The curse of f*ckability

Just one more thing to thank menopause for!

Actor Elle Fanning, who was told, aged 16, that she didn’t get a role because she was “unfuckable”

I was spoilt for choice of things to write about this week. I scribbled a shortlist of ideas as I drank my coffee and ate a blueberry muffin in Caffe Nero. (375 calories. I know I shouldn’t admit to knowing that, but I do. I’m a bad person. Don’t hate me).

It went something like this:

1 The pill - there’s a new documentary fronted by Davina McCall out in the UK this week (C4 Thursday) that seeks to do for the pill what their previous films did for menopause (ie take a burgeoning conversation and supersize it). I have a lot to say about the pill (thanks to my complex gynae history), but I figure, after reading at length about my adenomyosis a couple of weeks ago, you’ve probably had enough of my lady parts for one month.

2 Sex And The City is 25. Twenty five! Bloody hell, that’s scary. What was I doing in 1998? It launched the same year as Red (which I worked on as a dogsbody in the prelaunch phase) and not long after I started a five year stint editing Company magazine (RIP, again). Where were you?

3 A guitar has taken over our house! After decades of hankering, J has given into his longing to replace the guitar he was forced to sell at 19 to pay for a ticket back to college in the UK. The story is his to tell, not mine, but let me just say, there are plectrums everywhere and Sausage-the-cat is making Bluebeard look like he didn’t have possessiveness issues.

4 Jennifer Aniston has grey roots! Hold the front page! And also, yay! Baby steps, people, baby steps. (See her Instagram account if you don’t believe me.)

And then - THEN - I stumbled across this headline: “Elle Fanning Reveals She Lost Film Role at 16 Because She Was Considered 'Unfuckable”. I’m sorry, but What The Actual Fuck? (Yes, it’s that serious. So serious, I’m actually spelling it out.)

Elle Fanning. 25-year-old star of The Great. Tall, slim, blonde, pretty, white. Although admittedly probably too brainy for some (men’s) tastes, was deemed too “unfuckable” (at the age of sixteen, one-six, let’s not forget) to be cast in a – wait for it – father-daughter road trip movie. I can’t even. 

Except, of course, I can.

We all can. 

Because fuckability is a curse that plagues women from the second puberty kicks in. Sometimes earlier. It’s not even a month since Natalie Portman spoke about her “cringey” role in Luc Besson’s 1994 movie Léon (a film, I confess, I love, but I know is deeply problematic) where at the age of 12 – 12! – she had to tolerate grown men speculating how long they would have to wait for her to be “legal”. It would be gross if it wasn’t so repellent – and dangerous. Millie Bobby Brown (Stranger Things) and Bella Thorne (The Last Of Us) have both spoken about similar treatment. 

And on a more day-to-day level, pretty much every woman I know shares my experiences of being flashed at, letched over and groped from their very early teens until the time menopause hit and they were no longer deemed fuckable.

Yet another thing to be grateful to menopause for, I guess.

I don’t think I even thought about fuckability as a concept (yes, I am going for a personal best on the number of f-bombs I can get in one essay. Apologies if this ends up in your junk folder) until I no longer had it. If I ever did, which is probably a whole other conversation. 

I’m not sure it was even a thing until Amy Schumer’s Last Fuckable Day sketch (featuring Tina Fey and Patricia Arquette initiating Julia Louis-Dreyfus in what it means to no longer be fuckable in Hollywood) went viral in 2015. But Schumer didn’t create fuckability, she just gave voice to something we always knew was there. That’s why a five-minute comedy routine which could have just been an in-joke (admittedly between half the population) went from a late-night slot on Comedy Central to becoming part of the vernacular of the Western world. It’s because there’s scarcely a woman who didn’t identify and snort herself silly over it. Even those who never really thought about whether or not they were fuckable before – or if they had, wouldn’t have felt they fit society’s definition of it, or cared less.

(If you haven’t seen it, you mustn’t have been on the internet in 2015, but check it out below).

That sketch, I thought, was part of a groundswell of change. The beginning of women standing up and saying, you know what, screw these double standards, we’re done. After all, it coincided with #MeToo and #SheSaid and #IBelieveWomen and Weinstein and pussy hats and marches… It felt like a moment when things might, just might, move on. 

Silly me.

Then came Trump and Andrew Tate and all the other misogynists who seem disproportionately obsessed with forcing us back in those boxes we’ve been slowly wriggling out of. Because they knew something that maybe we hadn’t all quite grasped – fuckability has zero to do with how hot you are or aren’t (according to the male gaze at least), and everything to do with power. Them keeping it. Us not having any. Because fuckable is more insidious; it implies some sort of ownership over you and your body. Fuckable says you would. Fuckable implies you’d let them. And if you didn’t, they could make you. The audience, the internet trolls, the teenage boys in their bedroom, brought up on the-geek-will-get-the-girl fantasies, the entitled white middle-aged men who still run the show. They could.

All of which is an extremely roundabout way of saying that this is why older women are often labelled unfuckable. (And younger women can’t walk home without their keys wedged between their knuckles and have to wear cycle shorts under their skirts…) Because whilst many women in the vicinity of perimenopause and beyond no longer have skin that bounces back from pillow creases within seconds of getting out of bed, or 25 inch waists (respect if you do!), or eggs!, we do have a lot more. We are no longer malleable. We are no longer so desperate for the validation of total strangers. We are no longer doing it your way just to keep you happy. We are no longer nodding and smiling sweetly – or if we are, we’re taking a leaf out of Robert Downey Jr’s book and doing it so we can walk away and “do whatever the hell we want” anyway.  We are not going quietly. 

Yes, of course, it’s nice to be wanted – by a person who you want back (crucial caveat!), but whenever I ask a woman (over 40ish, older, grown up, whatever want to call it) about ageing, about attraction, about the dread fuckability, the reaction I get is pretty consistent: good riddance to bad rubbish.

Last week, I interviewed Pulitzer Prize winning author Barbara Kingsolver (twice actually, once for a national paper and once for an upcoming bonus episode of The Shift podcast). When I asked her how she felt about ageing, she was unequivocal. “Who cares what you look like? Who cares if you have grey hair?” She said. “ I don’t want men on the street to whistle at me. I never did. It was always terrible. It was always humiliating and felt like a violation.”

Simone de Beauvoir put it best: “The ageing woman well knows that if she ceases to be an erotic object it is not only because her flesh no longer has fresh bounties for men, it is also because her past, her experience, make her, willy-nilly, a person; she has struggled, loved, willed, suffered, enjoyed, on her own account. This independence is intimidating.”

Unfuckable? I’ll take it.