Coco Chanel once said that elegance is refusal. I say elegance is dead.

We need look no further than three wealthy, beautiful, middle-aged famous women who have sacrificed dignity this week — and for what exactly?

Clicks and likes? Relatability? Attempts to prove they’re still super-hot, sexy and irresistible?

We begin with Gwyneth Paltrow, making headlines as the subject of a new book, Gwyneth: The Biography, by Amy Odell.

Among the revelations: Gwyneth allegedly called her ex-fiancé, Brad Pitt, ‘dumber than a sack of s***’.

After ending things with Ben Affleck, she candidly discussed their intimate life with friends. It’s reported that she confided in make-up artist Kevyn Aucoin about her enjoyment of when Affleck ‘tea-bagged’ her.

Following her relationship with Ben Affleck, Gwyneth openly shared details about their intimate life with friends, reportedly telling make-up artist Kevyn Aucoin that she enjoyed when Affleck ‘tea-bagged’ her

Affleck is said to be livid.

‘This isn’t just tabloid gossip — it’s humiliating,’ a source said. ‘He feels completely exposed.’

In the meantime, Affleck’s second former wife, Jennifer Lopez, has been performing simulated explicit sex acts on stage, barely concealing her private areas, in futile efforts to demonstrate her continued allure and desirability, despite being left by Affleck once more.

Really, that’s the only thing that matters in Lopez’s small world and even smaller mind.

Not talent, or being a decent person, or finding a dignified way to emerge from this latest and entirely predictable heartbreak. No — the only thing that matters is whether men still want to have sex with her.

Could you imagine this as your animating life force? JLo is no deeper than a puddle.

Last week, while performing in Italy — since she couldn’t sell tickets in the US, she’s been forced overseas — Lopez, 56, aggressed her audience with this disclosure: ‘Sometimes I like it hard. [Other] days, I like it real slow.’

And she thinks this is going to make Affleck regret cutting her loose! The immaturity is astonishing.

By the way, this is a woman who routinely yells at paparazzi for invading her privacy — then turned around and, in her 2024 documentary, The Greatest Love Story Never Told, shared a bound book of Affleck’s emails and love letters with the co-writers on her album.

A shocked and dismayed Affleck was captured in the documentary talking about that breach of trust.

‘Things that are private,’ he said, ‘I had always felt, are sacred and special because, in part, they’re private.’

You want to ask him: Ben, have you not met Jennifer Lopez? There’s no spare part of any person or relationship she won’t use for attention.

Over in Italy, she wasn’t done talking about her sexual proclivities. Lopez went on to say that she also sometimes feels ‘naughty’ and ‘on those days, I like it real fast.’

Who needs to know this?

Last week, while performing in Italy, Lopez, 56, aggressed her audience with this disclosure: ‘Sometimes I like it hard. [Other] days, I like it real slow’

Lopez has school-age twin teenagers. She’s also made a big show of saying she wants to remain close to the three children Affleck shares with Jennifer Garner, but it’s hard to reconcile that with the open pot shots she’s taking at their father —performing a song believed to be about Affleck called ‘Wreckage of You’.

Subtle.

And then there’s Jessica Simpson, herself attempting a phoenix-like rise from her own recent divorce.

Performing on the Today show this week in a much-too-tight corset that revealed a prominent paunch, Simpson reportedly divulged to people backstage that she had wet herself onstage.

It’s not the first time Simpson, a 45-year-old mother of three, has gone public this way.

In fact, in 2023 she posted a picture of herself squatting, legs akimbo, outside a tent at what looked like a music festival.

‘When you gotta go, you gotta go,’ she wrote.

Disgusting.

Somewhere along the way, the idea of female empowerment got mangled with confessional culture. The result is otherwise beautiful, successful women denigrating themselves on stage, in interviews and on social media.

Charlize Theron just did it too, going on the sex-centric podcast Call Her Daddy and talking like an insecure girl desperate for the cool kids to like her.

Earlier this month, Theron, 49, told host Alex Cooper that, ‘I’ve probably had three one-night stands in my life, but I did just recently f*** a 26-year-old and it was really f***ing amazing.’

The only rational response to this is second-hand embarrassment.

Theron is one of the last true movie stars, and she debased herself, her Amazonian glamour, with this cheap, tawdry attempt to sound relevant.

It’s reminiscent of Steve Buscemi’s ‘How do you do, fellow kids!’ meme from 30 Rock. Once upon a time, movie stars and pop idols stood apart, deliberately.

Their remoteness was key to what made them special. Could you ever imagine Grace Kelly talking about her bathroom habits, let alone squatting for an Instagram post?

Madonna pushed the sexual boundaries in the 90s, of course, but she did it with a knowingness and a sense of agency. Nothing about her then felt desperate or cheap.

Provocative, yes. But even Madonna keeps many things private — her relationships with her ex-husbands among them.

Performing on the Today show this week in a much-too-tight corset that revealed a prominent paunch, Jessica Simpson reportedly divulged to people backstage that she had wet herself onstage

Perhaps ground zero was, as with so much of what’s plaguing us, the Kardashians.

Since the first iteration of their reality show debuted in 2007, so much of the culture has turned inside out: Sexual intimacy no longer private but a product to be commodified (not for nothing did Kim’s sex tape leak — the tape that built the Kardashian empire) and no family issue too sensitive to share.

It’s a sensibility that extends to their physicalities, bodies and faces, blown up with filler and implants until nothing seems real anymore.

The end result: One of the world’s richest men marries a Kardashian clone and wannabe.

Truly, what does Lauren Sanchez do with her access to the world’s finest minds but choose Kris Jenner as her new BFF, adopt the body and facial interventions of a Kardashian, and present her oiled-up bottom on a yacht to the world’s media — as a means to prove that she, too, is sexually desirable.

Self-respect is negligible, sophistication a rare trait, and elegance – well, it’s no longer refusal. It has been refused.