Ageing capitalism

It’s that ominous moment when the prow of last night’s fairy-lit fantasy ship is just grinding up onto the blinding iceberg of noon. But the orchestra is still playing in my ballroom when I wake on the foldout sofa in someone’s kitchen in a faraway land with somebody else’s partner and a blossoming hangover (blossoming not as cherries do, but like the flick knife in Patti Smith’s ‘Horses’.) The earnest folk over at polymoralism.com (names have been changed to protect the guilty) are going to tell me that I’ve asked for everything I’m about to get and they have a point. Foolishly, I persist in the illusion that s/he who has something to disclose, such as a monogamous relationship, is responsible for initiating the disclosing. Since I just recently burned my fingers in this very flame I should have known better. It’s just that finding a pen for the background check is such a mood killer.

            But judge me not as harshly as the alcohol did, dear reader, because this is anyway no ordinary one-night stand. This is not so much an old flame as an  underground coal fire. Gyorgy proves that size matters, just not in the way you might expect. If I was prone to penis envy, Gyorgy’s is absolutely not the penis I would envy. But he was – and still is - just short enough to tuck under my arm when we walk together and just confident enough not to care. He is my intellectual equal. And, he is close to my age.

            It’s difficult to convey just how sweet it is to be playing with someone my own size. Don’t get me wrong, I love the blush of youth as much as the next man. But these days the thirty-somethings seldom come back for more. and having to always add the phrase ‘in the half-dark’ poisons the implied flattery of being able to pull thirty-somethings ‘at my age’. Too many episodes like that are bound to erode one’s confidence, and sometimes I crave the base equality of knowing that if my partner glimpses sagging skin around my knees while we’re having sex, I could point right back at theirs.

            And I've grown weary of the wages of pulling these transitory 30-somethings, which seem to include denying my hair. When I was 18 the lovely Matthew Smith liquidised my heart with the marvelously politically-correct flirtation: “I think you’ll look great with grey hair”. (It was Matthew Smith who invited me to my first mass meeting at a university in the middle of a country-wide uprising and can therefore be credited also with introducing me to my most abiding and coldest lover, the revolution.) 
            All these years later I find the compliment was perhaps sincere. I love the white sweep up from my temples. I think it looks, dare I say it, distinguished and kind of sexy. But the sad truth is, after my housemate pinned me down to colour my hair, I instantly got luckier with the thirty-somethings. Sadder, I also started to get more attention from guys my own age and older.

            We’ve all rolled our eyes at that old feminist hack that society values men more as they age, and women less. I’d readily qualify the first clause with exhibit A, retired mineworker, or exhibit B, permanently unemployed drunk. And it would seem like the woman-friendly thing to do, in this modern age, to sneer at the second part, right? Just the other day there was a show on the telly discussing that dodgy research done by a hormone replacement manufacturer that women over 51 ‘feel invisible’. I was on board while the white-haired spunky fifty-one year old extolled the joys of experience, but I started to prickle when she insisted that these women had obviously just ‘let themselves go’, whereas she didn’t feel at all invisible to her (60 year old) husband.

            Let me see if I can translate that. Rule one, older women can still be valued (provided we remember that women’s value is tied with how we look). Rule two, you can get away with being an older women (as long as you can pass for, or are, a younger women). Rule three, if you're neither, blame yourself. 

            Back when the lovely Matthew was flipping the switch on that heart-smoothie, I imagined I’d be immune to all this when I reached this age. I couldn’t be arsed with wasting time on my looks amongst the garden of earthly and intellectual delights I’d landed in, and I can't say I've much time for it now - I'm not getting any younger, after all. I dressed like a boy back then and it didn’t bother my sex life. And I had no doubt that I’d have built up enough accomplishments by this age to dazzle anyone.
              You’d think I would therefore have graciously accepted what was rightfully mine when some 28 year old on a dating site wrote to me recently: “You are such a cougar. ;)”.

            I wouldn't normally have bothered to reply. But a treatise on the cougar concept had, apparently, been secretly building itself in the basement of my brain and it exploded without stopping for the punctuation police. "I *really* really hate that phrase and the whole concept. Firstly it’s mostly bullshit. Very few women have the wealth and power madonna has, [or the kind of job that allows and requires you to spend hours a day with a personal trainer] and the truth of the matter is that most women my age are being passed over by men our own age in favour of women half our age, on the basis of a blind prejudice that we're close to menopause or something (while overlooking the fact that most men also start having issues with the mechanics of sex, such as problems with erections from their late 30s, some from their early 30s if they drink or smoke.) There's also the issue that there are always more girls born alive than boys (except in China and India) and that numerical imbalance grows as we age. That means my dating pool starts smaller than yours and shrinks constantly (whereas yours expands for every year you stay alive). So lots of dating downwards [by older women] is just about that age group being the pool of people who are still dating, i.e. not settled into marriages etc. I think the idiots who coin these concepts are looking at this tiny slice of powerful women and not even looking properly at their motives…”

            And the cougar thing often hides a stinging rule four: you can be an older woman provided you are blazing-hot in bed (all that experience) and willing to accept that you'll be a filler til the right girl comes along.
            I was feeling quite optimistic about a guy 15 years older than me who mailed me from the dating site until I realised that I just squeaked in under his age-preference ceiling. When I asked him about that double standard he explained that he wasn’t done living yet and wanted ‘someone with a bit of life’. Er, okay. I just don’t get why he expects me to date a corpse if he isn’t willing to. Variations on this conversation became a meme in my online dating world. It’s not that I’m a geriatric magnet, it’s just that I’m a woman. See for yourself: OKCupid did a survey of women’s and men’s age preferences on the dating site, and their actual responses. Well, that explains why Mr. Lively and losers like him are stuck with internet dating on a Friday night, but it doesn’t help my situation any.

            Let’s be clear, if I was answering the hormone manufacturer’s survey, I’d have to truthfully report that ‘invisible’ is not a skill I’ve gained in later life nor an adjective my friends would use to describe me. Even if we roll with looks alone, I have no doubt that those dramatic white blazes when I bother to brush and then sweep my hair up are memorable amongst the more superficial aspects of my presence. My former lecturer blurted out one day recently that they looked ‘very sexy’. (We’re colleagues now at different institutions so I didn't have to slap him.) I only wish more men who aren't already pensioners agreed with him. It seems, indeed, that the white distinguishes me - from the pool of sexually desirable women. At my luckiest, it conjures the mental picture many of those thirty-somethings are drawn to of the dowager on her knees giving head in front of the mirror under the damning label 'needy' in that Wes Craven movie about the hotel. 
            So it's become a powerful aphrodisiac when someone is attracted to me despite or even because of the hair, with the deeply sexy implication that they’re liking much more than the packaging. Which brings me back to the foldout sofa, where, in practice, our cardinal sin was reduced, by the amount of alcohol required to commit it, to a merely venial grope in the dark which surely did no justice to the vast additional experience each of us should have acquired in the decade since our first transglobal romance, but which so buoyed my heart by implication that I initially dismiss the rumbling doom as paranoid imagination brought on by too many bad trips. 

            However the outline of the iceberg is too sharp to miss: he's so eager to get out the door he nearly trips over his trousers. I’m not expecting much when I croak from the sofa, ‘You’re going to hurt my heart, aren’t you?’ He ignores me so I say it again and now he sits, clothed and bag in hand, on the edge of the sofa, saying defensively, ‘how would I hurt your heart?’ And because I don’t know the details yet, only the signs, I say nothing and curl miserably around his back and start breaking out the fire extinguishers in my soul. 

            And then comes that moment of tenderness, sharp as a fishhook, that moves my treacherous heart to trill faintly all the rest of that day as I pay in bile for our sins at the porcelain temple, through all the months of email silence, right up until I discover that the very next thing he did after cheating with me was cheat on his partner with my 21 year old friend on whose sofa I’d camped that morning. (There’s karma for you, kids.)

            He looks at me, at last, and then his face softens for a moment and he starts to stroke my temple - just at the grey sweep. And yes, logic should have told me that he was really thinking, ‘Why doesn't she dye her hair?’, or more likely, 'What if someone says something to ma copaine about last night?' or 'Which tram do I get out of this place?' but I’m feeling -  damn my fool romantic mind - that he is stroking all the history I've acquired since our last grand affair and that I was irresistible last night because of it. I’m imagining that he sees in my white hairs what I see.