Madonna is unlikely inspiration for 50-plus set (2)

——Forget scandals, many women see a fit, stylish, vigorous and successful icon

More power to her, says Lesley Jane Seymour, editor of More, a magazine for women over 40.

“So she’s had some work — I’ll take it,” says Seymour. “I want to know who her doctor is! It’s really hard to believe she’s 50. She looks 40. And she just keeps going at it, living life and loving life.”

To Seymour, Madonna’s not only an example to women on how to grow older — she’s a reflection of how, as a society, our perceptions of age have changed. Especially 50, which used to be seen as the beginning of a depressing decline, not a new chapter.

It starts with looking different. “Put a picture of a 50-year-old woman today next to one from my mother’s generation,” says Seymour, who recently passed the mark herself. “We look at least 10 to 15 years younger than they did.” She attributes it to exercise, better skin care, sun protection, less smoking, and generally a different standard of health and well-being.

“Also, 50 really is a new beginning for so many women,” says Seymour, who notes that life expectancy rates show the average U.S. woman has another 30 years to live past the half-century mark. “Many have accomplished a number of their goals already. Their children are getting older. For the first time they can really think about themselves, and ask: What do I want from life?”

Of course, sometimes they can’t get it. Women trying to return to the work force — or to progress within it — often find that advancing age is an obstacle. And in popular culture, age is still something we accept in our male icons much more easily than in our female ones. In movies, a recent exception was the “Sex and the City” film, which appealed to older women because of its portrayal of the late 40s and 50s as a still-sexy time of life.

Joanne Bamberger, a freelance writer and blogger in Washington, D.C., hasn’t turned 50 yet — she has two whole months to go. She’s ambivalent. But, she quips, “as the cliche goes, I guess it’s better than the alternative.”

“I just don’t feel like what 50 should feel like,” says Bamberger, who has an 8-year-old adopted daughter. “I remember my grandmother at 50. Her hair was completely white. My mother, too, was just at a very different place in her life than I am now.”

Some days Bamberger asks herself, “How did I get to be this age?” But mostly she appreciates the perspective that being older has given her. She says she feels more settled personally now than in her 30s, when she was struggling with whether to have kids, but less settled professionally, having left a full-time career as a lawyer to write and care for her daughter.

Bamberger has always admired Madonna, especially for her shrewd ability to adapt her image. “She’s done a remarkable job of marketing herself, and she’s always been able to reinvent herself,” says Bamberger.

So how does Madonna feel about the impending birthday? The pop star is not speaking publicly about it, says her longtime publicist, Liz Rosenberg. “I’m sure she’s happy to be an inspiration to women and men of any age,” Rosenberg wrote in an e-mail. But the birthday, she noted wryly, “is not quite the benchmark for her as it seems to be in the media, who have been talking about her 50th since she turned 40!”

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