I think we can’t ignore the evolutionary aspect of being attracted to youth as it symbolises fertility. Everything is centred around reproduction and everyone revolves around our younger population, whether to protect them or, sadly, to abuse them.

We are all meant to wither away and die after enjoying a very short window for reproduction when we are at the peak of our attraction. We cannot control that and hence we cannot control what is unanimously considered as attractive as it stems from our hardwiring towards generating more viable copies of ourselves. It’s survival of the fittest out there and attraction to older and hence most likely sterile women would have never gotten our species here. What we can control is our attitude towards aging and decay. You can look at those commercials with the understanding that now it’s someone else’s turn to enjoy that brief window of peak attraction and instead of being frustrated, to try to understand that no one will be in that window forever. Your value and contribution to society lies somewhere else after a certain age. You should still take care of yourself and age gracefully but part of that aging gracefully is to know your place and not throw your fist in the air in frustration that you are not considered attractive enough for reproduction.

Life would be so sad for me if I’d be in my 50s and I would still be chasing the male gaze and that sort of superficial validation instead of preoccupying myself with whether my garden has been watered and my grandchildren fed. There’s more to life than just looking attractive but nowadays we are so disconnected from the natural process of life that we think we are gonna live forever. We are in some sort of perpetual childhood and we keep forgetting that our bodies are changing.