OH MY GOD. CHER, 76, IS GOING OUT WITH A BLOKE 40 YEARS YOUNGER THAN HER. He’s the “36-year-old music producer Alexander Edwards,” according to all newspapers. Never heard of him. But then, so what? I’m far nearer to Cher’s age than his. And guess what? I don’t care because it’s none of my business. Looking at social media and certain on-line red tops, I wondering whether I am the only one.
I’m not sure why people have a view on who Cher knocks about with or why they concern themselves with the various surgeries she has had over the years. Yet they do. And that to your average Mail or Sun reader, tittle-tattle is everything. With the case of the latter, this is very odd indeed.
The Sun’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, has a predilection for younger women. For example, his last two wives were Wendy Deng and Jerry Hall, who are respectively 37 and 25 years younger than him. Curiously, his tawdry ‘newspaper’ found nothing unusual about this, and quite right too, but one might hazard a guess that Cher might not be quite so absent from its pages. The Mail refers to Mr Edwards as a “toy boy” which is common language for any woman who gets into a relationship with a man who is younger than her, but oddly Murdoch’s wives were never “toy girls” because in the male dominated world of the gutter press, the term doesn’t exist.
I don’t suppose that if my blog was read by millions of people, rather than my rather lonely loyal reader, I’d be helping much by commenting on something people really shouldn’t be commenting on but I’m calling this out for what it is: ageism and misogyny.
