Jane Fonda Quotes

Most women are not as young as they are painted.

I mention my age because I find people in this country - women, not men, of course - women are so troubled by their age. There's a culture of youth, and it's a phony culture.

Men are allowed to get older and women are not.

Ageism works in both directions. As a teenager in the public eye, people would talk condescendingly to me. When you get older there's this feeling that you have to start carving up your face and body. Right now I'm in the middle ground - I think women in their thirties are taken seriously.

Women must be freed from the idea that they always have to stay young and that they must disfigure themselves at a certain age.

There's a lot of criticism on how an actress is aging. Why do we do that with women? I work with a lot of men who take terrible care of themselves - they drink too much, or they eat too much. We need to allow women to age.

The only problem is, that the musicians, the guys, their careers can go from the time they're 18 'till they're 50 years old and when they get wrinkles, they're 'character lines.' But when girls get 'em, they're wrinkles!

I think there's always the whole expectation that men can age and look fine, and girls have to be all conscious. But guys can also keep their skin intact.

Women are not forgiven for aging.

It's unfortunate that we live in such a panicked, dysmorphic society where women don't even give themselves a chance to see what they'll look like as older persons. I want to have some idea of what I'll look like before I start cleaning the slates.

For women in my family, in Korean culture, women are really valued in their youth, and then when they get older, it's like they almost become irrelevant.

We all get old, but I always say the skinny, pretty girls will be screwed.

It's more acceptable for guys to get old and craggy and become wonderful character actors as they get older, but women aren't allowed to get old and craggy in the same way.

Yes and our obsession with youth in our culture and how we, women lie about their age after 35 obsessively and no one wants to let anyone know they're getting older, et cetera.

A political woman loses her beauty within a year.

The Western man declares that in order to be beautiful, a woman must look 14 years old. If she dares to look 50, or worse, 60, she is beyond the pale. By putting the spotlight on the female child and framing her as the ideal of beauty, he condemns the mature woman to invisibility.

Something happened culturally: No one is supposed to age past 45 - sartorially, cosmetically, attitudinally.

Anyone who's had a finger pointed at them and been told they're pretty or attractive, there's a power that comes with that. But beauty for a woman becomes cumbersome because it's always being equated with youth.

Let's face it: There used to be something tragic about even the most beautiful forty-two-year-old woman. With half her life still ahead of her, she was deemed to be at the end of something--namely, everything society valued in her, other than her success as a mother.

Our public culture is one in which only the young and the beautiful will succeed. If you're forty, you're finished.

I really don't think you need to be 40 and have three kids and have a body of an 18-year-old.

Women are beautiful when they're young, and not after. Men can still preserve their sex appeal well into old age.... Some men can maintain, if they embrace it ... cragginess, weary masculinity. Women just get old and fat and wrinkly.

When you're playing a man, you can look tired and horrible and you still look okay. As a woman, if you're tired, it's terrible. It was such a luxury not having to worry about that.

I pointed out that men, society looks at aging men and say they get more distinguished; some say they get more handsome, more authoritative, and so forth. I said it's unfair. It's the way it works. It's sadly not that was the when women age. Sadly.

The world still wants to ask that a woman primarily be pretty and if she is not, the mob pouts and asks querulously, 'What else are women for?