Generally speaking, one should resist feminist justifications that begin and/or end with the fact of five millennia of the patriarchy being a good enough reason for anything. Sure, it’s true, but at the same time, it’s a little bit too convenient, isn’t it?
So Mariella Frostrup has pointed out – rightly, I think – that female critics can get away with objectifying male actors in a way that male critics can no longer do to female ones. Yet she’s wrong that this is a problem or double standard, for reasons other than, though not unrelated to, those pesky five millennia.
First, men are never framed as the gatekeepers to sex who merely put up with it in order to control or appease insatiable women: nowhere, in no culture, anywhere. Whereas women are routinely portrayed that way, and it’s not a long journey from “women don’t enjoy sex” to “women use sex manipulatively”, not long after which, you’re in Jordan Peterson territory of whether or not the world would be better if women were allocated to men, having no sexual agency of our own. Anything you can do to resist this, up to and including passing remark on Aidan Turner’s torso (though I’m more of a ginger-wildling-from-Game-of-Thrones woman, myself), you ought to do. You owe it to the sisterhood, and to your daughters, to do it.
Specific to older women is a top note of disgust – not that our sexual desire is inauthentic or confected, but that it is inherently repellent for us to desire anyone, which is extraordinarily unjust, given how rarely we leverage our wisdom or power to enforce our desire. You don’t find many middle-aged women spontaneously appearing in their dressing gowns before unsuspecting ingenus. In a way, a woman on Front Row feting the beauty of the cast of Poldark is acting as a good role model to any proto-Weinstein: this is how to appreciate the physical attributes of someone else, someone unattainable, without exploiting or violating them. You should do all this in the knowledge that Aidan Turner most probably doesn’t mind, though the Ginger might have preferred it if I’d looked up his name.