‘Ladies, never let anyone tell you you are past your prime,” Michelle Yeoh told a rapt audience as she accepted her Oscar on Sunday. She made history from a number of directions with the victory – the first woman from an Asian background to win best actress in 95 years, and only the second Asian lead even to be nominated. The first was Merle Oberon in 1936, and there is no better barium meal into the bowels of Hollywood racism than Oberon’s life story. but give the place a break: only 87 years later, it’s fine not to be white.
On the age point, though, Yeoh was thought to be taking a wider swipe at culture as a whole, specifically referring to the CNN television anchor Don Lemon, who said last month that Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley was “past her prime”. Challenged live on air, he clarified: “A woman is in her prime in her 20s and 30s and maybe 40s.” When that didn’t wash with his co-hosts, he said that it wasn’t according to him, and to Google it.
Lemon is said to have “sparked outrage”, but the phrase bugs me: it suggests the response is intemperate, sudden, unforeseeable, labile. That’s just how it is with woke armies. One minute we’re eating tofu and listening to Belle and Sebastian, the next we’re choking on anger. In fact, the response could easily have been foreseen. “Prime” has no fixed meaning – which is to say, everyone knows it relates to some murky, manosphere combo of fertility, beauty and hip-to-waist ratio, but there will always be some dude with the brass neck to argue that what he is really talking about is competence or self-assurance. Like all bigoted arguments everywhere, it makes its point – that it is OK to judge a woman professionally by whether or not you like looking at her – through the back door of bad faith.
I remember when that argument used to come in through the front door: when it was routine to explain, say, Elizabeth I’s late-career challenges with the fact that she was no longer hot by 1601. Her inner circle didn’t fancy her any more (did you know the arsenic face-cream had eaten through her teeth? Of course you did! That’s the main thing we all knew) and so what else is a reasonable Essex to do but revolt? Exactly the same razor-sharp analysis was deployed to explain the demise of Margaret Thatcher. In my life, these two events – having to know about the Virgin Queen, watching the fall of the Iron Lady – coincided, so 1990 was a real eye-opener for me. I discovered just how many people who thought they were serious people in the world couldn’t make any adjudication on a woman in the public sphere beyond whether or not they would hypothetically bang her.
There is a companion idea to the concept of a woman’s prime, which is that of knowing you are past it – ageing gracefully. It’s basically a way of enforcing obsolescence via rules on the age at which at woman should stop wearing, saying, doing or drinking certain things, in the interests of her dignity. Over the age of 20, she shouldn’t get falling-over drunk; over 30, she shouldn’t wear miniskirts or sleep around; over 40, no more spaghetti straps or, for that matter, spaghetti. That persisted well into the 2010s, when it was destroyed by a single humorist, Molly Hodgdon, who produced a list of 20 things No Woman Should Wear Over 30, which included “necklace made of human ears” and “police uniform that you stole from a police officer”.
I enjoyed Don Lemon’s moment so much that I didn’t want it to end, so I did Google it, but the results were inconclusive, which is to say, there’s a fella on Quora who thinks his wife is in her prime and she’s 37, and nobody else is sure. If you Google it today, of course, all you will find is the magnificent Yeoh.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
