No matter what the glossy magazines tell you, there’s really no great mystery to looking like Kylie Minogue does at 50. Any woman could mark her half century by confidently posing naked with a guitar – provided of course that she starts out by looking at 25 like Kylie looked at 25. All she’d have to do then is spend the next quarter of a century on a diet or in the gym, while conscientiously avoiding the ageing effects of sun, wine and late nights.
Then there’s the cost of a really good stylist and maybe a little discreet extra help; the equally ageless Elizabeth Hurley, currently camping it up wildly on the cover of Grazia magazine in some sort of black crocodile-effect dungarees and a leather cap at the age of 52, certainly admits to a bit of Botox. The finishing touch is a few hours of professional hair, makeup and lighting, et voilà!
And if this is not remotely how most women live, then it’s not how most women need to live, either. The vast majority of us don’t work in the music industry, or as actors with a sideline in selling swimwear, or in the handful of rarefied industries where getting hired still depends on never getting visibly older. There is no earthly need for most women to look like this in middle age. But to operate as both these women do – well, that might be a professional knack worth having.
Between them they’ve survived breast cancer (Minogue) and single motherhood followed by very public demands for a paternity test (Hurley) plus various more conventional ups and downs. Yet here they still are, 50 not out: cheerily reinvented for the umpteenth time, still gamely open to the new, and strikingly capable of chatting away to a Grazia audience half their age without falling foul of the generation gap.
Too many of us mere mortals hit the half century not set in our ways, exactly, but more resistant to changing them than we used to be. Middle age can bring with it a kind of mental calcification, a creeping defensiveness against new, challenging ideas – plus a reluctance to consider whether beliefs that served us perfectly well for decades might have run their course. Much like leather trousers, some social or political trends just don’t seem worth the effort of wrestling with any more.
It’s obviously not inevitable, or universal. Some people stay intellectually curious and open-minded well into retirement, while others are reactionaries from the cradle. But there comes a time for many of us when constantly updating one’s thinking goes much the same way as updating wardrobes and playlists; the stage a friend refers to as Peak New Ideas.
It’s clearly audible in older men irritated by the #MeToo movement – as the novelist Ian McEwan complained this week about the “mob” in full cry after Harvey Weinstein. It hovered too in the background of John Humphrys’ interview this week on Radio 4’s Today programme with the head of Rwanda’s development board, on her decision to advertise her country as a tourist destination on Premier League players’ shirts. It didn’t matter how often she told an incredulous Humphrys that tourism now raised millions for Rwanda, thanks to people’s desire to see gorillas in the wild, or that Rwanda had sharply reduced its reliance on the British aid. Rapidly growing African economies are still seen through a lens of Live Aid and war zones, ideas in some cases decades out of date.
But you hear echoes of Peak New Ideas in older women too, bridling at younger feminists and their supposedly naive or frivolous preoccupations. You hear it in middle-aged liberals, reacting badly to having their privilege challenged, or to being asked to use language that seems more sensitive, or to millennials – even though a decade ago they’d have been the ones sanctimoniously correcting their own elders talked.
You hear it sometimes in politics too, especially from people advocating centrist comebacks led by politicians whose heyday was 20 years ago. It’s true that the pendulum generally swings back, and moderate consensus politics will make a triumphant return one day; but it almost certainly won’t look or feel the same as it did last time around.
And to be brutally honest, these days I sometimes hear it in myself. The benefit of age is experience, having seen how this or that story usually ends. But just occasionally that experience can get in the way, blinding us to the fact that history doesn’t always repeat itself, or not without a twist. At the very least, it’s dangerous never to ask yourself: “What if … ?”
There’s a fine line between thinking young and sounding ridiculous, and risking becoming intellectual mutton dressed as lamb. But once workplace culture is routinely being set by people half your age, it’s professionally dangerous to fall too far behind. The reverse mentoring schemes adopted by some employers, in which grizzled senior staff are given insights by twentysomethings into how younger people think and behave, are a tactful recognition of that risk.
For if #MeToo has brought down monsters, on its fringes it has also caught out older men whose chief mistake was simply not to realise how far they have fallen out of step with the times; men such as Richard Ned Lebow, a 76-year-old professor of political theory who recently found himself in trouble at an academic conference after cracking a joke in a lift about stopping at the ladies’ lingerie department. It would have been fine a generation ago; it isn’t necessarily fine now. And no amount of railing against the tide of third-wave feminism will change that.
All of which means that older people who want to remain at the top of their professional game for longer will have to stay ideologically flexible, to watch their kneejerk assumptions as hawkishly as ageing actors study their faces in the mirror. It’s hard work, obviously. But it’s a damn sight more fun than a lifetime of living on salad and Botox.
• Gaby Hinsliff is a regular Guardian contributor