I was 14 when I first lied about my age. I wanted to start working in a cafe and I thought saying I was 18 would, for some reason, be a good idea.
I didn't need to lie when I walked in and announced "I want a job", they were slammed, handed me an apron and said "start now". I still kept up this older nonsense and during my time there had four 18th birthday parties before someone caught on.
I saw it as a lie to get ahead in my coffee-making career and had no problem making myself older. Yet as we actually get older we're told as women ageing is a horrible thing; men will leave us for younger women, our looks will fade, we'll become old and useless.
It's instilled in our society that ageing something for women to worry about and it's really tired nonsense. If you've watched American Horror Story - and you should - the most attractive woman in it is Jessica Lange and she's 64-years-old (just check out the pic above). She's sexually aggressive yet dauntingly feminine. Half of me wants to be her, the other half wonders if I could take her out for dinner.
I was lying in bed the other day and the guy said to me "younger women don't know what to do in bed". First of all, I was having great sex in my late teens, so he was inherently wrong there. Secondly, he was also implying I'm no longer a younger woman. I'm 25. Finally, it infers he's a slutty old man who's bedded a lot of teens.
It wasn't the bit about my age that made me annoyed, it was that the whole statement was so obnoxious. I don't give a shit how old I am. I sighed like a horse and purposefully coughed in his face.
This annoyed me, because this guy with the crap teen chat? He knocks six years off his age when he wants to seem younger and he's not alone. I get phone calls every so often from my long term ex's friends when they suspect it must be his birthday coming up and want to find out, once and for all, what age he actually is. He's my favourite ex, so I tell them he's 12 and he was born from a tube.
When women talk about their age it's usually always with a dry joke and an eyebrow raise but not much else. I've met no one from our gender running around concocting dates about when they went to school or why they have an awful lot of grey for a 29-year-old.
So, how come it's seen that ageing is worse for us? We're fine. When you feel down about getting older remember three things:
1. Men are feeling it harder.
2. It's an unstoppable force.
3. We might just grow up to be Jessica Lange.
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