Sunday morning

A few days ago I read two things that pulled my mind in completely different directions on the subject of aging. With my fourtieth birthday just around the corner, I’m currently quite interested, compulsive actually, about the topic. Instead of doing what most people do, which seems to be a quiet, internalized distintergration, I thought I’d have a very public year long explosion. Why behave irresponsibly for a few days when you can sustain it for 365?

Sitting in the mechanic’s waiting room, reading a copy of Women’s Weekly, something of a foreign journal to me, I received a rude shock. Deeply absorbed in the editorial, I realized that the magazine’s target demographic was… me! Time had crept away from me, leaving any edge I once inhabited far behind; I was supposed to be interested in finger food, affordable fashion and big covers. I got as far as the letters section before the mechanic told me that they didn’t have my car’s oil filter in stock. But this is what I gleaned from the uber supportive, fannish letters and the nervous horse/kind groom tone of the editorial: an awful lot of women are freaking out.

There were stories about anoxerics, bulimics, body image, sickness, relationship breakdowns, influential female role models (Lara Bingle cropped up here, I know next to nothing about her except that she got very well paid for a bikini tourism advertisement and now drives a nice car; and that the guys I sail with perk up when her name is mentioned). Basically there was an awful lot of stuff about how to feel good when you don’t, and how it’s all ok. There, there dear- your sisters are here for you.

Sunday morning

It was at this point that I started to freak out. There is something about a well meant, supportive, motherly tone that makes me run. Fast. Really fast. It’s like a hairdresser coming towards you holding up a sharp pair of scissors and saying ‘it won’t hurt a bit’ and smiling, the light hitting her large teeth- kerching! I mean I know that aging happens, but I usually pretty much ignore it, with a body image that swings between ‘I am just so totally hot’ to ‘whatever’. I can remember as a twenty something thinking that men may not fancy me due to acne (it was quite globular), and now twenty years later I assume that they probably wouldn’t find me attractive due to wrinkles, a bookended endgame state which is kind of amusing if you think about it.

Ironically later that same day I took my first ever plunge into Michel Houellebecq, specifically The possibility of an island, the novel about an offensive stand up comedian who survives an apocalypse through the judicious use of human clones. For those unfamiliar with the work of Michel Houellebecq, a quick Google will tell you that he is the enfant terrible of French contemporary literature, writing in the provocative tradition of Marquis de Sade. People tend to either like him or hate him: like him for his honesty, hate him for his honesty, like him for being so mean, hate him for the same, love his trashiness and spirited quest to offend, and so on.

Sunday morning

One of the themes the novel tackles early on is fourty year old women. Described as possessing ‘fat asses and flannel breasts’, the lead character cruelly observes ‘life begins at fifty, but that’s only because it ends at fourty’. There’s also the oh so funny, much circulated joke: What do you call the fat around a vagina? The women. (I’ve privately tried reversing the gender of this joke a few times but while the female subject seems to attract weary sniggers, a male subject doesn’t work at all. It comes across as either too factual to be funny or just like you got the joke wrong. Interesting). There’s also a fair bit about the plummet in erotic value at this age, the female habit of trying to talk up a hopeless situation, desperation at the end of the line, futile attempts to make sex mysterious etc.

Despising Houellebecq for his nastiness, but reluctantly admitting that this is an enemy worth fighting; and disdaining the Women’s Weekly for their cloying haven, guaranteed to seduce, smother and dis-empower, I find myself at something of a cross roads. Today I went to the gym, pumped iron, observed the men and boys doing the same thing, and thought about the aging process. It struck me that all ages, everyone is at the end of a line, knowing only as much as the days they have lived, with no inkling of what tomorrow may bring. And at this point there seems to be a huge amount of wisdom, fatalism, kindness and compassion condensed into a single word: whatever.