"I’ve been thinking about aging a lot lately because of Keanu Reeves and his rumored girlfriend, who is 46 and has gray hair."

"She’s gorgeous, of course, but the fact that she doesn’t dye her hair has caused an absolute cataclysm online. Everyone’s been congratulating Keanu on his age-appropriate date, — only nine years younger than him! So different from Leonardo DiCaprio! Some people have also confused her for Helen Mirren, which is somewhat reasonable because they do look alike, but also horrifying because Helen Mirren is 74. This supports my long-standing theory, developed the minute I turned 35, that people under the age of 35 think of all people over the age of 35 as 'old.' Once someone has crossed that barrier, it doesn’t matter if she’s 46 or 74 — the point is that she is not young.... I wish this were not the case, but I’m a little freaked out about turning 39. I liked being 35, right in the middle. Because let’s be honest — what we’re talking about, when we’re talking about women and aging, is losing status. Just by staying alive over the next decades, just by not dying, my value is going to drop. What a raw deal! It’s going to happen to me, and if you’re a woman, it’s going to happen to you, and it already happened to Alexandra Grant, which is why we’re all so proud of Keanu, a man with so much status, for allegedly dating her anyway."

From "Keanu Reeves’s Lady Friend Has Given Me the Courage to Turn 40" by Izzy Ginspan — which is a fantastic name for a humorist — in New York Magazine.

In a far less comic mode but on the same subject enough to keep me from making a separate post, here's Francine Prose, the 72-year-old novelist, in "Cruel jokes about the old are everywhere. When will we face our ageism epidemic?/We tolerate mockery of the elderly that we’d never allow if it targeted another group. But we’ll all be old one day" (at The Guardian):

It’s unsurprising that animosity toward the elderly has been profitably commodified... [T]he phrase “OK Boomer” is “Generations Z’s ... retort to the problem of older people who just don’t get it.” OK Boomer now appears on phone cases, stickers, pins, and sweatshirts and on a range of products that say, “OK boomer, have a terrible day.” “‘If they do take it personally’,” according to one 17-year-old quoted in the piece, “‘it just further proves that they take everything we do as offensive.’” And yet one wonders if the public would be quite so amused by a logo that said: “OK Jews, have a terrible day.” Given the losses and infirmities that so often accompany age, don’t the elderly have enough bad days without being told to have more?

The accepted explanation and justification for all this is that the old have ruined things for the young... [but] I think that the animosity toward the old is less economic than existential, less political than primal, less about student debt than about fear of one’s own ageing.... What’s striking is that the prejudice against the elderly is the only bigotry directed at the inevitable future of the bigot. Few misogynists, I imagine, fear that they eventually will turn into women, nor do racists worry that the passing decades will radically alter their ethnicity and the color of their skin. But the young will get old, if they’re lucky....

Maybe we can talk the young out of their mockery and aversion by telling them they're attacking their own future selves and magnifying their own fear of aging. I would add that we Boomers in our youth were very cruel to those who were older. We had the slogan "Never trust anyone over 30." Confront the young of today with the idea that they're acting like we did in our time. If you don't like what we are, you'd better work on being something else. And that goes right along with the cancel-culture fastidiousness about any mockery or aversion to any traditionally discriminated against group. Be that, kids, and manifest nothing but the celebration of diversity that includes the old people. OK, Zoomer?