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Honestly from having done a bunch of dating in the modern era, the rise of obesity means that unless a girl is like... bottom 10th percentile genetically she's got scope to get to 6/10 simply by being in shape. I feel like a lot of the takes around the immutability of beauty made more sense before 30-40% of the population enthusiastically nuked themselves in the foot and modern cosmetics.
It's interesting how these discussions always reflexively equate "women" to "women age 17-35", well under half of the adult lifespan. No amount of makeup and toning is going to make a 55-year-old woman physically attractive to the broad majority of men, much less a 70-year-old woman. And as evidenced by the shape of this conversation itself, for a woman to be unfuckable by men is for her to not exist at all: nobody's interested in her plans, nobody's interested in her capabilities, nobody wants to hear from her apparently because nobody wants to look at her.
This is going to shock you, but there are older men who'll enthusiastically pursue the same level of simping for an older woman in reasonable shape. I know 50 year old women who are essentially still existing off flirtation and prettiness
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Irrelevant to the OP, which posits that they are still given a much greater degree of deference, empathy, and social support than an equivalent 55 or 70-year-old man. Who is getting sexed up is a different issue altogether.
I mean, if you see people in everyday life deferring a lot to the views of older women while ignoring older men, then I guess we'd have to hit the sociology literature to resolve it, because it seems very much the opposite to me. In my experience, at least, if a 60-year-old male customer complains about the poor service at a coffeeshop, people may think he's an asshole, but they will listen respectfully to him and try to correct it. A 60-year-old woman complaining is a Karen, a ridiculous figure, the object of derision and deep resentment, and people will roll their eyes and try to get her off their backs rather than addressing what she has to say. Ditto in work meetings, when knocking on a neighbor's door, in political action, etc., etc.
IME, men on average don't seem to want to pay much attention to any person who's not (a) a sexual target, (b) sexual competition, or (c) a potential physical threat. Other men get to be at least 1-2 of those three from about age 18 to age 75. Woman get to be at most one, from age 14-35ish with steep dropoff thereafter. Maybe they're pitied a little thereafter, just because they're obviously physically vulnerable,. But that doesn't equate to being effortlessly treated as a peer in social relationships, the way older men seem to be.
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