On magazine covers, billboards and TV screens, middle-aged celebrities are flaunting their fat-free, perfectly toned muscles. How hard is it for the average fiftysomething to measure up? And what will it do to the rest of your life?
ould Nicole Kidman possibly be real? That was the question springing from her photoshoot for Perfect magazine, in which the 55-year-old adopts a power victory pose, flexing arms like a bodybuilder, her biceps taut, huge, extremely detailed. She looks like an anatomical drawing, and as if she could pull a truck out of a swamp. I was bewitched by her legs. It’s difficult to see muscle definition, head on, on a leg. Oh boy, not any more. The Daily Mail said she looked “decades younger” than her age, which is not true, since we don’t tend to age one another by our arms (it’s all in the eyes, folks). What she does look is absolutely ripped, in her 50s. She looks like an elite athlete, as does Davina McCall, 54, with her rock-hard six-pack and even Huw Edwards, 61, who caused a stir by showing off his toned torso on Instagram.
When we who are in, or about to enter, our 50s were young, the female ideal was to be incredibly lithe and slim. Muscle definition, especially in – God help you – the shoulders, was considered beefy and undesirable. Visible triceps were OK, indicative of low body fat, but it’s quite hard to tone your triceps while leaving your shoulders unaffected. I remember being warned against rowing as an activity, with a scare story about someone’s sister who had tried it a few times and ended up looking like a wrestler. There were myths peddled as fact that, if you accidentally were to build a muscle and then not tend it, it would turn into immovable fat, hence Big Daddy.
You would have this terrible ratchet where you’d build a muscle, tend the muscle, accidentally build more, and if you ever stopped, you’d run to seed, and nobody would ever love you. Theoretically, this could carry on until you became the Hulk, so it was safer just to stick with aerobics. This was all predicated on the idea that the ultimate femininity was to be as different as possible from the male, with your meaning as a woman generated by your difference from a man, in the Derridean tradition. Women born after the mid-80s just aren’t swallowing that any more.
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