There was a minute there when it seemed like society, or at least the representation of it through pop culture, had come a long way from reiterating the message that women are “dead” at thirty. Or, more accurately, their youth is. This was perhaps most succinctly encapsulated by Lily Allen’s 2009 track, “22,” on which she sings such chirpy lyrics as, “When she was twenty-two, the future looked bright/But she’s nearly thirty now and she’s out every night/I see that look in her face, she’s got that look in her eye/She’s thinking, ‘How did I get here?’ and wondering why.” This is followed by the chorus, “It’s sad, but it’s true how society says her life is already over.” And yes, it’s sad but it’s true how even “modern” women are still thinking this way. Especially if we’re to go on Anitta and Miley Cyrus’ latest single releases, both of which have the phrase “used to be” in them. A term that easily connotes some form of lament.
For Anitta, she’s slightly less sad-sounding about the fact that she “used to be a ho” and now she “ain’t no more.” Because, if we’re to go by the accompanying music video’s narrative, she’s getting married, and she needs to put her former “ho life” ways to rest. Although Anitta might have had the masses thinking this could be about Simone Susinna for a brief second after being spotted with the Italian actor/model all over Europe, she soon after declared, “I’m not dating anyone, I’m single. I’ve always been single.” Or rather, a serial “dater” (read: fucker). Which puts her much more firmly in Selena Gomez’s camp, the latter having released “Single Soon” the same day as Miley’s divergently-themed “Used to Be Young.” But where thirty-one-year-old Gomez seems to be embracing her “single girl life” without a tinge of sadness just because she’s now “over the hill,” Anitta and Miley are patently entering their thirties with something like a white flag. Surrendering to the notion that they have to “grow up” and fall in line, adopting a more “zen” state that only “old ladies” can. Anitta conveys this through images of herself getting married so as to shirk her erstwhile life of ho-ish “sin.” Repenting in her chorus with the lines, “I used to be a ho, but now I ain’t no more/Been swimmin’ through the water, now I’m back to shore/I look at who I did and I’m like, ‘Oh, my Lord.’”
In the first verse, Anitta then switches to Spanish, singing, “Una perra de raza muy dura de matar/Pero ahora soy mansa y ya no muerdo má’/Rompí mucho corazóne’ y a mí no me lo rompieron/Pero ya yo no quiero, ‘toy tranquila y ya.” The Spanish lyrics translate to, “A very tough breed [more specifically, breed of dog] to kill/But now I’m gentle and I don’t bite anymore/I broke a lot of hearts and they didn’t break mine/But I don’t want to anymore, I’m calm and that’s it.” As though a “switch” has been flipped within Anitta as a result of entering her thirties and now she’s decided it’s time to, as Selena Gomez (and her bestie, Taylor Swift, for that matter) also said, “Calm down.” Or “settle down,” as some prefer to call it. Because, despite all the work Madonna did to negate the idea that you’re expected to put yourself out to pasture by the age of forty, now it seems women are admitting even earlier to being “old” as opposed to “being a slut and doing whatever they want” at any age. As so many women who came before fought for them to be able to (though again, mainly Madonna…and Cher).
Instead, things feel like they’re going backwards vis-à-vis women and aging. For example, the existence of a recently-circulating meme featuring Margot Robbie with the phrase, “Life doesn’t end after thirty, she’s proof of that.” It makes one want to positively vomit. As though we need a thirty-something representation of Barbie to assure us that one’s thirties (as a woman, mind you) aren’t a death sentence. A form of thinking that is so fucking retro that we have to wonder if we’re even actually in the twenty-first century, and any progress has truly been made with regard to women’s viewpoints about their own age. Some, of course, will try to say that it’s actually “positive” for women to have candid conversations about getting older, but, once more, it has to be emphasized that talking about being old at thirty only serves to reinforce the false belief that youth is a commodity reserved strictly for teens and twenty-somethings when that simply isn’t the case. The adage, “You’re as young as you feel” ought to be brought up more regularly. Especially for a generation—millennials—that has been so often accused of having Peter Pan syndrome. Now, it seems, they’re only too willing to pass the youth torch on to banal Gen Z despite not being anywhere near “old” at all. Alas, not if we’re to go by the current trend in pop culture to brand people in their thirties and forties as “elderly.”
Although there did seem to be a blip of evolution, the culprit for this regression toward branding thirty as “old” is, undeniably, TikTok, which is overrun by thirteen-year-olds who are the “tastemakers” of society at this moment (and possibly for the foreseeable future). So, of course, they’re going to view women in their thirties as “old,” never imagining that they themselves could reach that age from their cush vantage at thirteen. Ergo, the callous ability to come up with a trend based on Lana Del Rey’s “Young and Beautiful” that compares celebrity women in their current state to photos of them when they were younger, as though to highlight that their “jig is up” because they’ve committed the “sin” of aging. And yes, Madonna herself stated (with her sardonic tone) in a speech for the 2016 Billboard Women in Music Awards, “Do not age. Because to age is a sin. You will be criticized, you will be vilified, and you will definitely not be played on the radio.” Nor will you get as much film work if you’re an actress. Something Charlize Theron, at forty-eight, is starting to contend with as she, too, puts up a white flag and surrenders, “I’m old” the way Anitta and Miley seem to be alluding to already at the outset of their thirties. As though women themselves needed to give narrow-minded patriarchal perspectives about aging any more clout. And yes, it’s all still rooted in the primal idea that a woman is “old” once she’s not of “child-bearing age.” But with the advancement of science, we’ve seen that women can have children well beyond their thirties. Even if they’re not nearly as embraced for doing so as men like Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. To boot, with the rapid progress of cosmetic products and surgery, we’ve seen Aaliyah’s “age ain’t nothin’ but a number” aphorism realized. And both Anitta and Miley (but especially Anitta) have enjoyed their share of expensive ways to physically “enhance” themselves.
This is, in part, why it makes it even worse that they should go to all that trouble to stay looking young and yet still slap themselves with an “older now” demarcation. After all, “The confluence of celebrity culture and the ability to manipulate every casual selfie has created the sense that we are not meant to look old at all.” So why should women who look young cause a further mind fuck by declaring that they’re old? It just seems sort of counterproductive to a positive self-perception. Because when the likes of Anitta and Miley arrive in their forties and fifties, what will they say about themselves then? That they’re crypt-keepers? And all while women who are actually in their forties and fifties work far harder to appear in Anitta and Miley’s age bracket. Including someone like Kylie Minogue, whose recent hit, “Padam Padam,” highlights lyrics that are decidedly “too youthful” for a woman in her mid-fifties. Meanwhile, Anitta and Miley are looking the gift horse of their youth in the mouth by casually writing it off as being “old.” With Cyrus essentially insisting that she can no longer be “crazy” or “fun” because those things have been buried with the teen and twenty-something Miley. As though all such traces of “wildness” ought to be if a girl is to “transcend” fully into a woman (not that Britney ever chose to, still overtly holding on to what she said long ago, “I’m not a girl, not yet a woman”).
Maybe Cyrus thinks she’s doing a service to the women her age by “mourning the loss of her youth” at thirty, giving them permission to finally “mature” and “let go of childish things” such as drinking, drugging and ho’ing (as Anitta more or less calls it). But, in the end, it serves to underscore the already damaging idea that only those who are “Lolita age” can be classified as young (and yes, that entails fairly perverse implications about our society).
Carrie Bradshaw, who existed most potently in the 00s—a time now known for its deeply problematic worldviews—once said to Samantha Jones, “It’s time for ladies my age to start covering it up. We can’t get away with the same stuff we used to” (cue Madonna gyrating to “Hung Up” in a leotard in her fifties as a big “fuck you” to that statement). And “getting away” with such “stuff” is only going to be made even more of a challenge for those women who don’t want to “button up at thirty” thanks to vibrant thirty-year-old women like Anitta and Miley playing up the notion of being “aged” once a girl’s twenties have concluded.
Like her aforementioned contemporary, Lily Allen, Amy Winehouse also had her own choice words for “sad women” that dared to turn thirty. And they appear via the lyrics, “Don’t get mad at me ‘cause you’re pushin’ thirty, and your old tricks no longer work” (Winehouse, as we know, wouldn’t live to thirty herself to find out). Perhaps still taking such a message to heart, Anitta and Miley are using the “trick” of running an offense on being automatically perceived as “irrelevant” just because they’ve hit their thirties. A maneuver that itself seeks to make it harder for other women (even “normal” ones in addition to famous ones) to be seen as relevant just because their birth year is no longer keeping them in the “right” decade.
