I FELT SOME sympathy for Sharon Stone this week, as much as one can muster for a woman currently touring European capitals in a Gulfstream IV private jet with a retinue of nine. To promote Basic Instinct 2 at the age of 48, she gamely put on her shortie fur coat and kinky boots to titillate male journalists with the notion — as in her famous leg-crossing screen role — that she might not be wearing panties.

This is the woman who, in a Hollywood that demands actresses are publicist-tamed, pleasure models, once quipped that “a vagina and an attitude” were a deadly combination and who slapped the director of the first Basic Instinct when he’d covertly trained a camera up her crotch.

So it was dismaying to see her trading once more on her tumpsy instead of her brains and her bad, brilliant mouth. Especially when she came out with the self-serving spiel that women over 40 are still sexy, still hot, still up-for-it 24/7 as much as any nubile young thing “but in a different and alluring way.”

Of course La Stone is being well- remunerated — $14 million for wielding her icepick once more — to buff and diet and splice her body. Likewise Teri Hatcher, from Desperate Housewives, seen jogging like some clockwork skeleton; Demi Moore spending £250,000 on a virtual surgical retread; and a muscle-bound Madonna have huge incentives to remain eternally 10lb underweight and cut a youthful shape on screen. Who cares that in real life their thinness doesn’t look lithe and youthful but scraggy, miserable and unwell?

It is the job of celebrities to suffer for our amusement. Shed not a tear. But this week I watched a 40-year-old British woman have the new “lunch-break facelift”, in which lengths of surgical barbed wire are inserted around the hair-line to hoik up those Deputy Dawg jowls, all in the time it takes to buy a sandwich in Pret. Such progress! The woman concerned, looked, ooh, maybe 37 once all the swelling had gone down.

Telling women over 40 that they can and must compete with young, beautiful girls will make no one but plastic surgeons happy. What is the point in entering a contest that they can so rarely win?

The great pleasure of being older is no longer feeling compelled to parade your flesh. A few years back at the Baftas, I felt a sudden flash of sympathy for the exquisite young starlets, nervous in their near-nakedness, trying not to unstick their tit-tape, heads swivelling constantly around the room to see if they were being admired. Then in the loos I came across Jerry Hall and her model daughter Elizabeth together at the mirror: imagine pushing 50 and still being evaluated by your body, skin and hair with such fresh loveliness always by your side. Women despair of sexual invisibility after 40 but there is some relief in no longer flogging your horseflesh.

As I lunched with a distinguished publisher this week, she threw back her head and let out the filthiest laugh. “Young women today are so stupid!” she cried. “They really do think it is all about dressing sexily.”

We were discussing today’s twentysomethings who spend more time and money on personal grooming than any generation since the pre- feminist 1950s. Except this lot have, despite their superior qualifications and huge sense of entitlement, been inveigled by lad mags and music videos to spend half their salary trying to resemble ten-dollar whores. Why would we ever envy or strive to emulate them?

But perhaps if we feign youth we will never have to accept our own frail mortality. A friend, aged 43, went to the doctor complaining she was always tired. “You are just getting older,” he told her simply, which came as both a shock and a relief. And when I was discussing with my orthopaedic surgeon whether I should have my cruciate ligament reconstructed, he looked at my date of birth and frowned. “Well, at your age some people don ’t bother, they just slow down, decide to be less active.” Yet without the operation I couldn’t even risk playing Frisbee on a beach. So I was supposed to endure — at 41 — not a slowed-down life, but one that would virtually stop?

Stone remarks that Europe values women over 40, while America denigrates them. But here too the pressure to resist age, to deny we are getting older, to reside forever in some cartoony, perpetual kidulthood, gets ever stronger. But I like the way women grow older.

Age seems to have a narrowing effect on men: they grow ever more introspective and fixed in their routines, they neglect friendships and balk at change. (Until they explode with mid-life angst.) But my women friends, once free of very young children, resume their questing curiosity about the world, crave change and new experiences. And people who have created life and — most likely — dealt with death seldom lack in strength and insight.

The real shame is not that older women are not regarded as sexpots, but that they are seldom allowed to enrich the professions and companies that they left to raise kids. It’s time to stop fighting gravity and embrace gravitas, to take our eyes off the magnifying mirror and look back into the world.

• FILM CRITICS have not been permitted to see the Pink Panther remake starring Steve Martin because MGM knew it would only merit poisonous reviews. I had the misfortune to see it in Los Angeles. And it truly is the lamest, most toe-curling waste of $80 million (it was rewritten, reshot, then the studio fiddled around with it for two years) imaginable. In fact it’s the worst movie since . . . well, since The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

  In fact I propose a boycott from now on all remakes and TV series spin-offs. The Stepford Wives, a saccharine new version of Neil Simon’s Goodbye Girl, The Italian Job, Starsky and Hutch, Bewitched, Alfie . . . each was an insult to its original. Now the studios are going to defile the wonderful Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid by recasting it with this year’s hunks.

  In LA no one preserves old houses: they just rip them down and build afresh. Likewise Hollywood has no respect for its history, only tomorrow’s takings. the studios know that re- makes cynically interplay nostalgia with a craving for the new. The only way to stop this is to stay at home, order pizza and get in a classic DVD.

  janice.turner@thetimes.co.uk
  
  Join the Debate
  Send your e-mails via debate@thetimes.co.uk=

Times Recommends

• It’s the beginning of the affair
• Afghanistan: still a price worth paying
• Heroes of the downtrodden