The (controversial) narrative appeared on my social media timeline too frequently until it became impossible to ignore it; women in their 30s and 40s are looking sexier than those in their 20s.
I approached it with lots of caution because algorithms know our age, sex, and preferences – mostly because we have fed the machines with the information knowingly and sometimes unknowingly, and also because humans notice what they are interested in, what favours them.
I remember when we bought a vintage car (quite honestly, it’s this banged-up very old car, model long out of production, but indulge me), and suddenly we had similar ones too often on our roads. The truth is, they were always there, we just noticed because we became stakeholders. The human brain is selective like that.
I recently found myself as the only middle-aged woman among several twenty-something-year-olds in the presence of a yogi. When it was time to do the yoga moves, I beat them all, hands down. There is of course the fact that I am generally a very fit person, especially for my age, but when I was the age of the young people I was with, no way could I not have pulled those moves, with lots of ease.
I was, like I still am, a fitness enthusiast, and so were many of my age mates back then. How bodies seem to have changed with technology.
Back then, keeping fit was by default. For starters, there was the fat-shaming we did not want to be targets of. Add ‘nothing else much to do’ for entertainment and flex but to go to the gym or the field.
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There was also the little fact that when we went to the club, we danced and danced to compensate for our inability to buy a lot of alcohol, and the idea of sponsors was highly frowned upon. How could I forget that going from point A to B was by foot, not by bodaboda or overly expensive taxis?
There is a current-day change of body attitude, of course. Our young people today have taken pride in carrying around wobbly behinds. You cannot body-shame them and get away with it. Good! They are glued to electronic gadgets and endless options of stuff to watch – who wants to go to the field when they could just sit and watch Netflix all day?
If I could go with many videos that circulate on social media, the young of today go to the club to drink, not dance, and no, twerking is not dancing. Most of us in my generation have kept up the habit of keeping fit. I am a hiker, and the people I go hiking with are more or less my age mates. Once in a while, we get a token youngling.
The good thing is, when you get a young one, they are super amazing and committed. In gyms, the average age of the women working out is on the older side. Narrative true or not, there are not enough young people keeping fit.
There are those like me who keeping fit has always been on the plate, then there is the group that picks it up later in their 30s. When you are young, the metabolism can be deceiving, but then you reach the age of 35 and realise you only have to look at food to add the dreaded Michelin tyres.
You become self-aware, you start grasping onto the fast-disappearing youth, and it hits you that ‘Forever Young’ is just a song, you lose control of a lot of stuff, and fitness becomes one of the few things you can control.
Science tells us that we reach our optimum physical stage between the ages of 20 to 35 years of age.
This window would of course be the best time to train the body and mind to keep fit, but what the average person ends up doing is thinking that it would always be like that – this is the age you speak statements like, ‘I can eat anything and not add weight.’
Then your metabolism flips, you lose muscle and fat builds up and doubles the speed. So, are older women sexier than younger women? I guess the answer would be in what you consider as sexy.