Ideals of femininity, such as the Victorian-era “Angel in the House” and the 1950s domesticity Betty Friedan attacked in “The Feminine Mystique,” tend to arise as a means of constraining women anew after each major step forward.

Twenty years ago, in “The Beauty Myth,” I argued that as feminism took hold and women gained new access to power, popular ideals of beauty were being used to undermine them. I look around at the magnetic and dynamic women my own age, I look at my own life, and instead that script seems more like a convenient fiction - designed, as so many aspects of “the beauty myth” are, to make women feel less powerful in this case, just when their power, magnetism and sexuality are at their height. Middle-aged women are supposed to face the loss of their youthful selves with grief and anguish. The common cultural script tells us that women lose value as they age and that men will trade in their counterparts for younger versions (because, of course, that would be trading up). I had thought that getting older would be harder. The man may have imagined that he was showing off the youth of his date the way he might show off a new Maserati but parading her around like an acquisition seemed only to make his friends feel sorry for him.

In fact, the mood of both genders was tender, almost pitying. And yet I did not feel the frisson of envy among the men present, nor did I see a bristle of jealousy from any of the stylish, accomplished women in their 40s. It took only a few moments of conversation before the rest of the group realized that the two had very little in common. Recently, I was at a party, and a man who, like myself, was in his late 40s, arrived with a woman 20 years younger.

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