Undead sexist cliche: Older women are dogs, older men are sexy

So today a friend’s FB link led me to a men’s rights website (no, I’m not linking there) which included a post on how women who turn 30 almost immediately age out of the sexual market: They’re worthless no matter how smart, successful or educated they are because they’ve aged into ugliness. Men, on the other hand, remain attractive, aging like a fine wine.
This is not a new thought, of course. I’ve been hearing variations of it since at least the 1970s. Like the other undead sexist cliches, it’s bullshit.
For starters, anyone who doesn’t think women in their thirties can be attractive obviously doesn’t hang out with the right women. Certainly not all women in their thirties, but there’s no shortage of them. If someone thinks all 30somethings are old and worn-out, that says more about the speaker’s taste than the women (case in point, right-winger John Derbyshire who was in his fifties when he claimed that no woman is attractive naked after the 15-to-20-year-old range). Ditto anyone who assumes the only measure of a woman’s desirability is her looks.
Second, the idea that men age well? Some do, true. But most of us? Even in their thirties, some men are not, shall we say, studly. And we don’t improve or become hotter from there. For every Sean Connery or Paul Newman (to name two older guys widely considered hot) there’s a hundred schlubs. And even with the finely aged men, a lot of younger women, I suspect, would sooner find a good-looking man in their own age range than someone older.
And let’s face it, some older men attract some younger women because they have lots of money. Which is not what I’d consider aging well, it’s just having money. Other men attract younger women because they’re movie stars, and fame has its own currency.
Which brings us to Hollywood, which does a lot to perpetuate the myth that older men are some kind of chick magnets. Look at My Cousin Vinnie. In the real world it’s very unlikely a cute twentysomething Marisa Tomei would wind up engaged to fiftysomething Joe Pesci. He’s hardly a fine wine, and his character has been largely a failure up to the time of the movie (I love the movie and they both give great performances, but still). Or I Love Trouble in which grizzled old Nick Nolte is irresistibly attractive to Julia Roberts (which is inevitable by the laws of screenwriting)—and apparently a red-hot babe magnet for every other good-looking woman in town (which is kind of silly).
The idea also ties into a lot of other undead sexist cliches. The blog post I read gloats that a woman’s worthlessness in her thirties is comeuppance for how women control men with sex in their twenties. It comes off as a textbook example of misogyny fueled by hot women not wanting to sleep with you: Some day you’ll be wealthy and successful and have hot girls falling all over you while that bitch who turned you down is desperately trying to get laid. That’ll teach her!
For more on men’s rights activists, here’s an earlier post.