What I’d give for a wolf-whistle now I’m 50
WHEN I was young, I suffered from all the usual afflictions — naivety, arrogance, vegetarianism, sixth-form socialism, a liking for cider and bad poetry.
I was, I’m ashamed to say, a walking, talking cliche.
But the thing I regret the most was my half-baked feminism — and the sense of humour bypass that accompanied it. Like so many girls of my generation, I took myself far too seriously and was quick to mistake kindness or generosity for sexism.
I would never let a man pay for dinner (or I would never admit to it, at any rate) and I wore ugly shoes I could walk in, rather than have to accept a lift home in high heels. As for winking, thigh-patting and the occasional wolf-whistle — woe betide the man who dared.
Now, aged 50, I realise how silly I was to get so wound up about such things. If I had my time again, I would accept those gestures for what they are: crude but flattering demonstrations of male admiration. And I would appreciate them all the more as I know how much I miss them now they’re gone.
THIS week, Eve Pollard — more often tagged as TV presenter Claudia Winkleman’s mother, but actually a successful veteran journalist in her own right — echoed these very sentiments.
In an interview, she bemoaned the fact that, for all the advantages that come with age, there was one thing she missed about being young: the sexism my friends and I used to get so huffy about.
‘I know that no man is ever going to wolf-whistle at me or stare moodily at me with a hint of lust again,’ she told the Radio Times, somewhat wistfully.
At 71, Pollard hasn’t exactly let herself go. She belongs to that generation of baby- boomer women who, like my own mother, have redefined what it means to grow old, defying advancing decrepitude every inch of the way.
And, she says, certain advantages come with age, such as wisdom, freedom and confidence.
Yet deep down, most of us agree. After all, there are few women who don’t regret the decline of their sexual powers: that slow, depressing slide into invisibility that comes with the passage of time.
Believe it or not, I used to get wolf-whistled on a fairly regular basis in my youth (although not as much as my friend Lucy, who’d cause serious industrial accidents if she went within 100 yards of a building site).
In my case, I suspect it had more to do with the fact that I spent a lot of time in Italy, and Italian men will proposition pretty much anyone who is not a nun.
Nowadays, I’d be positively overjoyed by the attention. To today’s right- on students, these must sound like the demented ramblings of a Fifties housewife. But until you’ve experienced the invisibility switch for yourself, you really have no idea what it feels like.
Trust me, there is only one thing worse than attracting unwanted attention, and that’s attracting no attention at all. Even the most impeccably turned- out women find that, after a certain age, you practically have to send up a flare to get served at a busy bar.
The worst part of it, though, is that, if anything, you feel happier and more comfortable in your skin than ever before. Certainly much more so than when you were young and gorgeous.
That is the awful irony. Young women have it all, but don’t know it; older women know it all, but no longer have it. Somewhere in between, there’s a golden moment when it all comes together. But blink and you’ll miss it.