Over 40, smarting, and getting wiser
amended and reposted 10-28-2007 11:21 p.m.
original posted 6-21-2007, 3:44 am

 
[Note: Since this essay was written, The Starter Wife garnered an Emmy and 10 nominations in all; the award and the response to the program was encouraging enough to USA Network that it decided to turn the mini-series into a regular series for next season. Just when I was ready to start watching again … ]

Hollywood seems to be throwing women over 40 a bone at the moment. But only that much, if indeed that much. The more I consider it, the more it seems to me that popular culture is really patronizing and insulting us, possibly mocking us, too, while playing to our worst fears. None of which is particularly helpful. Or funny.

The first clue I got was the premiere of a new summer mini-series on cable called The Starter Wife. Now there’s a term that makes any woman decidedly uncomfortable: a label for a woman who’s been had by the jerk she was married to when he decided to trade up for a younger, prettier model, as if he were changing cars to reflect career advancement or a more affluent lifestyle. Ouch. It smarts every time you hear the term. We all want to avoid being that woman, and we all privately have at least a tiny doubt that we really could, if push came to shove: how do you ever know for sure, when you’re hopeful and taking those blessed vows, that the guy you’re marrying won’t one day turn into exactly that kind of jerk?

The choice of that title is clearly provocative, probably (or so the network or studio heads thought) to pique interest in the premiere. Actually, I suspect the choice was even more cynical, the thought having occurred to the powers in charge of the program that potential female viewers would have either a streak of masochism or a dose of schadenfreude (there but for the grace of dumb luck go I) that would make them watch. Yet hearing or reading that term ‘starter wife’ is for many women not unlike having a huge bandage that’s stuck to a second-degree burn suddenly ripped off without warning. Which means, in a way, that watching a program about that particular subject is a bit like picking at a scab and making the wound worse instead of just leaving it alone and letting it heal. Charming, all the way around.

The immediate reaction of a woman who’s discovered she’s a starter wife is to think something like “Oh shit, he’s having a midlife crisis, and I’m going to end up paying for it.” That’s once she gets past the sense of hurt, betrayal and panic, of course, because her husband’s turned out to be a lying, skirt-chasing schmuck, and his leaving her (or her leaving him, if she’s discovered his infidelity before he’s ready to make his move) will permanently change her life and more than likely significantly dent her income for years to come, even if she does work. The sense of betrayal is understandably more intense if during the marriage she’s helped him advance significantly in his career by putting him through law or medical or graduate school, being the good corporate wife, managing his family, household, and all his non-career affairs so that he can advance on the job, and/or helping to actually manage part of his career. Probably at the expense of her own situation.

There is, of course, one other reason to watch a program with that title: the hope that somehow, this fictional heroine would find some way to overcome this lousy situation, recover her self-worth and dignity, and, if all goes well, make the schmuck pay – something that doesn’t always happen in real life. Call it looking for inspiration or just plain escapism, but a woman just might want to see a story like that. After all, that’s why a lot of people, male and female, watch soap operas. And summer is, let’s admit it, the season for trashy beach books and pulp fiction; what else is this but the cable TV equivalent?

Still, I was willing to give the program a glance, based on the fact that I like Judy Davis and Joe Mantegna as actors and wondered if the writers were good enough to find a creative solution to the heroine’s problem that I hadn’t thought of yet. I was even prepared to suspend disbelief and feel some initial sympathy for the lead character … until I discovered this was just one more story line about the rich, about status and celebrity. Like we don’t have WAY too much unhealthy focus on that already.

Admittedly, I’m not the target audience for shows like this. I never watch Lifetime or Oxygen, hate so-called reality TV, and absolutely despise American Idol. I’m really, really tired of hearing anything at all about that useless, brainless entity known as Paris Hilton (would TV Guide channel please stop pushing that on me??), I refuse to read anything by Jackie Collins, and I've never cared who’s on the hot list at the moment. I don’t read People or tabloids, either, not even in the grocery line, so why should I give a damn about these characters? True, title character Molly is famous only by proxy, because of who her soon-to-be ex is and who her friends are, and she’s stigmatized the moment she’s labeled a starter wife; but she’s also a studio exec’s wife, the friend and possible future girlfriend of a studio head, not desperate in any way by any standard, and not bloody well likely to be, either, once she’s divorced. None of her friends are broke or in danger of being so. Yeah, she’s dating a beach bum who looks like Adonis (like that would happen to me; right), but he used to be an investment banker and is homeless and jobless by choice. Oh, and she has a token stereotype gay decorator friend, and another who’s in rehab. How politically correct, predictable and trite. How perfectly L.A. No, this is a contrived tale about fake people who really don’t have much of anything in common with the rest of us, and I just can’t work up any sympathy for any of them.

The show is sponsored by Pond’s, a company that purports to be reaching past stereotypical images of beauty even as it adheres to them. It ran a contest to find women over 40 and fabulous who are now featured in its new round of commercials. Unsurprisingly, none of them are less than model lovely. Inner beauty they may have, even inner strength, but so far I’ve noticed that all of them are packaged in plenty of outer beauty (no doubt to better tout Pond’s products). Not a one so far who’s overweight or plain, let alone homely (once again, images of women who seem to have it all, starting with looks). Well, sue me, but I don’t see how this constitutes reaching past conventional definitions of beauty.

Segue to the second instance, a new unreality show with the dubious title Age of Love. Here we have a selection of great-looking babes over 40 (like any of them would really need help with their dating lives, given looks like that) who get to compete against a team of great looking babes under 30, all for the attentions of one great-looking guy, age 30. Like he needs either dating help or more ego gratification instead of a swat upside the head. In a move precious enough to make one vomit, the twentysomethings are dubbed kittens whereas the fortysomethings are labeled cougars, which I’m guessing is supposed to make us over-40s feel flattered.

The key word here, however, is compete – like this is something new and doesn’t prey on all our already hypertuned insecurities where men are concerned. Nearly 50 years after we tried to pass an Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, we’re right back to a clone of The Dating Game, and scores of women are still supposed to be okay with competing for one guy, as if he’s the Second Coming. Clearly it's the fantasy of an overgrown male adolescent mind, or more likely, a whole hierarchy of overgrown male adolescent minds, some of them studio execs in midlife crisis (in short, minds still hopelessly polluted by hormones and fear of death and devoid of any sense). Nearly 50 years after Masters and Johnson and other researchers told us that women’s sexual peak comes much later in life than men’s does and that we’re clearly more suited to having our own harems instead of being part of one of his, we’re still supposed to feel privileged to compete en masse for one already overprivileged guy. As if men needed another shove toward narcissism. How is this progress? And how is this not supposed to make me feel depressed??

Age of Love is merely another rip-off of male-centered dating game shows. I’d much rather see 20 highly eligible guys competing for one of five smart, talented, accomplished women of less than model-perfect beauty who would challenge their views about what really makes a woman attractive. That is, women who have trouble getting dates precisely because they’re smart and accomplished yet not model perfect. Not Miss America contestants or the cheerleader next door but real women with jobs and lives and quirks who are personable but not automatically compliant or predictable, and certainly not all about making some guy happy. Women who don’t think they should have to compete for any guy. You know, grown-ups. But don’t look for a show like that any time soon, not while men rule the airwaves. Women like that scare men. Hell, a beautiful woman with even average intelligence unsettles men.

Ever notice how the female equivalent dating show, The Bachelorette, got only one season? I’m thinking it was because you can always get the male part of the TV audience to watch a flock of babes competing for one guy and enjoy any cat fights that may result along the way, but watching a group of other guys pose, scheme and grovel to get the attention of one lone woman just makes them squirm – and the majority of scriptwriters, producers, promoters, network honchos, and studio execs are still men. Men who are pursuing a viewing audience of ever-more-elusive teenaged boys and/or men with still-teenaged minds. Oh hell, all of the above. We’re not talking PBS here, folks, meaning any audience with brains that are actually being used most of the time.

Remember, it wasn’t women who created Baywatch or kept it on the air – and there are still a lot more guys who admire that living Barbie doll Pamela Anderson than admire Christiane Amanpour or Aung San Suu Kyi or Maya Angelou or any female business leader, politician, artist, scientist, doctor, lawyer, mathematician, missionary, or peacemaker you can name. A lot of those guys run Hollywood, TV, cable networks, the music business, the trash media (as opposed real news media like the New York Times or the Washington Post, most news magazines, Slate or Salon or BBC), and a lot of other aspects of popular culture. So should we really be surprised that they’re giving women over 40 such short, cynical shrift? Probably not. Yet one would have hoped for at least some improvement by now. Why are modern women still being inundated by popular culture with such destructive, demeaning messages? Why are we still being pushed to pander to men’s vanity, and why is it still supposedly okay for grown men to act out by chasing younger women? Why, for once, can’t men simply grow up and deal with women their own age on their own terms? Could it be that popular culture is still giving them plenty of seeming reasons not to?

The third sign that the TV establishment is still clueless about women is a new show that has bimbos and golddiggers of the ilk of Marla Maples deigning to give average women who’ve been dumped by their men advice on how to get over it. I won’t legitimize it by naming it. We’re talking rich celebrity women for whom the starter wives were dumped, then the bimbo wives were themselves dumped for even younger women and got huge settlements – and they think this now qualifies them to give the rest of us advice. Oh, geez, just shoot me now. As if these pampered has-beens really had anything useful to offer a woman who might really need that child support to keep her kids from going hungry or being homeless, or someone who’s genuinely struggling to keep a job while raising kids (forget dating – no energy left) and doesn’t have the luxury of a live-in nanny, let alone a six- or seven-figure divorce settlement. How much more insulting can you get? I suspect the TV Powers That Be are in a race to answer that question in the worst possible way. And I do mean worst possible.

The bimbo advisers are repulsive to the max; the idea of watching them patronize normal, everyday women who are hurting just gives me the creeps. The latter are better off listening to Dr. Phil, not that his ads for Match.com are all that realistic, either, despite his perky positive palaver (sorry, Phil, some of us have been there, done that, to no avail; Match can keep its extra 6 months free – after all, if they haven’t given you even one decent prospect that stuck after 6 months, why would you give them another six months to make you endure the same degree of failure? That’s not a real selling point).

The Powers That Be in popular culture have just enough sense to figure out that women over 40 aren’t stupid and wield an increasing amount of economic and political clout, even if we still have grossly inadequate representation in boardrooms and legislatures as opposed to households and bedrooms. They know they have to somehow acknowledge that clout, but they just can’t seem to figure out how to do it without shooting themselves in the balls. So they think up these inane TV programs and these pandering commercials and hope we don’t notice that they’re as patronizing and insulting as the disease-or-crisis-of-the-week movies and variations on woman-in-peril plots they’ve been feeding us for years that now provide fodder for Lifetime and Oxygen. Except that many of us do notice, and we stopped watching that crap long ago. Regular TV viewership is declining in favor of other activities (I wish reading was one of them, but unfortunately it’s not). Result? Those Powers That Be are getting worried, deservedly so; but they don’t seem to be getting any smarter. It’ll take a lot more women in the business for that to happen.

Meanwhile, popular culture still pisses me off in its dopey representation of and fare aimed at women. So I’ll just keep reading more books instead, watching more PBS and BBC, and making occasional forays to SciFi Channel, Showtime and HBO for that rare bit of interesting fare when I don’t actually go to the movies, the symphony, the opera, a jazz club, or to live theater. I live in a big city, so I can do that. Instead of unreal dating shows or The Starter Wife, maybe I’ll watch the new season of The Closer or reruns of Battlestar Galactica, where the scripts are great and all the women are smart, strong, and throw a hell of a punch. Or old repeats of The Avengers on BBC so that I can watch Emma Peel kick ass with grace in a black catsuit, then smile and drink champagne with John Steed in his sleek Bentley. Or perhaps a new episode of Rome on HBO – if Caesar’s niece and his ex-mistress square off in a cat fight, at least you know they’ll do it with cunning, guile, style, great enunciation, and some damned good lines.

And if all else fails, there’s always Fred and Ginger on Turner Classic Movies or old Kate Hepburn films – not the ones with Spencer Tracy, in which he often treats her badly and whenever they disagree her character always has to be the one to give in, but the ones with Cary Grant (Sylvia Scarlett, Bringing Up Baby, Holiday, The Philadelphia Story), in which her character always holds her own against his and they might disagree, but he likes her all the more for it. It might be escapist fare, but at least it’s classy, constructive escapist fare, and it won’t insult my intelligence. It might even rekindle the hope that men can still snap out of it, get past their midlife crises without reaching for younger women, and improve (oh, that more men were like Paul Newman in that respect! Lucky, lucky Joanne Woodward). Besides, it’s one way that I can better spend my time until popular culture and the men who drive it finally catch up and get at least half as wise, witty and forbearing as women over 40 have to be most of the time.

Your move, fellas. Don’t screw up. Oh, and Mr. Clooney, if you’re ready to date an intelligent adult your own age now and talk politics, I’m available.


policywonk is a Chicago-based independent journalist and policy analyst who admits to being over 40, isn’t sure she entirely likes that term cougar for older women, but has been known to purr when she’s pleased and snarl when she’s not. She likes jazz, men, books, science, and the arts, leaves cat fights to her pet feline Mimi, and is still hoping to date a grown-up some day.