Presenter and campaigner Katie Piper has told an audience at the Hay Festival in Wales that "ageing can be compared to a bereavement."
why would anyone say anything so daft?
Piper's latest book, which is published on Friday, is titled Still Beautiful: On Age, Beauty and Owning Your Space.
oh, say no more!
The 41-year-old said: "Women age out of the male gaze. I was ripped from the male gaze at 24. I didn't just become invisible. I became a target for people saying derogatory things."
Derogatory things like ‘You’re talking bollocks, love’ perhaps?
Piper, who is also a presenter on the BBC programme Songs of Praise and ITV's Loose Women. said she had recently been asked if writers minded if they mentioned her age. "It was shocking, but not surprising. This was because I had been reminded at such a young age the currency and the power a woman holds when she is considered either beautiful or young, and now here I was going through the second phase of youth slipping away and feeling, once again, society's judgement and the label that they were going to put on to me."
It’s a familiar refrain. Because we are all getting older - some of us with dignity and acceptance, some of us...clearly not!
She said she felt positive about getting older. "I'm going to be 42 in October. I'm still incredibly young to many, and old and past it to some. You realise, 'I know who I am.' I have a strong sense of self and identity. This is the heyday. This is the time of my life. So I can only imagine what's on [for the] 50s and 60s and the decades beyond. I feel excited by that second chapter."
She said if she had to give one message to her younger self, it would be: "If you've ever felt less than... you've hated yourself or felt ashamed, it was never you. It was society, consumerism and capitalism. It was beneficial to someone, somewhere, to hold you down.
Oh, boy, capitalism is forever the big bogeyman in some people’s eyes, even as they earn a nice living from it, isn’t it?
“ Because we are all getting older - some of us with dignity and acceptance, some of us...clearly not!”
ReplyDeleteIndeed.
Reality hits.
ReplyDeleteWomen are best when they are younger, I'd better mention of legal age because someone will have me arrested, then then deteriorate over time ate different rates bepending on how they treat themselves. Look how there are several women in their late 50s still pretty good. Halle Berry, Nicole Kidman and others for example. It depends how they look after themselves, and how much they spend doing so.
Men on the other hand seem to stay pretty much the same all the way through and Brad Pitt, etc. if they keep themselves fit.
These older men are looking for something pretty to wear on their arms so they go for the younger things, see all Leonardo de Caprios bits of fluff.
So this woman has just had the feminist fog blown away, too late, and realised she has missed her opportunities. Soon she will be calling for a law to forbid people dating anyone younger than 5 years of their age.
LOL
41 and still wet behind the ears - how novel!
ReplyDeleteYou can't turn around millions of years of human evolution and biological fact. This could be a new trans issue in the making once women reclaim their space from the dress-wearing blokes.
ReplyDeleteOlder men fancy younger women because they are reproductively viable. Just as young women look for males that can provide for their offspring, which in modern times is about bank balances and not dragging antelope back to the cave. So the bias is towards older men. Biological reality, unfortunately for Katie.