And it worked. Some clients even made it clear that's why they wanted to work with me. For example, after my work and photo was profiled in an industry publication, a potential client phoned my account manager and said he'd like me to work for him because I was cute. Writing recently on Role Reboot, Cecily Kellogg argued that with age, she's now judged on her credibility rather than her looks. This is the upside of losing your sexual desirability. But for many women, things don't work out so well. In my experience, older women were rarely called in to close a deal or impress a client. Women learn about the link between their sexual desirability and their value before they have even learned to speak. It's everywhere in popular culture. Beautiful and inexperienced girls are the heroes of fairy tales. Older and wiser women are relegated to jealous stepmothers or evil witches. The money and time women spend on maintaining their youthful appearance is a waste of a woman's resources, but it's understandable why women do it. The alternative is to disappear.

Outside of professional settings, older women - by which I mean women over 35 - are often rendered invisible. Having recently turned 40 and a stay-at-home mother of two, it's been six years since I noticed a man check me out. When it happened, I was shocked because feeling sexually attractive had come to an abrupt halt a couple of years earlier when I became pregnant for the first time. Men used to look at me, chat me up, and ask for my phone number. Now they just want me to get my f--king pram out of their way. I hadn't realised how much of my identity I had derived from being sexually attractive, until I wasn't. I really wish I was better than this - and as a feminist, I feel like I've let the team down. But in my defence, and in the defence of every other woman who is missing her hotness, the reason we lament the loss of our sexual currency is because for much of the time it's our only currency.

To be clear, I do not miss feeling threatened, being harassed or feeling objectified. It drove me crazy when male colleagues were more interested in my cleavage than my ideas. It's not so much sexual desirability that I miss. And it's not that I was staggeringly beautiful when I was younger. I wasn't. But my appearance fit within the bounds of female acceptability, which was essentially my passport to feel welcome in public space. The further I drift from our cultural definition of beauty - namely young, slim and symmetrical - the less welcome I feel. My friends talk about being ignored in shops and being pushed out of the line at bars. We lose our names, being referred to instead as someone's mum. Professionally, we're shuffled off to back-of-house roles and our photos are left off corporate documentation. In my 20s, I made the mistake of confusing my f--kability with my credibility. I didn't see the distinction between being valued as a professional and valued as a potential Friday night girl.

Now that I have lost my f--kability and my social and professional value has diminished accordingly, I understand that any power that I thought I had derived from my youth and beauty was only ever an illusion. At a time in our lives when we have the most to offer - professionally and personally - we feel less and less important. We like to pretend that we're a merit society, where ability counts far more than appearance. But the reality, for women at least, is that the capacity to turn on a bloke is inseparable from judgements about our worth. Kasey Edwards is the best-selling author of Thirty-Something And Over It.