Fifty! Is the new forty!

Also, my dog has fleas

It turns out there is no budget for my bollocks.

Unaccustomed as I am to freelancing, I made the classic mistake of writing something before I had pitched it. DO NOT DO THIS. I couldn’t sell the piece below because my timing is terrible and to be honest, it’s too long. You have to write snappily these days. Unfortunately, my brain meanders, so I can’t get arrested in the present media environment, let alone paid.

I present it here as an amuse bouche ahead of my regular newsletter, which is already late. I’m a little distracted right now because I discovered our DOG has FLEAS. This means I need to hot-wash everything he’s ever touched, steam-clean the soft furnishings, vacuum ruthlessly and set off these awful little bombs of insecticide you can get from Mitre10.

Honestly? This is why I can’t get a midlife career off the ground. Because of my meandering brain but also, THINGS keep HAPPENING.

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Tap, tap. Is this on?

It’s come to my attention that 50 is the new 40. Being 52 myself, this is very welcome and there are people I must thank.

Don’t worry if you hadn’t heard; it’s a very recent development. It happened over summer and owes much to Demi Moore’s hit movie The Substance, Nicole Kidman in Babygirl and the blockbuster novel All Fours by Miranda July.

Everybody’s watched or read them. Everybody yapped about them. They spawned a million think pieces and so now, women like me who were worrying about a hip that had started clicking, a silvery patch in an eyebrow, a beaky, permanently cross look we couldn’t get rid of and the thinning of every lip we have, can look at ourselves in a whole new way.

Turns out we’re still hot, especially to younger men. We can break out of our boring suburban roles, opening up our marriages in the pursuit of our desires. We can thumb our noses at repressive beauty norms while at the same time, nailing them. The answer to any number of recent headlines (Can I Get Ripped at 53?) is unequivocally yes! Fifty’s the gateway to 30 more years of hotness, according to The Times (How to Have a Body Like Helen Mirren at 79).

I can’t tell you what a relief this is. Here I was, regretting not going easier on the pav at Christmas. My low point was early January, under cold strip lighting in The Warehouse changing rooms, as my husband struggled to zip me into a wetsuit (a size fourteen, if you must know). It’s an awful feeling, grabbing wobbly fistfuls of your own stomach and forcing them in a too-tight casing; like stuffing pizza dough into a tiny handbag, except the pizza dough is you.

“I can’t do this anymore,” I whimpered.

“I’ve got it,” he said, and rammed the zip up to the nape of my neck. My flesh distributed itself inside the rubber. My arms and legs puffed out like the points of a starfish. Beached on land, in water I’d be unsinkable.

Unsinkable! That’s what middle-aged women are now! Let’s start with Miranda July’s All Fours, the book everybody’s talking about, only not in front of children. The narrator is a performance artist, wife and mother who sets out on a road trip but only gets as far as an outer borough of her city. She checks into a drab motel, spends $20,000 redecorating her room and begins a thrilling three-week liaison with a sexy twentysomething she side-eyed at a petrol station.

In New Zealand terms this is like leaving Dunedin to drive to Auckland but stopping at Mosgiel to have sex with a guy from the Wildbean at BP. You can just picture him: no responsibilities, and an ironic moustache.

This novel has changed many midlife women forever. Some are leaving their husbands. Some are exploring their sexuality. Menopause has become a battle-cry for them, not a fading out or a raging against the dying light. No wonder book clubs are passing it around like hooch at Prohibition.

Full disclosure? I’ve always found Miranda July annoying beyond belief. Her avant-garde style, her kooky films; her drawling manner of speaking. There’s something self-consciously L.A. about her stuff, like life is like a never-ending opening night at a gallery specializing in video installations.

Reading her book didn’t unlock anything rebellious in me but that’s because I was distracted by the irritating trendy details, like the main character sprinkling nutritional yeast over kale for her kid’s lunchbox, which she helpfully calls a Bento (yes, thank you, Miranda). I felt sorry for her thinly-drawn husband. Hey! I joined the pussy march to Parliament in 2016, and this book made me feel like a bad feminist!

I get the central message (an artist needs a room of her own - trademark Virginia Woolf). I don’t disagree with it at all. I think she writes beautifully, with an easy, aerated style you can gobble quickly, although trust me, you will burp extravagantly now and then. I just can’t understand the general wonder, because novelists have been writing versions of this story for years.

But thousands of readers disagree and what July definitely gets right about fifty-something women is our desire for excellent homewares. Who wouldn’t drop twenty grand, if they had it, on scented candles and silk sheets? Those parts of the novel definitely turned me on, legitimizing my secret longings. For that, I thank her.

Thanks, too, Nicole Kidman. In Babygirl she plays a glossy CEO having a submissive/dominant affair with an intern at her office. I haven’t personally seen it, but I’m told there is no kale.

Let’s set aside that until now, there’s been little if nothing relatable about Nicole Kidman, a hard-bodied, flawless, multimillionaire actress famous for avoiding facial lines. But now she’s lionized as the bravest woman in Hollywood – an ageless inspiration. If she can fold herself into a pretzel to have role-swapping sex with someone too young to recall when Bush was president, so can we.

Demi Moore is another one giving Hollywood the finger, while still buying into the whole thing (she’s tipped for an Oscar – who’d say no to that?). The Substance is a body horror where an ageing beauty takes a magic tablet to return to dewy youth, but things go terribly wrong. Apparently, people have fainted or been sick while watching this movie, a satire on the impossible beauty standards imposed on women.

Unfortunately, many missed the message and are foaming at the bit to praise Moore for her age-defying hotness, and her return to the red carpet after years of being a laughingstock. Let’s be clear, Moore was a laughingstock for trying to stay beautiful for the industry and, you’d imagine, her much younger then-boyfriend. There wasn’t an enhanced body part of Moore's that wasn’t breathlessly reported upon (even her knees had a lift, allegedly). But framing her success as a triumphant, late-in-life return to form flatters Hollywood, which decided to clang the gates shut on Moore at 40. It’s annoying she seems so grateful to be back, when she was there all along, if only somebody had cast her.

No matter! I thank Moore for making 62 look 42! And Jane Fonda for making 82 look 72, and Helen Mirren for looking 60 all the time. I’ve three decades of sizzle ahead of me, and this is worth celebrating!

Maybe with another slice of pav?

Taken by Jane O’Loughlin, fellow marcher in 2016

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I’ve become aware that fellow NZer

Lucy Corry

has a delicious newsletter VERY much worth your attention. Her latest offers the perfect gloop to crunch ratio for your next batch of homemade granola. Lucy, you are cool.

Dan Keane

writes flawlessly and thoughtfully about life as an American in New Zealand. He’s sent me some lovely readers, who I imagine are Americans and I’m grateful to him, and them. Also, we had coffee once and it was awesome.