Our judgmental attitude to women is an age-old problem

I’m profoundly ageist when it comes to me... If I wasn’t broke, I’d be having more plastic surgery, writes Terry Prone

TO DISCOVER that, give or take a few months, I am the same age as Fergus Finlay, is shocking. He revealed his age on this page a few weeks ago, and I still haven’t got over it.

Fergus Finlay isn’t old, but he is indubitably a senior statesman, which is why there was national outrage when Dusty the dysfunctional dolphin rammed him in the butt. No decent dolphin would be so impertinent. But it is simply not possible that someone as junior as I am could have been born in the same year as Fergus Finlay, and I’m not having it.

And the age he perceives himself to be is precisely the age I perceive myself to be. We’re both 28. Lest you assume this is delusion, everybody apparently has a non-chronological age. That is the age we believe we are, and research has shown that the younger this is, the longer you are going to live. This emerged in the JAMA Journal of Internal Medicine, where reseachers Isla Rippon and Andrew Steptoe published a study of the link between mortality and perceived age, rather than chronological age.

Rippon and Steptoe divided the research volunteers into three sub-groups, based on how old participants believed themselves to be. One group believed they were older than their years; the second group believed themselves to be younger than their age; the third group boringly felt themselves to be roughly their actual age.

By far the biggest group of the three comprised the people who believed themselves younger than they actually were. This is where delusion may enter the picture. That large group viewed themselves as three or four years younger than the reality, as opposed to Mr Finlay and me, who are privately convinced that we are three or four decades younger than the dates on our birth certificates. We’re exceptional. But you knew that.

The research tracked the participants over a few years, and for no obvious reason the folk who thought they were younger than their age were significantly less likely to die from a range of killer diseases.

In other words, if you accept chronology, or if you see yourself as older than you really are, the bad news is that you are likely to pop your clogs sooner than the mad yokes who live in denial.

I’m not sure it’s possible to extrapolate from the exceptional wishful thinking exemplified by Mr Finlay and me, but I’m betting that being so self-deceiving about our real ages gives the two of us a sporting chance of becoming centenarians and getting that kindly ritual letter from the President.

This is good news and bad news. It’s good news for my bank, which might eventually get paid what I owe it, because I’ve got a better chance of working until I’m about 85. It’s bad news for me, because, during all of those years, I will be old.

It’s not that I’m ageist, although I do frequently want to choke grandparents who announce, with misplaced pride and an even more misplaced sense of originality, that they rely on their grandchildren to programme their Sky box or load songs onto their iPhone. That’s age-related learned helplessness, and nobody should be proud of it.

I’m not that ageist when it comes to other people. I am, however, profoundly ageist when it comes to me. I hate every aspect of it. If I wasn’t broke, I’d have more plastic surgery. Not to look younger. Just to remove the extra crepey skin that develops as you shrink with age. Nobody needs to look the way a leftover balloon looks, three days after the party it decorated. That shrinkage is bad enough. Worse is the sudden onset of promiscuous bruising, from minor encounters with furniture, which gives the impression that you regularly get into unsuccessful fights with wind turbines. Younger women use concealer to minimise the dark circles under their eyes after a night of revelry. Older women use the same product to cover up the black-and-blue bruising consequent upon no revelry whatever.

The improbable jollity with which Mr Finlay greets his real, as opposed to his self-perceived, age illustrates yet another of the grim contrasts between how men and women are seen.

Men continue, more or less, as they always did. Women encounter a whole new set of constrictions. Some of these constrictions are superficial and constant. Men over 50, 60, 70, or later, go on wearing the same kinds of clothes they always did and nobody bats an eyelid over their choice. Women, after the same ages, who continue to wear what they’ve always worn are dubbed “mutton dressed as lamb”.

Which makes me wonder if there’s a dress code for mutton that I’ve been missing. I presume this implicit code majors on beige, mid-heels and mother-of-the-bride embroidered satin. Nobody gets a brownie point for dressing as mutton. The only payoff is increased invisibility.

Dressing as lamb, on the other hand, is generally accepted as disgraceful. And, of course, any woman who is known to have had a facelift is presented as psychologically unable to fulfill her proper function, which is to “grow old gracefully”.

Businessmen, when they retire, if they’re reasonably prominent, are invited onto high-paying boards. Businesswomen, when they retire, if similarly prominent, are invited to mentor other women. For free. Older male politicians, unless they carry the “Disgraced Former Minister” label, become commentators and newspaper columnists.

Older female politicians have their history erased — witness the experience of Gemma Hussey, who, on a radio programme not so long ago, with a younger politician, had to point out that she had been a minister for education, because the younger speaker didn’t know. But then, on radio and TV, when older women appear, it’s rare and specific. Either they opt for the “feisty old broad” role — I’m not naming any names — or they disappear.

Nor does global fame help. Read recent interviews with spectacularly successful actors like Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Diane Keaton or Diana Rigg and you’ll find the theme running through all of them: Age.

The underlying assumption seems to be that these women are interesting only because they’re still able to walk without a Zimmer frame and learn lines.

It’s as if the key theme for younger famous women — how they juggle home and family (which men are never asked) — morphs, at some point in their late 50s, into “aren’t you marvellous to be still active, and you so wrinkly”. Helen Mirren has done arguably the best work of her career in the last decade, but as far as media is concerned the issue is that she’s so physically well-preserved.

The only age to accept is the mythical internal one. Mine is 28. You want to fight about it, I’ll meet you out the back.

I’m profoundly ageist when it comes to me... If I wasn’t broke, I’d be having more plastic surgery