Is It Beyond the Pale to Reference a Female Celebrity’s Age?

It’s often said that you should never ask a man his weight, a woman her age, or a nonbinary person some secret third thing (okay, I’m paraphrasing). But as we barrel toward 2025, is it really still taboo to acknowledge that womenâ€"even women in the public eyeâ€"are aging human mammals? That’s the question that was raised this week when Jennifer Lopez sat down with Variety’s senior awards editor, Clayton Davis, to promote her new film, Unstoppable.

When conversation turned to the upcoming 30th anniversary of Selena, Lopez’s Selena Quintanilla biopic from 1997, Davis remarked, “You’ll be 60 by then…[which is] getting up there.” While Lopez, who is 55, didn’t seem perturbed by the comment, referring to it as “funny” and taking a moment to thank her fans for their support since the 1990s, one audience member could be heard asking, “Did he really just say that?”

While it’s not considered good manners to call out a person’s age, the fact is that Lopez is in her mid-50s, and she’s stacked her long career with a genuinely wild number of movies, albums, tours, films, Super Bowl halftime performances, and other projects. On top of all that, she’s a mother of two who recently navigated a very public divorce. So what are the odds that she would somehow remain permanently young? She’s already got the luminous skin of a 20-something, so why shouldn’t she celebrate her actual age?

At the end of the day, I doubt there’s anything Lopez cares less about than whether people know how old she is, but in general I think we should all be a bit less shy about discussing female celebrities’ ages. After all, does Holland Taylor lose any power when you learn that she’s over 80? Absolutely not; she’s got a mid-40s girlfriend, a busy live-theater schedule, and dance battles to occupy her, so we can safely assume she’s sitting pretty. And if Al Pacino and his octogenarian friends can have new babies in their 80s, what’s wrong with women in their 50s and 60s claiming a little space for their real ages in the cultural discourse?