Bad reception
-
- June
- 19
Last night I put on a pair of ripped flannel pajamas, flopped down on the bed and collapsed.
My hair was wild and unkempt, my makeup smeared and my eyeglasses smudgy with fingerprints. I didn’t feel young. Or attractive. In fact, I felt particularly frumpy and sweaty and decidedly middle-aged.
Then I turned on the TV and my blood began to boil.If you happened to watch television last night, you may have caught the premiere of NBC’s latest reality show, “Age of Love”:http://www.nbc.com/Age_of_Love/about/. I actually had no idea this show existed  or that its premise would irritate me so much.
Here’s the concept: 30-year-old Australian tennis player Mark Philippoussis is a bachelor ready to meet the love of his life. He’s presented with a series of glamorous, well-dressed women, each of whom walk over to greet him, and then they reveal the awful truth: They’re anywhere from 39 to 46!The tennis player tries to conceal his disappointment, but his face tells it all. Every time the women  whom the show has nicknamed the Cougars  reveal their ages, his smile curls down into a grimace. You can almost hear him thinking, “Hey, I didn’t sign up for this.’’
As if this weren’t bad enough, the show ends with the surprise of the night: There’s a whole new crew of women in their twenties (the “Kittens”) waiting to meet him, and ultimately the tennis player will have to choose between youth and wisdom  or at least prove he’s got the integrity to look beyond age when it’s time to pick the woman of his dreams.
The thing that got to me  besides the painful realization that the women in their forties really did look two decades older than the 20-year-old Kittens  was the message implicit in the show’s premise: Women do have an expiration date. And no man in his right mind would willingly select an older woman over her younger counterpart.
I almost started crying when the tennis player stared into the eyes of the blond 46-year-old  and then quietly told her she was going home. The poor thing’s lower lip started shaking and her eyes welled up and I wanted to hug her and tell her she looked beautiful  and that no man was worth this kind of humiliation.
Then I took off my smudgy glasses, pulled up the elastic waistband of my flannel pajama pants and turned off the bedroom light. And I wondered: Are we women fighting a losing battle? Why does society discard us when we reach a certain age?
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, June 19th, 2007 at 5:32 pm by Linda Lombroso.
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Baby boomer Linda Lombroso was born in Queens and grew up in Port Washington. She began her journalism career at New York Magazine and Rolling Stone, and came back to the field after spending 10 years as a stay-at-home mother. Linda joined The Journal News in 1997 and has been a Life & Style writer since 2000. She has three children.
i wouldnt know. i am just a lowly man. ;-]
Sadly, society will always be trying to convince us that older women have a shelf life. It’s true—no man is worth that kind of humiliation. The women I admire most are those who thumb their noses at that mentality and prove themselves by capitalizing on their own strengths and talents! I find them inspiring!