I know you're joking, but it's women that get the short end of the stick in media.
Men are (within reason) considered handsome in media even in old age. Wrinkles and gray hair can be seen as sexy (again, within reason), but only in men.
Women are discarded or relegated to sexless granny roles (except maybe for comedic purposes, where sexuality is the butt of a joke). Actresses are replaced by younger women because they are not sexy enough even when their male equivalents aren't (looking at you, Top Gun: Maverick).
I'm not saying there aren't exceptions in particular movies that deal with this topic; I'm talking about the general trend.
When you ask men who they are attracted to, at least on the surface, it’s always young women. I’m pretty sure the OkCupid stats showed that girls age 20 give or take were peak attractiveness. Reality is of course that guys will “work for food” or attention.
Women are different. It ranges — alot, and is more about EQ and scarcity. If you have a moderate baseline level of physical attractiveness, moderately fit (Jon two miles let’s say), not an asshole, and not living with mom, a 40-60 year old guy is a hot commodity.
If you’ve never stumbled across the older OkCupid blog posts or Christian Rudder’s book (Dataclysm[1]) then I can’t recommend them enough. Super interesting content delivered by a smart and engaging writer
Agreed, but once you reach 60 (like Cruise and McGillis) you're well beyond the forces of natural selection and into the unnatural realm that our longer lives have granted us. Both of these actors are outcompeted in real life by younger people (sex/reproduction wise) yet one of them is still able to secure billing in "sexy roles" and the other isn't... and this is just one example.
This could be natural selection acting against us, but since modern society is artificial anyway, why not make an effort to combat it?
> you're well beyond the forces of natural selection
Are you? By all appearances this is a direct result of it. Visual indicators of age haven't been selected against in and of themselves as strongly with regards to men but a great many related things have been.
Arguably your specific example might constitute an edge case that historically didn't occur with enough frequency to be selected against. Seems like little more than a curiosity to me.
Men season, while women age - The media's portrayal of desirability of old people is a reflection of societal preferences, not the other way around.
Men become wiser, skilled, kinder, more patient and often better providers. Women tend to become argumentative, quarrelsome, bitter (especially those who date often) and rewarded for it. They also tend to dissociate love from sex and manipulate one for the other.
There would appear to be two poles of explanation - that either the media is reflecting desires and not influencing it, or that the media is influencing desires and not reflecting them - or somewhere in-between.
The reflection of biological reality appears easier to justify: that men remain fertile for longer, that the attractive qualities that women care about most (e.g. wealth and personality) tend to improve with age; and that a women's attractiveness is most tied to her skin, which we all know shows aging the most on the body, and is a sign of her reproductive health or ability.
I'm not sure what the argument for the media being able to influence males to the extent suggested would be? Older men were marrying younger women before the printing press, so where did this pressure originate? And what is its mechanism of action?
I'm not saying media is influencing this; this preference clearly showed before media! The media here clearly reflects a preexisting preference, but in my opinion, it also makes the world worse for old people, especially women and actresses.
I'm saying media could be changed from this tendency, since this preference is less relevant in modern society and it hurts actresses. Media is a human construct that can be adapted to new needs, it's not a tool of natural selection!
Changing media wouldn't change the sexual preferences of men, and nowhere am I arguing this. It's like inclusivity in media -- is it ever going to eradicate racism? No, but it will make the world a tiny bit fairer.
I agree that falling back on "it's natural" can be a poor excuse, mainly because humans have the power and intellect (maybe not intelligence, but I digress) to change even what is considered nature, but I'm also not for social engineering, and I've seen such a wild increase in social engineering in media over the past 15, maybe 20 years, that I'd err on the naturalistic side now.
With this specific example, if McGillis had spent as much time and money and effort on appearing young and attractive as Tom Cruise has, maybe she would have been back in her role as well.
The main problem is that evolution is just not a thing at our modern civilizational time scale.
And I don’t see any problems with late-life reproduction, assuming we can make it reliable and healthy. If anything, some countries desperately need it.
Evolution is really slow on average, but locally it moves quite quickly and probably explains the large variation between members of a species.
Add strong selective pressure to that high local speed and you can change a good part of the genotype within a couple of generations. See: animal husbandry. You can breed a new race of dog within 5-10 generations.
Ethics aside we could probably breed people who can sniff out Alzheimer's in less than 250 years.
Our current late reproduction style will very likely influence future generations health at older ages.
It's probably a wash. Sure people are reproducing later, but it's also more likely that they have recieved some major medical intervention to allow them to make it to that stage. For example, it could be stuff like freezing eggs before starting chemo.
I don't dispute any of your points in general. But at the same time, it brings a nostalgic smile to my face to envision starting a 250-year project in 2025.
Also the moths that "changed" from white to black during and because of the industrial revolution. That was quick, and to me, the best example of how it all works.
With our modern health systems we are pretty much a huge evolutionary blind spot ourselves. Many illnesses that would be filtered out because the carrier wouldn't survive, are now trivial. And on the journey hand we can screen for known illnesses.
I think we are already post evolutionary, or control it ourselves. Not a big issue either IMO, it's totally ok that this is happening.
We are definitely not post-evolutionary; the selection pressures have simply changed. Before industrialization the big two were starvation and infectious disease. Now? Well, it's anybody's guess decade to decade. Certainly sexual selection is still with us.