Advice For "Aging Sex Kittens"

These aging stars need to give up on getting good parts already and break into clothing lines. Or that’s the party line, anyhow.

According to a piece in the Daily Beast, there’s no hope: if you’re a onetime sex symbol, you’re going to need alternate sources of income.

As PR veteran Michael Levine, who has represented Barbra Streisand and Michael Jackson, told The Daily Beast, “There is a very painful joke amongst elites in the entertainment industry, which says that as actors get older, they look like Sean Connery. The problem is that as women get older, they also tend to look like Sean Connery…It’s very painful,” Levine continued, “but you either have to make peace with it or continue to fight it for the rest of your life. It’s a brutal fact and it places pressure on you to act differently, if you want to remain relevant both economically and socially.”

What do the “elites” suggest these unfortunate Scotsmen do? Well, they don’t care, presumably, but some publicist recommends a “horizontally integrated economic model.” This means other lines of work. Like writing (Angela Bassett, Jamie Lee Curtis), K-Mart lines (Jaclyn Smith), jewelry or makeup (everyone else.) (Wineries aren’t mentioned, so maybe they’re just for aging men.) Ideally, the article cautions, it should involve something you actually like. But the important thing is to “brand” yourself. Needless to say, the same parameters don’t apply to male stars; a closer analogy would probably be athletes, who have a similar “window” in which to, say, become synonymous with a low-fat electric grill.

It’s good advice, probably, if one’s goal is to bank on fame to the utmost degree or stay in the public eye at all costs. And the article seems to assume people do. In Hollywood, it would seem, “aging gracefully” means patenting a skincare system. Or at least in the eyes of the elites. Interestingly enough, Brigitte Bardot — the progenitor of the term “sex kitten” — is not referenced here as a model. This is, presumably, not the sort of “branding” anyone has in mind.