Is anyone else out there enamored of Dove's Real Beauty and Pro Age campaigns? I’m a marketing babe as much as I'm an author, and I take a great interest in how sex is used by Madison Avenue. Just as I was truly about to lose my mind from seeing rail-thin cocaine chic models, girls under 14, and other disgusting displays in advertising, Dove renewed my faith in the human race with their campaigns.

How refreshing to have someone in the Old Ad Game recognize that the women who control the spending dollars in North America are real women with real bodies. How enlightened of them to recognize many of us are over 40 and happy about it, rather than weeping for our lost 20's.

These campaigns appealed so much to me that I visited the Dove website and ended up applying to their casting call for 40+ women. To apply I had to send a photo and write 200 words about the joys of being an older woman, which was a fun exercise that made me all the more glad about being 50.

Now, I have no beef with the fact that erotic film and photography features impossibly attractive women; those are visual media and it makes sense. Even erotic writing is skewed young because even if readers can't literally see the characters, they do picture them. I’ll admit the protagonists in my writing are in their late 30s at the oldest. But I'll let you in on a shameful secret:

I write them older.

Yes, my female characters (and many of the males as well) are written with older personalities than their ages would indicate. I don't know about you, but certainly when I was in my early 20’s, I wasn’t interesting or mature enough to be the lead in a novel!

For example, Scarlett O'Hara starts out at age 16 in Gone with the Wind and she is annoying as hell. The war ages her fast and the book covers quite a number of years, so in her 20's Scarlett is interesting, but she is not a typical 20-something. Consider the TV show >The Real World"; isn't it far more appealing to 20-somethings than any older demographic? To most of us over 30 these kids are annoying as hell, like 16 year old Scarlett times ten. It’s nothing personal: we are all clueless at that age.

20-somethings are often beautiful, and can be very interesting insofar as they are growing and changing significantly, but I wouldn’t trade 50 for 20 any day. There are benefits that come from living--from failure, success, suffering, joy--and nothing else takes the place of experience. It's easier to deal with challenge, to keep on an even keel, to appreciate what life has to offer.

Erotically too, experience makes a difference. Just ask women, who are less affected by physical appearance, if 50 year old men make better lovers than 20-year-olds. (Do I hear ironic laughter and a big "hells, yeah"?) And it’s not just from practicing your bedroom skills. There are a lot of ways experience benefits one in the realm of love, romance and sex, and a lot of ways it teaches us to better enjoy those things.

Interestingly, I was in the middle of writing this column when I saw an ad for a new NBC show called "Age of Love." The premise is seeing whether a young bachelor will go for one of the 40-somethings or one of the 20-somethings competing for his attention. My money is on the 40-somethings...and I think the media is on to something just proposing the competition!

So I admit it: my heroines are actually 40 to 50-year-olds disguised as younger women. Forgive me! I don’t really mean to be cheating, or compromising my own beliefs. I guess perhaps I'm just writing characters who look the way so many of us mature women feel. With those extra years under our belts, we feel more interesting, more graceful, more charming, and if we were to translate that into physical appearance, well...we’d all look about 30 I suppose!

That's why it's so nice of Dove to showcase real women, and older women, celebrating looking their best and being beautiful regardless of their appearance. It's about time--after all, soon I'll be pushing 60!

Diana Laurence is the author of the Soulful Sex anthologies, and just released her new paperback, Soulful Sex: The Paranormal, Science Fiction and Fantasy Collections. Visit her at www.dianalaurence.com.