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Why Have Julia Fox’s Comments About Ageing Being “Sexy” Sparked Such A Backlash?

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NEW YORK, NEW YORK - NOVEMBER 07: Julia Fox attends the CFDA Fashion Awards at Casa Cipriani on November 07, 2022 in New York City. (Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images)Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images

I wouldn’t call what happened on my 28th birthday a meltdown, exactly. That afternoon, my boyfriend and I had been to the cinema. I don’t remember what film we saw, only that I walked out in a crappy mood, which only got worse when my phone started beeping with messages from friends pulling out of my pub drinks that evening. I stomped down the street, flinging my phone in my boyfriend’s direction and maturely announced that I was cancelling the whole thing. Just forget it. 

At 28, I felt as though I should be more “sorted” than this, with fewer flaky friends and anxieties about edging closer to 30. I’d already spotted what I was sure was my first grey hair and pals were talking about anti-ageing potions. It felt as though I was on a slippery slope downwards – now I was no longer in my mid-twenties, the inevitable decline had begun.

I thought back to that time this week, when I read Julia Fox’s comments on ageing. The actress, 32, let rip in a rant on TikTok about the unrealistic standards women are held to as we grow older.

“If I see another product that says anti-ageing on the label, I’m suing,” she said. “I’m going to sue because I’m gonna age regardless of if I put the fucking $500 serum on my face. And you all fucking know it, and we know it, so let’s stop lying to ourselves. Getting old is fucking hot. It is sexy.”

She also recalled having spent her 27th birthday in bed, crying, because she was no longer in her mid-twenties. “I was such a tyrant about it because I wanted the day to pass and just have it be… I don’t want to draw attention to the fact that I’m 27,” she recalled.

Fox’s comments have riled a lot of women, and it’s not hard to understand why. Hearing a 32-year-old say that “getting old is hot” and is “sexy” sticks in the craw for those staring down the barrel of midlife and beyond. I want to go back in time and shake my 28-year-old self for moping – and I expect many people felt the same way hearing what Fox had to say. Reality check, please.

It’s the same way I’ve reacted when younger colleagues have moaned about next year being their 30th birthday and how utterly terrible that milestone will be – while I’ve been on the brink of reporting them to HR for gross insensitivity. Or how I felt about a recent conversation I overheard two Gen-Zers having on the bus, about someone they had met at a house party the previous night. 

“You know she’s twenty-three,” one of them said. “No! Seriously? She looks so young,” gasped her friend.

You have no idea, I wanted to shout in their plump, collagen-rich faces. And yet, I also want what they want. When a friend of a friend told me that I looked “really young” at a baby shower the other week, I felt the tingle of pleasure fizz all the way down to my toes. I use retinol and worry constantly about frown lines. I want to own being 38 but look 28. While 58 still feels like a foreign country. 

That’s just it. What Fox has hit on is how divisive ageing can be – not just in terms of women being conditioned by society to feel that we’re somehow “past it” in our twenties and that we have to stay looking foetal forever, but actually between ourselves. The absurd standards of youth that we are expected to adhere to have created a schism between the generations. 

Older women are annoyed that Fox is trying to encroach on their territory from her place of glorious wrinkle-free youth. Ageing isn’t a “so hot right now” trend for them: it’s inevitable, tricky and can rapidly make you feel as though you’re invisible. We live in an ageist society – there’s a reason that so many women over 40 are sidelined at work, just as their confidence reaches parity with that of their male counterparts. Being a woman with opinions and gravitas is still unwelcome in many workplaces – we don’t like it when they not only lose the first bloom of youth, but think they can run the place. Not to mention that one in 10 of us has quit work because of a lack of understanding around menopause symptoms

Little wonder that older women don’t want to hear about ageing being “sexy” from someone in their early 30s, when they are the ones trying to navigate and control what can be difficult. We want to act as though we don’t care about growing older (and, retinol aside, there is an element of fewer fucks given) but we don’t want to hear that from someone too young to really grasp its meaning.

But Fox might just have a leg to stand on? After all, she works in an industry in which being over 25 can mean you suddenly progress to playing George Clooney’s mother, possibly grandmother. And all women are being impacted by those unrealistic ideas around beauty and ageing even younger – how else to explain the number in their twenties getting Botox and dermal fillers? In 2020, the Department of Health estimated that 41,000 Botox procedures were carried out on under-18s (since banned for minors). The American Society of Plastic Surgeons says that injections have increased by 28 per cent since 2010 among 20- to 29-year-olds. 

There are many reasons for this – it’s too simplistic to point the finger solely at Love Island – but it does mean that belittling the concerns of younger women becomes harder. Fox, like me at 28, isn’t doing anything but voicing a genuine worry shared by millions. Every decade and generation has its own neuroses and fears – and while I might want to give my younger self a talking to, my own near-tantrum was coming from the same place.

What I do now understand, rapidly heading towards 40, is that while getting older might not be “hot”, it’s also not the end of the world. In fact, it’s a privilege – something my own brother, who died in his forties, will never get to experience. That’s a lesson Fox has also learnt – in her TikTok she mentioned her late friend, Harmony, who will “not even… have the privilege of getting older” she said.

When it comes to ageing, that’s a message we can all unite around, and one that’s really worth shouting about – however old you are. 

Claire Cohen is the author of BFF? The Truth About Female Friendship