In Praise of Older Women II

You want to see a No. 16 seed beat a No. 1? Check out Esquire magazine’s March Madness Sexiest Woman Alive bracket and vote for the 64-year-old.

"CINDERELLA HELEN MIRREN TALKS MEGAN FOX UPSET" says the headline suggesting that it's an upset when men prefer a 64-year-old to the star (human) bod of the Transformers franchise. In Esquire’s bracket, Mirren is a No. 16 to Fox’s No. 1 seed. In the NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournament, a sixteen has never beaten a one. But Dame Mirren has been kicking Megan’s tattooed 22-year-old backside.

Said Dame Mirren to Esquire when she heard the news: “I am gobsmacked.”

“Personally,” Esquire quotes her as saying, “I think Ms. Fox is one of the smartest, coolest, and sexiest creatures in the Western Hemisphere.”

I’m not sure when Mirren can be declared the winner and move onto the second round. Esquire first reported the upset days ago, but said Fox was closing the gap. At that point, it was Mirren, 61 to 39 percent. The last time I voted (for Mirren, naturally – read my old post about my boyhood crush), the gap had closed to 54-46. Maybe that’s because Fox mentioned the voting on her Twitter feed. Does Helen Mirren even have a Twitter feed?

I don’t know what explains Helen Mirren standing tall in a sexiest-woman-alive-death-match with one of the reigning teenage-boy poster girls. But I’m glad for it. Let’s face it: The world is lousy with Megan Foxes, and next week there will be dozens more and we’ll have forgotten a thousand others, but there has really been only one Helen Mirren. She’s smart, talented, witty, and, as Esquire notes, a bombshell. She’s also proving that when a woman enjoys a bounty of the virtues that combine to describe sexy, one of them need not be youth.