Aging and Women and Why Men Are To Blame and Why Sharon Stone Is Bonkers

Okay, how many of us are planning to see Basic Instinct 2? I thought at first that there was no way in Satan’s Red Hell that I would go to BI2, and the recent release of the trailer has done nothing to convince me otherwise. But with the hew and cry over Ms. Stone’s expected full frontal, as well as the beginning of her Whack-Job 2006 publicity tour, I am now thinking I just might go, and here’s why:

The World Sucks Monkey Butt
Sharon Stone is a beautiful woman who is now “of a certain age”. Now, I’m all for 40-plus women being portrayed in the media as tomatoes who deserve and demand hot monkey sex as much as tangerine-colored brainless twenty year-olds do, why not? Sex, like most of the rest of life, is wasted on the young anyway. Supporting 40-plus tamales is the only reason I watch Desperate Housewives. God bless Hollywood and the viewing public for allowing the broads on Housewives to strut their sexy stuff. Go sexy broads, rah rah. Felicity Huffman, you can suck my toes any time.

So just why does Sharon Stone doing her patented smoldering thing seem so completely creepy? As a woman of “a certain age” myself, I want to support her right to flash her nethers on the big screen. I just know her performance in Basic Instince 2 is going to be shredded in the press and that it will be the end of her career—and maybe that will be justified, because ol’ Sharon is not exactly what you’d call the most accomplished thespian, and she’s also been acting full-on bat shit insane in public in recent years. But Sharon won’t be ripped to tiny pieces just for being bonkers; instead, people will be groaning in the theater and making “grandma beaver” jokes because of her age.

Madonna, who made the world a better place by making it okay for women’s bra straps to show, is currently suffering the same treatment for her latest Disco incarnation—no matter how perfectly cut Madonna’s butt is, apparently no one wants to see her in a glitter leotard shaking her ass checks. We loved her for all of her other fashion disasters, so why not this one? Kevin Pereira of Attack of the Show recently said of Madonna’s Disco tour, “Eew, it’s like watching your mom Jazzercize!” Well, what exactly is wrong with that? I personally think Madonna is beginning to look like beef jerky, but that’s because she needs to gain some weight.

Forty-seven year-old men are still considered “hot”, why not women? People get the heaves over how sexy George Clooney is, and he has grey hair and jowls! Grey haired, jowly middle aged women don’t receive “Sexiest Woman Alive” awards; they get the part of the incontinent grandma in the “vacation gone wrong” comedy. It’s so unfair.

Act Your Age. Or Not.
I personally think a lot of women don’t come into their full beauty until they are over forty-five or so. Think of Susan Sarandon in Alfie or Anjelica Huston in Life Aquatic: both of these women are at their peak of beauty right now. Perhaps it’s the experience in the eyes that does it. When Susan or Anjelica turn to their on-screen lover and fix him with that “look”, damn, it’s smoking hot, and they are both pushing sixty.

Maybe the reason why Sharon Stone getting her groove on seems wrong is because she’s still trying to be the same “pretty” girl she was when she was twenty. Like a lot of women who have made their way in the world simply by being attractive, she doesn’t seem to be okay with getting older. Like Susan and Anjelica, Sharon’s beauty should be evolving into full flower; but instead, she’s trying to pretend nothing has changed and that she’s still young and hip and so she’s coming off as old and crazy. Madonna is doing the same thing. To Mrs. Ritchie: it’s one thing to affect the fashions of the 1946 when you are in your thirties, but affecting the fashions of 1976 in your forties just reminds us all that you are old enough to have shaken your booty in those clothes when they were “in” the first time around. Go back to being Japanese.

Men Rule the World
Of course, the sad fact is that older women are not considered sexy is because older men rule the world, and older men don’t like experienced women who can call them on their bullshit. You older men love young women not just for their supple flesh, but because they will still gaze adoringly up at you and pronounce you “so cool”. When you come home wearing leather pants and driving a your new cherry red Camaro, the older woman in you life will put her hands on her hips and laugh at you. Men are afraid of older women, and I think that is why our male-centric culture tries to downgrade women when they get past forty. But men, you are the ones who made us this way. It’s your own fault. Suck it up.

It’s My Birthday and I’ll Boogie Oogie Oogie If I Want To
Maybe I’m waxing all introspective because it’s my birthday tomorrow. In the next decade or so I’ll be passing out of Mother, and into firmly into Crone. While I’m all in favor of not acting your age, I’d rather do it as a sexy Susan Sarandon, rather than as a bonkers Sharon Stone. Still, my heart goes out to Sharon, and I wish I could change the world so that we can celebrate old women as smoldering tomatoes too. Because of that, I’ll probably be suffering through Basic Instinct 2, just to boost the box office a one ticket's worth more so that maybe Hollywood will retire "Incontinent Grandma" and replace her with "Tomato of a Certain Age" more often.

Tomorrow, however, is reserved for Clive Owen and Inside Man…yummy, yummy Clive, will you be my present? I also plan to misbehave, dance a chicken dance in my underpants, and eat Indian food. Fear me.

For my birthday, you can send your best wishes and offers of toe worship to mistresssquidia@yahoo.com. I promise not to bite. Much.