Breaking news! Men's magazines have determined that it is not abnormal for men to ogle and objectify women over the age of 40! Women of the world, feminism has won! Rejoice!

Or not.

To kick off its annual women issue, Esquire magazine on Thursday published an essay called "In Praise of 42-Year Old Women", assuring the normally-depressed old hags that dudes (or at least the writer Tom Junod) still want to bang them. Junod – who has an "interesting" history writing about women – writes that, while "[t]here used to be something tragic about even the most beautiful forty-two-year-old woman", they now have "carnal appeal".

A few generations ago, a woman turning forty-two was expected to voluntarily accept the shackles of biology and convention; now it seems there is no one in our society quite so determined to be free. Conservatives still attack feminism with the absurd notion that it makes its adherents less attractive to men; in truth, it is feminism that has made forty-two-year-old women so desirable.

Protip to male writers gorging on self-congratulation as they deem grown woman fuckable: leave feminism out of it.



Junod, careful to qualify that the 42-year-old women worthy of praise are those who "have armored themselves with yoga and Pilates even as they joke about the spectacle", seems to believe that he has done women a great kindness with this piece. But when he writes that 42-year-old women are "superior" to men and that "the best thing that that forty-two-year-old American men have going for them is forty-two-year-old American women", he does so with the same benevolence of a lazy husband praising his wife's laundry skills. (Or financial skills, in his case.)

It's easy for men to call women "superior" in a society that privileges men at nearly every turn: they're not the ones being grossly objectified under the guise of a compliment.

Certainly, women over 40 deserve more reverence and respect than they typically get – and I'd love to see women of all ages receive that ... outside of women's magazines and day-time talk shows. We live in a culture, often driven by the media and Hollywood, that paints women over 25 as desperate and pathetic: we're considered past our prime, never to be "nubile" (a word worth banning from our collective consciousness if there ever was one) again!

But the validation that women seek is generally not of the erection-producing variety. It's very nice and all that writers are catching on that women of all ages can be sexy, but framing that as an amazing new discovery makes it more about men than it is about us (which feels about par for the course).

For example, in a companion piece on Esquire's website, writer Stephen Marche urges us all – in a slightly less cringe-inducing way than Junod's overwrought boner-prose – to retire the word MILF. He writes that "there's another explanation for the rise of 42, one that's even more revelatory. Maybe it isn't fashion at all. Maybe it's what men wanted all along."

Right. But maybe, just maybe, what men want isn't – and doesn't always have to be – the damn point.