Older Women

When I was thirteen or fourteen I was completely hung up on my friend Betty’s mom. Her name was Karin, though I had to call her Mrs. Ziegler because that’s what you did. She had long black hair, this sharp face, full lips, big breasts, pale blue eyes—and I couldn’t look at her without this weird collision of desire and envy just running through me. At night I’d lie in bed and daydream about the three of us together—me, Betty, her—going on vacation, lying under palm trees on some beach, all tangled up. Completely ridiculous. Nothing was ever going to happen.

But something did. I developed a taste for older women. The kind who’ve lived long enough to know what they’re doing but somehow stayed young in their heads. They can catch you completely off guard.

Sabia Boulahrouz is someone you probably recognize from the tabloids—modeled, dated Rafael van der Vaart, all that drama with Sylvie Meis. She’s forty and she just did a Playboy shoot. Which on its own is fine. But the fact that she’s forty, that she just went ahead and did it anyway—that’s what got to me.

She talked about the shoot in an interview. Said she sucked in her stomach, tried not to look tense in front of the camera. She knew there’d be backlash, especially from people in her culture who wouldn’t understand. But she was raised in Germany, feels German, and she said she’s comfortable with what she did. She’d do it again.

That’s the whole thing. Not the photos themselves, though obviously I looked. It’s that she knows what she wants and doesn’t waste any energy on doubt. That’s exactly what pulled me in with Karin all those years ago. It’s not about being young. It’s about someone who’s lived long enough to know the difference between what she’s supposed to want and what she actually wants, and then she just goes for it.