How men feel over the hill at 58, but for women it's 29

Over any hill.

You and me both.

500_Apples wrote:

al-Qa'bong wrote:

I welcome you edification, but anyone between the ages of 27 and 45 who whines about the ravages of aging is pathetic in my view.  You're in the prime of life for crying out loud.

My point was not to whine but to critique the assumptions of the article, that men feel young until they're 58 because they never need to take care of their appearance, that masculinity is defined solely by the frequency of erections, et cetera. Judging from your comments not just in this thread but in others, you are in a bad mood. You've never pissed me off so I'm not going to fight. You should lighten up though.

Feelings about age are completely within context.

I work at a University and I'm 26 and I'm the youngest of my co-workers. I was actually somewhat obscure about my age until someone guessed that I was 21 because I didn't want people to think that I was a co-op student doing a work term or something and that they could give me their shit to do because I was some sort of young'in that was trying to impress people. Frankly, I'm waaaay past that. When I take a random undergraduate class, I'm usually one of the oldest ones (albeit by only a few years) because I'm not in Grad School yet. I find that I complain about random things like Much Music having "used to be" good (it probably never was) and not understanding cultural phenomenon that "kids these days" like, such as Justin Bieber, Twilight, Tumbler, etc and preferring a nice bar or lounge where the music isn't too loud to a club or underground party.

A few of my friends are starting to get married (though I'm nowhere near ready to... though I've joked with some that we should have 10 year "if we're not married by then we'll marry each other pacts"). I think the whole "30 is the new 20" meme is total bullshit, seeing as I sure as hell don't feel like I'm 16 (I'm about three or four pants sizes and a good five or so inches taller than I was back then) and can't recover from hangovers as well as I could even five years ago. All that being said, I don't feel over the hill and I don't feel like I'm in the "care free" (what a pointless saying) days of my youth either. Basically we poke fun at the fact that we need to step it up and start acting like adults and that while we're relatively young, we are in the primes of our lives, so if we want to live well we have to realize we're not babies anymore and that we need to get our shit together.

distinguished

I really, REALLY hope the mods reword the thread title.  I know it's part of the original Daily Mail headline(for those who don't know, and around this site I don't think thee's that many who don't, the Daily Mail is one of the most reactionary papers in the UK, and has always been not only racist and homophobic but relentlessly sexist as well), but we don't need to use their phraseology(which, as written, sounds as if it goes without saying that women, in fact, ARE over the hill at 29).

We don't really need to repeat antiwoman propaganda phrases just because they were part of the link article.

So, the headline is about a survey, right? That means they've asked a whole bunch of people, of both sexes - and, hopefully, all walks of life, but i can't take the time to read it now - and come up with a statistic. Not a universal truth. And no gradations or nuances.

If any women are reading this, the prime of our life is c 40-50 - not 25! The twenties are full of anxiety and insecurity, whether you're studying, starting a career, mating or reproducing: there is so much yet unknown about your ability, stamina and courage. By 45, you know who you are and what you're capable of, and have pretty much stopped giving a flying fig what anyone else thinks. That's not old, that's mature.

As a macro-sociologist this kind of bullshit "study" makes me want to rip my hair out.

So....  in our lovely patriarchal, sexist, heterosexist and woman-hating society, women are only valued for our (time limited) youth and (time limited, one assumes) appeal to men.

So, women are taught this all our lives and, wow, magic, when we hit 29 or 30 we feel that we're done, our prime years are over. We're taught that what we look like is more important than anything else we do, and presto, we internalize it and speak back the stereotypes. Oooh, shocking and groundbreaking.

The technical term for that in sociology is GIGO. Ha.

What ages of people were asked? Were there changes in responses across age, particularly for women? What does "prime" mean? Sexually "hot" and desirable? By whom? By what standards? Were only white folks included in the survey? Were there any differences across racial/cultural groups? Class groups?

Argh.

I like CMOT's thread about aging better. 

I just turned 30, as mentioned in the thread Maysie linked to, and I am happy to be this age. I had such a period of confusion, lack of self-confidence, heartbreak, struggle, etc. in my mid-twenties. I just feel so much more sure of myself, full of direction and happy. It doesn't hurt to be happily married as well, but unless I could go back to age 20 with all the knowledge and confidence I have now...I would not want to go back.

al-Qa'bong wrote:

Quote:

What does "prime" mean? Sexually "hot" and desirable? By whom? By what standards?

 

The baseline criterion I use to make my scientific assessment of "prime" is the time before some new body part didn't hurt with every new day.

I always assumed that the prime of a man's life was over when he started to define the prime of others' lives...

Corporatism's mass conditioning leads people to believe that the ideal way to achieve a culturally accepted standard of personalization and individuality, is to measure oneself against an artificial corporate depiction of everyone else who had previously bought into it.

Random body parts started to hurt around 45 for me.

Caissa wrote:

Random body parts started to hurt around 45 for me.

Two words:  "Magic Bag."

I use one of these every night.  You microwave it to heat it up, then place it on the afflicted sore spot.  My only problem with this device is that it isn't big enough to cover all my afflicted areas.  I could use "Magic Pyjamas" or something.

I hate it when some product on TV uses healthy-looking very senior Swede or Scandinavian men in their advertising - makes me look pathetic by comparsion - which I am.