Old and looking it… "In America we tend to erase women after 40," croaked leather-skinned actress Sharon Stone, who is still trying to trade off sex despite now requiring an entire effects crew to look like a bankable star.  Her career is a bad joke that Hollywood took the wrong way – she owes it all to a movie that was regarded by everyone at the time (except its creators) as a camp classic, filled with unintended laughs.

So Stone is finding out that once your flesh goes slack and mottled you need a propaganda campaign on the order of Triumph of the Will in order to get anyone to care about your desperate comeback attempt.  For an actress with talent, surviving the loss of youth is indeed difficult; sometimes you have to admit that you are no longer well-suited to be the vulgar bombshell.  For Sharon Stone it is out of the question, and the only uncertainty is how much dignity she is willing to abandon in the struggle (middle-aged women are usually willing to abandon quite a bit).

The reader comments on the Daily Mail piece are entertainment unto themselves.  They fit a familiar pattern of clueless braying about the unfairness of life:

Had your time? What does that mean? After 40 we are no longer useful? [Correct.] That same rule doesn't apply to men! I am sick of it. You know if you live long enough you will be over 40. You know women over 40 now includes stars like; Sarah Jessica Parker, Courteney Cox Arquette, are these women "has beens"?

If you're going to invoke over-40 actresses, could you at least find someone with talent?  Anyway these two mediocrities are on the steep back slopes of their careers – Arquette barely had one, and Parker is still best known for playing a frighteningly homely sex columnist on TV.  Hardly brilliant examples of over-40 women who "still got it".

You don't think it's fair that after 40 men are still valued and women aren't?  Try living the life of a man, then.  It is a life of accomplishment and consequence, rather than one of indulgence and self-absorption, at least for those who are not failures.  Rather than reading book after book by Deepak Chopra looking for some bullshit illusory enlightenment,* or seeking out the affirmative action version of achievement in which you value the reward a hundred times more than the work itself, try living by male standards.  Part of the problem is you think trading off your looks is being useful.

What people stop doing when you're an over-40 woman is treating you like you have a spellbinding vagina.  Herein lies the irony:  that over-40 women are treated fairly.  The real unfairness (if one must call the way life works "unfair") is that they were getting special treatment the first 30-40 years of their lives, not that they aren't getting special treatment now.  But boy do they notice.

Of course we men desire women as they are:  intellectually stunted quasi-children, beautiful and receptive and luxuriantly soft – there is no denying their charms as such.  I suppose this increases the disappointment, but life is filled with disappointments just waiting to be discovered.