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" When the Billboard Music Awards wrapped Sunday night, J.Lo shot to the top trends on Twitter. The singer, who performed twice (managing to gyrate on BFF Pitbull only once, god bless), hadn&amp;#039;t ignited conversation about how talented she is, but rather, how old she is. Specifically, how old she doesn&amp;#039;t look. Out flooded mass surprise that Jennifer Lopez is 44 years old and looks as beautiful and young as she does.    Jennifer Lopez is 44 years old. I repeat 44 years old &#128576;&#128536; pic.twitter.com/uVHLlfQOUQ \u2014 FREDDY (@FreddyAmazin) May 19, 2014      Lorde is 17 looking 44 Jennifer Lopez is 44 looking 27. \u2014 alexis (@MajorMorton_) May 19, 2014      how is Jennifer Lopez 44 and still so perfect &#128557;&#128525; \u2014 tori (-: (@tori_monahan) May 15, 2014   Jennifer Lopez&amp;#039;s big break came in 1997 when she played the title role in Selena. That was 17 years ago, and she&amp;#039;s hardly fallen off the tabloids&amp;#039; or entertainment industry&amp;#039;s radar since that film came out. She&amp;#039;s 44 now? That number doesn&amp;#039;t seem so unreal. She looks incredibly beautiful and youthful? As one of the world&amp;#039;s biggest pop icons, again, that sounds about right. Because which celebrities actually look their age? Also, with such a small number of realistic portrayals of age in pop culture, who can even tell what a &amp;quot;normal&amp;quot; 44 years old looks like? When Madonna has been apparently ageless for decades, who can really be surprised that J.Lo is charting the same course? She is setting herself up, like Madge, to perform well into her 50s and maybe even beyond. If she looked &amp;quot;old,&amp;quot; that would seem unlikely to happen.  When celebrities are by definition celebrities because they build their brands by looking and acting inhuman, it&amp;#039;s ridiculous to act surprised when they do so. Eternal youth is the modern-day promise of female celebrity. It seems ridiculous to praise a celebrity for living up to this standard \u2014 can you imagine the nasty articles the Daily Mail would print if J.Lo dared to look any older than 28? I don&amp;#039;t even know what 44 \u2014 or 35 or 50 \u2014 is &amp;quot;supposed&amp;quot; to look like anymore. The media is so saturated with retouched images of already ageless celebrities that you&amp;#039;d never figure it out by flipping through magazines. You could look to the real world, but in many parts of it, women have been conditioned to do anything they can, from injecting fillers in their faces to filtering photos they post to Facebook, to conceal their true age. Women who do look like unretouched, plastic surgery-free humans, with wrinkles around their eyes and dimples on their thighs and stretch marks on their bellies, become objects of cultural fascination. Cosmopolitan.com featured a slew of images of mothers and pregnant women, their physical &amp;quot;flaws&amp;quot; jarringly revealed for the world to see, and the post went viral, accruing 800 comments, nearly 80,000 Facebook shares, and nearly 4 million unique visitors. That&amp;#039;s how hard it&amp;#039;s become to find realistic portrayals of women past the idealized age of twentysomething \u2014 4 million people were that curious to know what &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; women look like. Many posting to Twitter on Sunday night delighted in comparing J.Lo to Lorde, the 17-year-old phenom who is routinely mocked for looking much older than 17. (A Tumblr about black people who look younger than Lorde, which features celebs like 37-year-old Kerry Washington, has been widely shared across the web, to much amusement.) But Lorde is no different from pop icons who have preceded her, like Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera or even Beyonc\u00E9, who never really looked like teenagers. If Lorde looks 28, she&amp;#039;s only doing what the pop music machine would seemingly dictate \u2014 look and act older until you actually turn 28, and then it&amp;#039;s time to start looking and acting younger.  But everyone railing against Lorde while praising J.Lo for seeming so much younger than 44 is only encouraging the monotonous charade of every female celebrity striving to look like a hot 28-year-old. There&amp;#039;s nothing wrong with looking like a hot 28-year-old, but wouldn&amp;#039;t the entertainment industry feel much more empowering and interesting if it embraced a range of body types, faces, and ages? Wouldn&amp;#039;t it be refreshing not to slice every female celebrity one way just so she can be stuffed into the very same box that&amp;#039;s been reserved for dozens and dozens of stars before her? This is probably why the reaction to Lorde, her age especially, has been so strong and unfortunately nasty. She does not possess the sex appeal of J.Lo. She does not have the straight blond hair or bronzed skin Britney Spears does. And she&amp;#039;d sooner apply even more white powder and another coat of black lipstick before trading it for tinted moisturizer and lip gloss. She is building her pop stardom on something we&amp;#039;re not used to. And rather than embrace it, the knee-jerk reaction is to wonder why she doesn&amp;#039;t fit into that pre-cut box. Let&amp;#039;s stop celebrating that which the industry demands, and cheer when celebrities actually do something surprising. If J.Lo appeared at an award show with a bag under an eye and said she didn&amp;#039;t care about it, then I&amp;#039;d cheer.  Related:  How Social Media Killed the Red Carpet Follow Amy on  Twitter. Photo Credit: Getty Images "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/celebs/news/a6869/age-doesnt-matter/>