Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer got married last Saturday night and in typical Hollywood fashion, everyone was reading and talking about it on Sunday morning. In typical internet fashion, amidst the many, many messages of congratulations to the newlywed couple from fans, two solid topics of debate emerged in the comments section of pretty much every single entertainment and celebrity blog that reported on the wedding news. Apparently people are gravely concerned about two things when it comes to the marriage of Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer--his age and her teeth.
Stephen Moyer is 40 years old and Anna Paquin is 28 years old. Yes, that is a 12-year age difference you just calculated there. This age difference caused quite a stir among commenters, who made many arguments about just how much older Moyer is than Paquin and how obviously this age difference means the end of days is approaching. I swear that if you did not just read the ages of these two people in the article above, who are very much fully-grown, responsible adults who just may love each other by the way, that you would swear a 60-year-old man just married his 15-year-old cousin. The speculation and downright disapproval of the marriage of these people based solely on the fact that Moyer is 12 years Paquin's senior caused a little bit of a stir in me, especially when I saw many people chalking their entire marriage up to Moyer having a mid-life crisis.
Ah, the mid-life crisis--a concept that is being used to illegitimize relationships far and wide! We have all seen American Beauty and we can all agree that it's a damn good movie, but I'm very sorry to go and break this obviously heart-wrenching news to you all, but not all middle-aged men quit their jobs to work at a fast food joint, buy an expensive car, smoke pot and lift weights all day and want to get their daughter's friends in bed as soon as they hit that certain age. Not all men ranging from 30 to 40 years old are merely looking around for a woman who is ten or more years younger than them to make them feel secure and fulfilled with themselves when they realize they're suddenly older. Just as it is unfair and very sexist to chalk up a woman being genuinely upset, irritable or angry to her having to be menstruating because she isn't behaving the way a docile Victorian lady would behave, the same can be said about blaming any erratic or "questionable" behavior or decision coming from a man over 30 on a mid-life crisis.
It is true that many people do have a "mid-life crisis" at some point in their lives, but rarely is it taken to the extreme that we see--from both the male and female roles--in American Beauty and there surely are a number of men who do troll for younger women in hopes of boosting up their own egos, just as there are a number of women who are attracted to older men in hopes of being taken care of in some form or another or because they have unresolved conflicts within themselves that lead them to seek the approval of people who just so happen to be older than them. At least that is what we hear from the psychology side of this type of argument. These circumstances exist; if they didn't, we wouldn't be able to debate about the intricacy of them and realize the need to evaluate a situation on a case-by-case basis instead of lumping every relationship that society has a problem with because of something as trivial as age into a bin clearly marked 'cliche.'
I think that the biggest problem I have when it comes to saying a man is with a woman a number of years younger than him because he is having a mid-life crisis is the fact that it is downright offensive to the woman he is in that relationship with. That woman could have just found the love of her life and by saying she is the product of a mid-life crisis illegitimizes her entire relationship and by extension, her feelings for that person. It's like going up to someone and saying "That person is only with you because they are crazy, but it won't last long because it's temporary insanity. Make sure you don't get too comfortable because you'll be well on your way out the door soon. You know, as soon as this man comes to his senses!" Yeah. That's pretty damn shitty if you ask me.
The other great, big topic of debate regarding Stephen Moyer and Anna Paquin getting married is, of course, Paquin's appearance; specifically, her teeth.
Anna Paquin has a gap in between her two front teeth. I had not noticed this until I saw several commenters all over the blogosphere make jokes about buying her rope as a wedding gift so she could floss her teeth with it and refer to her smile as being "scary", followed up by the explanation "a woman's smile should be beautiful, not scary."
The idea that all women should be beautiful and have no flaws or intricacies, as I like to put it, is horrendously unrealistic. Take that idea and magnify it times, oh, about a billion, and we have the standard celebrity women are held to every day, regardless of whether they're walking down a red carpet or a member of the paparazzi gets a photo of that woman walking from her car into a grocery store. A great deal of people cannot understand why Anna Paquin would not use her money and resources, both of which she undeniably has, to fix the gap between her teeth. From a personal perspective, I have always had crowded and crooked teeth all my life and after you grow up with teeth that do not fit the picture perfect mold for what society at large thinks they should look like, they do grow to be part of your identity, regardless of the fact that the state of one's teeth are often scrutinized more and held even closer under the microscope by society in terms of beauty standards.
The news of the marriage between Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer was meant to be a fluffy, happy piece of celebrity gossip that fans of the actors and the show True Blood, which they both star in, could swoon over for a few minutes before going on with the rest of their day. Instead, the news became yet another opportunity for people to not only scrutinize Anna Paquin for one of the very, very few visual "flaws", but also to illegitimize her entire relationship, and now marriage, with Stephen Moyer. To say the least, that is pretty depressing.
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