Scruffy—I think it's pretty common for people to increasingly underestimate women's age as they get older. I have a lot of 40+ friends who are completely incapable of guessing a young woman's age, thinking that women who are clearly (to me) 25+ are under 18! I don't have a definite explanation for it, but I can offer a few theories. First, it's easier to guess someone's age when you possess familiarity by being a part of that age group yourself. Second, your relative perception of any given range of absolute time becomes smaller as you grow older. Five years is a quarter of your life when you're twenty, but only a tenth once you reach the age of fifty. When relatively short amounts of time start to lose meaning, it's no wonder that one's ability to guess age would similarly decline.
Anyway, I find the general topic of this thread quite interesting, despite being only in my 20s myself. And since you revived this thread, I will share below a discussion I had in the chatbox which I think has some relevance to this issue:
Quote:
"When we find beauty in a youthful person, it is because we glimpse the light of eternity shining in those features from a heavenly source beyond this world." [Quote from the documentary, Why Beauty Matters]
The context of the quote was a discussion of how observing beauty can take one of two paths: lust or love. Lust is a destructive process in which one person is used for the pleasure of another. The Platonic ideal of love, however, requires only admiration, as the individual is a source of spiritual inspiration.
It reminded me of Alizée because of Moi Lolita. In the story Lolita, the young girl is a source of lustful desire for the older man, who simply wishes to consume her (not in a literal sense).
However, someone else might look at the same person and have a very different experience. Instead, they admire the beauty of the individual in a purest sense of Platonic love. It is an act of giving, rather than taking away.
Alizée's early Lolita image played between those two dichotomies simultaneously.
The choice of which path one takes is left up to the observer. "C’est pas ma faute!"
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