Women Respond to 50-Year-Old Author Who Says Women His Age Are "Too Old" to Love
Updated Jan. 8 2019, 12:15 p.m. ET
50-year-old French author Yann Moix caused a bit of a stir online when he went in-depth about how the age of a woman disqualifies her as a potential love interest.
Apparently, he finds women 50 years old and over "too old to love." It went over about as well as you'd expect a comment like that would, especially considering that Moix is a learned man, who is 50 years old himself.
People on Twitter immediately eviscerated him for his comments and condemned the double-standard regarding gender and age that Moix not only fell victim to, but felt the need to perpetuate.
Before getting into all of those roasts, however, it's important to clarify just how freaking wrong Moix is. And I'm not trying to be all "woke" and "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" here.
Sure, taste accounts for a lot as to whether we find someone or something beautiful, but the examples I'm about to present were solely selected with Moix in mind. The man said that "the body of a 25-year-old woman is extraordinary. The body of a 50-year-old woman is not extraordinary at all."
I'm sorry to say Moix, old boy, but even if we're going by what you find "extraordinary," you're dead wrong.
That's Halle Berry at the Golden Globes. As of this writing, she's 52-years old. Sandra Bullock, if you can believe it, is 54 years old and I promise you she's in better shape and looks heaps better than Yann Moix, if you were to ask people to compare the two on the shallowest of levels. Catherine Zeta Jones will be 50 this year, Helen Mirren is 73 and is hot, Robin Wright, like Berry, is 52 years old and looks pretty darn "extraordinary." Oh, you guys ever hear of Nicole Kidman? Yep, 51 years old.
Maybe Moix's thinking, "Well those are actresses, they're not regular people!" Well, I'm sorry there, buckaroo, but there's some other, lesser-known women who are over 50 and look pretty darn extraordinary. Like Ernestine Shepherd, who's over 80 and has a better physique than most 20-year-olds.
There's also this 50- year-old mom who encounters awkward situation after awkward situation when she walks outside with her son: people constantly think she's his girlfriend.
I could go on and on providing examples why Moix has no idea what he's talking about, but I don't need to. Because there's plenty of other people on the internet who are already lambasting him for his comments and pointing out the hypocrisy of such an obvious double standard.
Several women also posted photos of themselves, letting Moix know that they had zero interested in dating him, so he shouldn't worry himself.
The author added that it's "sad and reductive" for him to be a "prisoner" of his own tastes, and that "it takes nothing away from a woman of 50 years that I don't want to sleep with her." He also said he's particularly fond of Asian women and almost exclusively dates them. That only rustled people's jimmies even further online, and genuinely worried others.
A number of French women spoke out against Moix's comments, like comedian Marina Fois, who is soon approaching her 49th birthday joked on Twitter: "More than 1 year and 14 days to sleep with #yannmoix #inchallah it is done."
Olivia Gregoire, an MP and spokeswoman for Macron's political party simply wrote: "Very classy Yann Moix. Very classy," while another comedian, Anne Roumanoff, wrote that there's more to romance than just a firm buttocks and that she hopes he one day finds happiness.
Moix is the winner of several literary prizes, and his only apology was the aforementioned "prisoner of my own tastes" comment. That's the thing about freedom of speech: you can have the freedom to say anything you want, and then people have the freedom to respond to it. Sorry, Moix, but you're wrong on this one. Take the L, and maybe re-evaluate some things about yourself. Because Halle Berry is objectively gorgeous.