The main problem facing today's aging women is not sexism but the lingering youth cult of the 1960s. Traditional mating patterns have been disrupted: Marriage is postponed by extended education and early career demands. Because of easy divorce, middle-aged women are now competing with younger women for both men and jobs — and thus are resorting to costly interventions to look 20 years younger than they are.
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Most disappointing about Madonna's speech was her collapse into rote male-bashing, which has escalated in Hollywood and surely will increase its cultural isolation from the national audience. The young Madonna was refreshingly sane in her teasing affection for men. Top movie actresses once projected an emotional depth, composure and adult authority that can only be called womanliness. Ingrid Bergman, Susan Hayward, Elizabeth Taylor, Deborah Kerr and Sophia Loren were no victims: They're strong-willed personalities — onscreen and off. But all of them liked men, and it showed.
Women in or out of Hollywood who dress like girls and erase all signs of aging are disempowering themselves and aggressing into territory that belongs to the young. They are surrendering their right of self-definition to others. Men are not the enemy: They, too, are subject to nature's iron laws. For the sake of its own art, Hollywood needs less sex war, not more.
