I don’t remember Paulina Porizkova from her 1980s heyday. I should, because I was a teenager in the 1980s. Porizkova is only three years older than me; we’re basically the same age.
In recent years, the Czech-born former supermodel has made headlines for her social media posts.
No—she isn’t shoving her political views in our faces, like Alyssa Milano or John Cusack. Porizkova, rather, has become recently famous for posting revealing photos of herself on Instagram, her advanced years notwithstanding. Porizkova’s latest addition is a photo of herself in her underwear at the age of 60.
And I have to say, she looks pretty good. Yes, if you compared her to the fittest 25-year-olds here in Ohio, she would come up short. But if you compared her to the typical 25-year-old here in Ohio (Ohio consistently runs among the top ten or twelve states in obesity) this 60-year-old definitely holds her own.
The mainstream media largely ran with this from the direction of aging and body positivity. Many mainstream media journalists are women over 40, and there have been a lot of articles of late about women over 40 supposedly being “invisible”.
(A 44-year-old Huffpost writer took a bravado stance on this issue a few days ago, declaring: “aging has given me something that I didn’t even know I needed: delicious invisibility and freedom from unwanted male attention.” (Yes, I completely believe that those are her honest feelings on the matter.))
While I cringe at clichés like “sixty is the new forty”, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with reassessing the definitions of both old age and youth. Times have changed, after all. In the year 1900, the average life expectancy at birth was 47.3 years. Most people were old by the time they were forty, if they were still alive at all. Surviving fifty- and sixty-somethings were hoary elders.
From the other side of this, we could reasonably ask: does the Internet really need photos of 60-year-olds in their underwear, no matter how fit they are?
I’m going to take a different angle entirely. Back to those obesity rates. We have a national obesity epidemic, which has created yet another opportunity for Big Pharma. I know at least half a dozen people who are presently taking Ozempic or Mounjaro.
In the US, the younger you are, the more likely you are to be obese. Millennials have become the most obese generation in the history of humankind.
There are no 60-something Millennials. Millennials are presently in their 30s and 40s. Obesity rates are high among Gen Z, too. Gen Zs are presently in their twenties.
And hey, what about all the Gen Xers? (This is the generation to which I belong.) Paulina Porizkova, born in 1965, is the oldest you can be and still be an official Gen Xer.
Let us set aside debates about MILFs, cougars, and “X age is the new Y age”. If Paulina Porizkova can look gym-toned at sixty, then there’s no excuse for all the obesity we see in the USA nowadays, across multiple generations.
-ET