So you guys might have heard the news that Hollywood superstar Renee Zellweger is in town. Bridget Jones Number four has just been released on the weekend, and I was lucky enough to be able to go to the premiere.
You were flashing yourself on the red carpet.
That's right, flashmounds on the red car but in true Bridget Jones style. Like I felt like that was an ode to Bridget Jones.
I didn't even think of that. You embodied it, Yeah.
I really did. They didn't write that. They just wrote that I flash Mandy's malfunctioned irrelevant. So I want to talk about the movie itself. I know I mentioned yesterday if you were listening, that I just loved it. It was about grief and I had all these beautiful aspects to it. But there was a part of the movie that I particularly resonated with. Bridget Jones. In this movie is an older woman that gets into a very loving sexual relationship with quite a younger man, like I'm talking Handalus,
pretty big age gap. It's about twenty years. Actually, it's also Leo Woodhall, So who could blame her? Anyone is going for Leo Woodhall. I don't care what age you are.
I'm so sorry this has just become the Leo Woodall fan show. Like everyone's like, why are you still talk talking about him? It's my fault, Well, Bridget and.
The reason that's all you are. Bridget Jones's author Helen Fielding has come out and said that this was very intentional. She really wanted to smash the idea that women have this sexual cell by date. Hollywood has always made us believe that you get to an age and you're no longer desirable, You no longer want to have those relationships. It's always been okay for men, especially in Hollywood, to date women ten, twenty, thirty, forty years younger than them, and no one bats an eyelid.
I mean, look at Leo DiCaprio, for example. The age of his girlfriends have never changed. I'm pretty sure he was dating twenty year olds when we were all twenty. Is he like late forties now? I don't even know he's fifty.
He's just fifty and he's still dating twenty year old's twenty five?
Nothing. Yeah, but well, actually I have a few things against it, but like you know, well people.
Have started to talk about that, but this whole narrative has been flipped on its head, and we've seen quite a few movies in the last year where they've had relationships between the old women and the younger men, like Anne Hathaway did a movie earlier this year as well, where she was in a relationship with a guy in his twenties. I think it's really cool personally because I've always dated younger, and I've always made jokes about the fact that I'm a cougar. Now I'm not dating twenty
years younger. Mine are like between five seven eight years, but eight years has been my man.
You're absolute Max, Ye, okay, what I would do.
Well, I'm getting married now, but my ex was seven years younger than me, and I just remember, I remember the feelings surrounding that from other people, but also the feelings that I had myself. It didn't bother me, but I felt the judgment from other people because when we started dating, I was in my thirties and he was still twenty five, which is very young.
It's interesting to me because I know that I have a bias from years of watching you know, just men who are older date younger women, and women always date older men. I personally have never dated anybody that's like significantly younger than me. Funnily enough, my husband is actually the youngest man I've ever dated, and he's only a year and a half younger than me. But I've always thought, and this is actually kind of sad, I've always thought,
why would someone younger than me? Like, why would a younger man want to be with me when he could be with a twenty year old?
You know?
I mean like like I put the expiration on myself, and I know that that is so backwards and it's almost the antithesis of this, but it shows the conditioning. Like I've never looked at a forty year old man and being like, God, what would a thirty year old see in you? I've always just thought that was completely statistically normal, Whereas, like for me, as someone who is surging towards my forties, if I was single, I would genuinely think, what would a twenty nine year old man
see in me? Do you know what I mean?
Like?
And I know that that shouldn't be the case, and I love that there are movies that are platform being the alternate, but I do think that women face so much more judgment for dating younger men than what men do. It's like, I mean, I know, I don't think it. It's absolutely just fact.
Of course they do, which is why it's so important that these movies are flipping that narrative on his head. It sounds so cliche, but I truly believe that age is just a number. It depends on what the person is. What does that person bring into the relationship, what are they offering, how do they act, their emotional maturity, their life experience. And you know, the twenty five year old that I was dating was so worldly and so mature, like the position that he was in, what he did,
what he brought our relationship was amazing. I didn't look at him like he was younger. I think we forget and we put the limitations on ourselves. Yes, society does. But what you said is true, Laura, Like we say it to ourselves.
Yeah, we say it to ourselves though, because it's been said so much. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm happily married. I don't not running out there wanting to date a twenty year old BA. But I guess what I mean by this is when I say, like I have this judgment about myself or about you know, it's a fleeting thought when I do see these age disparity in relationships.
But the thing is is, like, all that does is it reinforces that women must have an expiration date, that they're not as valuable as they get older as what men are. Because men retain value, they can still date down. But the older you get as a woman, then the expectation is that you don't. And that's something that needs to be looked at for sure.
Except it's actually perfect because men's sexual peak is in their twenties and women's sexual peaks they're not peaking until mid to late thirties, even early forties some women. So that's really ideal for a younger man that's in his peak, that wants someone that's like thriving experience, knows what they want. Brittany's selling it.
She's like, all the younger men slide into my note. You're happily engaged.
Now, No, I'm fine, But imagine how how amazing it would be to be Rene Zelwiga when the author and the director brings this to you, right, and they're like, hey, we're going to set you up with a man in his twenties.
Take your peak.
What actor do you want, And you get to like look around Hollywood and be like.
Oh my god, I guess begin what times are changing? They really are? Are they?
Women are in control