Julie Burchill Body Language Until very recently, no matter how liberal he was, a man could argue himself blue in the face that he was in favour of all possible equalities between men and women, and then at the last moment slip the stiletto between the ribs: “Ah, but nature, you see – nature’s different. No matter how many laws we pass to legally enshrine women’s equality, nature is always going to put the boot in. And it’s a sad fact that, while women become sexually superfluous after the menopause, a man can have children until the end of his life. Look at Charlie Chaplin – he was fathering babies in his eighties!” Though, as Nora Ephron pointed out in When Harry Met Sally, he was also so infirm that he couldn’t pick them up. But all that man-eternally-fertile/woman- good-for-15-years-tops eyewash has come in for a right bashing over the past few weeks. First, there were the conclusive studies showing that sperm quality decreases in men over the age of 24, and that it would take a man of 35 at least twice as long as a man of 25 to get the same fertile woman pregnant. In a nice twist on the old clich’, this means that it is not wise to send a man to do a boy’s job. It also means that all that jive from the likes of Dr Michael Odent – about how women should “purify” themselves for a year before attempting to conceive, while putative fathers may go on smoking and drinking and generally whooping it up – is a pile of sexist claptrap. (Where I come from, it’s invariably the girls who drink and smoke the most who get pregnant quickest – I think it’s called being loose.) Can it be any coincidence that, between the ages of 25 and 35, most men will eat their own weight in fry-ups, piss away a river of lager and smoke themselves blue in the face? It’s a wonder their sperm can be arsed to move at all. How ironic that adhering to the loaded lifestyle has done far more than the hobnail-booted march of feminism in rendering man “unmanly”. Then, last week, Professor Mel Greaves of the Institute of Cancer Research announced that, if women wished to remain cancer-free, they should have more children far younger – and, more problematically, that men could best avoid the disease by not copulating beyond their prime. Prostate cancer is now the second most common male cancer, diagnosed in 21E000 men each year and killing more than 9 500; this, says Greaves, is because men are not biologically programmed to have sex beyond the age of 50: “What other mammal, including dogs and our great ape relatives, continues to indulge in sexual activity long after it can successfully compete with younger, fitter males for the favours of the harem?” he demanded rhetorically. Failure to turn off the “testosterone tap”, apparently, promotes the growth of fatal cancers. With women now bearing the burden of Aids in Africa and dropping like flies with breast and cervical cancer at home (cervical cancer being widely thought to come from sexual exposure to men, as nuns hardly ever get it), it’s a relief to find out that there’s something we can’t get. And it’s the cherry on the top that men would get it less if they only learned to practise sexual continence – something that has apparently been the answer to every last bit of female trouble since time immemorial. Add to this the news that no critics will be allowed to see the new Richard Gere and Winona Ryder film before its release due to audience previews, which ended in hilarity and disgust at the May-September romance (have you ever noticed how that “September” is always stuck in to preserve the old guy’s glamour, like he’s still in the “Indian Summer” of his youth? Anyone looking at the 51-year-old Gere next to the 29-year-old Ryder would surely agree that May-November is nearer the mark) and we might venture the guess that the myth of men getting “better” as they get older, while women just go south, is well and truly on the skids. Women have been treated like sexual livestock for so long – in training, nubile, past it – that we have long since learned to live with the insults that come with each stage and just get on with enjoying them, anyway. For men, who are encouraged to think of themselves as sex machines from the cradle to the grave, the news that they wither and perish reproductively – just like a woman – is going to take some getting used to. Exactly how differently men and women approach ageing can be seen, interestingly, in aforementioned May-September flings. Unlike many feminists, I have nothing against older men doing it with young women, because they have just as much in common (low sex drive) as do older women going out with young men (high sex drive), as one of which happy breed I am proud to number myself. The difference is that when older women go out with younger men, they don’t believe that they themselves are actually still young – if Francesca Annis did herself up in a belly top and braids every time she went to a premiere with Ralph Fiennes, we’d all be laughing, when in fact she dresses like the grand dame that she is. Yet when you see an old man out with a young chick, be he Peter Stringfellow or Jack Nicholson, it’s obvious that, when that man looked in the mirror before he went out, he saw a young stud no older than his girlfriend.
To sum up, the reason younger women went with older men is because, historically, men have had more money than women, and marrying a rich old man was the one way to become rich yourself. Sexually, biologically and in every other way, it makes no sense at all – and finding the idea of Winona Ryder fancying Richard Gere strange but not turning a hair at the idea of the Graduate fancying Jerry Hall shows how far we have come to realising this, even over the past 30 years. Women go out with younger men to get good sex; men go out with younger women in order to stave off their own mortality. It’s not hard to see which one of these ambitions is bound to end in tears.