Alejandra Marisa Rodríguez is a lawyer and journalist, she is 60 years old and has just become the first woman of that age to win the Miss Universe Buenos Aires contest. After that distinction she will represent the province in the final of Miss Universe Argentina 2024.
The election of Miss Buenos Aires had another differential fact: that day, before Rodríguez, the first finalist of the pageant turned out to be a 73-year-old woman. Now, Alejandra will have to compete with several of her peers from all over the country.
Miss Universe Argentina 2024 will be chosen on May 25, when Yamile Dajud, Miss Universe Argentina 2023, will crown her successor.
Rodríguez’s triumph generated a certain popular astonishment, not because it called into question the merit of the winner’s title, but because she did not associate this type of competition with people her age. Diego Bernardini, doctor and master in Gerontology, told Clarín that “the surprise has to do with the fact that beauty has always been related to youth.”
”What we are seeing today is a new reality that has to do with beauty, with charm, with sensuality, with security, with smiles,” the specialist explained, adding later that all this is also linked ”to the fact that Today people are taking better care of themselves.”
This, he clarified, refers to “a much more relevant self-care, which does not only involve surgeries or treatments, but also how we manage our own emotions, our security and how we capitalize on everything we have experienced in past decades.”
Along these lines, the doctor highlighted what can increasingly be seen on social networks, ”with more and more people – both men and women – who show the attributes that middle age and mature age give them, compared to an indicator that already says very little, which is chronological or biological age.”
The arrival of a person of this age segment to the highest point of a competition of this type – added Bernardini – is another example of how ”the stages of life were extended and the limits were blurred, which are more permeable and flexible. ”.
”That is what leads us to see not only the consecration of this 60-year-old woman, but also a fact that is not minor and that has to do with the fact that the other finalists range from 18 to 40 years old. We have to think that she is also going to face people who are above what a Miss Universe supposedly always was, who was in her early twenties or early thirties, that seems to me to be the main thing,” she emphasized.
The coronation of Alejandra Marisa Rodríguez as Miss Buenos Aires 2024 is positive not only for her but for an entire age segment. ”It is showing us that people are being encouraged to ask questions that were previously supposedly pigeonholed to a certain age. We are seeing people in middle age and mature age who not only want to be participants, but also want to be protagonists and, at the same time, it is forcing us to understand that a society that is going to have more and more “Older people are not going to be the same as they were 30 or 40 years ago.”
This society, the gerontologist insisted (on Instagram, @doctorbernardini), ”will have people who, as protagonists, will not want to anchor themselves in an age, but rather continue exercising their rights, continue carrying out their tastes and, above all, things, have a good time.
How? According to the doctor, ”for some people having a good time will be being with their grandchildren; for others, go on a trip; For others, get together with their friends and for others, parade and compete in Miss Argentina or Miss Universe.”
”We have to change concepts about the second half of life and learn to live in a society of new longevity,” Bernardini concluded.