Sophia Loren in a less revealing pose.
Photograph: PA
So Sophia Loren is doing a nudey pose for a Pirelli calendar, at the age of 71. I wondered idly what the accepted line was on Loren... I went to askmen.com, which is quicker and almost always more succinct than asking an actual man, and apparently she "has managed to age quite nicely".
People Magazine called her, in 1999, "one of the world's most stunning and age-resistant women". Really, from a feminist or indeed any point of view, this stuff is irrelevant, but I liked that last, it makes her sound like a tin of Ronseal (does she also resist rain? How is she in other weather conditions?) Female nudity (which my prudish spellcheck just tried to change to "untidy", how weird) tends to generate conclusions that spin way beyond its significance.
A young woman flashing anything is considered simultaneously cynical and dumb; a nude middle-aged woman, well, one over 35 (nobody says middle-aged about that bracket anymore) is miraculously divested of this taint, and people just wonder how she manages to stay so trim/ toned/ voluptuous/ cellulite-free (or not, depending on whether or not she, you know, did).
An older woman, 60-plus, is widely considered to be making some political statement, shaking a feminist fist at the patriarchal notion that women have to be young to be attractive.
I find this position annoying - it was never meant to be part of feminism to deny that young people were better looking than old ones. It makes it unnecessarily easy to take the piss out of the woman's movement... which isn't, naturally, to say that Sophia Loren shouldn't take her clothes off (she's keeping a modest scarf on, apparently, not sure where).
She can take her clothes off as much as she likes. I just don't get a joyful message of the march of gender parity from it.
A lads' mag, of course, would say I was just jealous, on account of how I'd never make it into a Pirelli catalogue, at this age, at that age, or at any age in between...
