Kate Emery: Why those Kate Beckinsale pics fill me with middle-aged dread

It’s not that I don’t care about young people and the extent to which their body image is being warped by an Instagram-filtered, superhero-torsoed world.

But there’s another demographic being bombarded by unrealistic beauty standards that nobody seems to worry about half so much. Which is to say: won’t anybody think of the middle-aged?

The latest affront to those of us whose faces get a little lower every year was an appearance by Hollywood star Kate Beckinsale at an event last week.

Beckinsale is both talented and the kind of gorgeous that would probably make my eyes explode if I saw her in the flesh. But the combination of a waist-cinching, labia-skimming dress and a face as smooth as a lake before someone throws the first stone made her resemble a bobble-headed LOL Doll.

She looked so knackered, uncomfortable and hungry that all I could think was: good God, Kate, you’re 51 years old. Aren’t you allowed to ease up a bit now?

The answer is no, of course. When being hot is your job you’re not allowed to ease up or let the passing of time show on your face or arse.

It’s why Jennifer Aniston, 55, is currently flogging fitness equipment in a plunging black bodysuit and a series of crop-tops.

It’s why Nicole Kidman appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair at 55 in a designer mini-skirt that probably cost less than the airbrushing used to blur her features into a waxwork version of herself.

It’s why Hugh Jackman’s 56-year-old body increasingly resembles a Coles chicken breast value pack.

The dilemma facing the professionally hot was brilliantly illustrated by this year’s body horror flick The Substance, in which Demi Moore, who is in her sixties, plays a 50-year-old fitness influencer fired for the crime of getting old. Long story short: taking a black market drug in order to birth a younger version of yourself you can only inhabit for a week at a time is probably not the answer to ageism.

Judging celebrities for the decisions they make about their own bodies is, I realise, gross. So long as no virgins are being sacrificed, people should be allowed to look however they please.

Quite possibly if someone paid me the $20 million Jackman reportedly picked up for Deadpool 3 I’d also be prepared to put down the cheese and hummus and do enough burpees to lose the will to live (that’s three, four tops).

But do these celebrities truly want to be starving and exercising and injecting themselves to look this way or does our society just have a very messed up relationship with ageing?

Fame seems like a poor bargain if the price to be paid is no freedom, even in middle age, to eat that extra piece of cake, sleep in and make peace with your real face, even on the days when the only kind of LOL Doll you resemble is one that’s spent some time in the microwave.