Mere personal charms...

The Times describes Elizabeth Young as 'the high priestess of Post-Modern lit crit.' Now I know nothing about lit crit (I am a theology and philosophy graduate - although on reflection I know next to nothing about these subjects as well) but I love her collection of essays in her book, 'Pandora's Handbag', a collection of literary criticism and journalism. She's subversive and brilliantly witty.

But one of her pieces is achingly sad. 'The agony of losing your looks.' She originally wrote if for The Independent, but then a woman's glossy picked it up, and insisting on running it against a Before and After photo. A medley of extracts:

For about fifteen years I rarely paid a train or bus fare. People just let me off. I never went food shopping. Men gave me expensive drugs all the time. I wasn't trying to ponce off people or to prostitute myself. They just offered... Jean Cocteau said, 'The privileges of beauty are enormous', but it is hard to make the damning admission that one is, or was beautiful, or to speculate on what the inevitable loss of such looks entails.

It would have been stupid to pretend I didn't know that many people were attracted to me. But conscious awareness of my looks made me feel superstitious and desperate. The hysterical emphasis on youth and beauty everywhere was a forcible reminder of their temporary nature. Everything I depended on was slipping away, day by day...

But things are much easier for the pretty girl. When you are indulged like that you acquire a sort of learned helplessness. It makes you very lazy with your life. You drift along like sea kelp.

Every little sign that you are getting older is a dagger to the heart. You really feel it. The first time a man's eyes don't follow you. The first time you like a guy who is completely indifferent - no offers of a lift, a drink, not even a telephone number. The increasing callousness regarding your welfare. The growing anonymity - standing alone at a party.

Two centuries earlier, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote warningly about this:

• Men are not aware of the misery they cause, and the vicious weakness they cherish, by only inciting women to render themselves pleasing.
• The respect consequently which is paid to wealth and mere personal charms is a true north-east blast that blights the tender blossoms of affection and virtue.
• Love's silken wings are instantly shrivelled up when anything beside a return in kind is sought.

But it's not just women who have this problem. This quote resonates with me particularly: When a man falls in love with a woman half his age, it's not her youth he seeks, but his own.