1. young men have always been turned on by older women 2. the patriarchy has always benefited from convincing 40+ women we're invisible 3. we're not.

men in their 20s and 30s are dating more women in their 40s and 50s (and 60+) because there is nothing hotter than a woman who doesn't need to be perceived to know she's visible

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It’s Saturday night at eleven something PM and my friends and I are scream-singing George Michael on a dance floor in a cramped bar in K-town. It is the first night any of us have been out-out since the fires and it is pouring rain outside.

We are here to celebrate two fifty-something birthdays of two of the most iconic women I know and we are doing it with lyrics in our throats and drinks in our hands and the SICKEST FUCKING DANCE MOVES YOU’VE EVER SEEN.

I am on the younger side of the group at 43, most of us in our 50s and early 60s. We are by far the oldest women in the room.

And also the least invisible.

26 wishes, Chad.

But it isn’t just me who sees us this way. We all do. There is a confidence that is passed around between us in groups like the joints we used to hide from our parents. A collective battle cry that harmonizes when Heaven knows I was just a young boy/Didn't know what I wanted to be come-a-belting out our middle-aged mouths. Some of us are gray haired. Others of us botoxed. It doesn’t fucking matter because we’re all in our bodies — hotter than we’ve ever been before not because someone on the periphery of our lives thinks so but because we do.

The visibility thing is something I have been thinking a lot about lately. How the very idea of aged-out invisibility erases the way we gaze, not only at each other, but at OURSELVES. Eye-fucking strangers from across the bar — not for attention but for sport.

There is a difference between WANTING TO BE VISIBLE and KNOWING THAT YOU ARE.

There is a difference between wanting to be desired and DESIRING ONESELF.

And every time I read a sob story from a woman who feels invisible I want to shake her and remind her who the fuck she is. I want to remind her how to separate her church from her state. How to prioritize her desire over her desirability. How to walk into a room and take up space on the dance floor with a body that moves with a kind of experience impossible to emulate without a certain number of rings in the trunks of her thighs.

And that energy — feels like a drug. The knowing of self. The recognition of power, autonomy and the security of unadulterated love between girlfriends. Man as indulgence not necessity. Supporting role, sure, but main character? Nah.