You are both correct. My statement was unnecessarily absolute. I am incredibly attracted to a woman who is actually older than I am. I only meant to point out the way Hollywood frames actors, and that in itself is sexist. Dumb idea not to be clear about that.
Discussions of sexism as it relates to the looks of specific people who are employed for their looks is an inherently low value conversation. Maybe not completely meaningless, but close. And hectoring people about viewing more negatively the appearance changes of aging women than men, in general, is not going to change it. It may not be molecular level biological, but it’s really deep.
FWIW I think Duchovny looks pretty beat up and kind of bloated, more like Quagmire on Family Guy (or maybe it’s just that Family Guy wasn’t around in the original X Files days). Anderson looks good for a women her age. Which of them to pay more though would surely depend also on what other role/career options the two have. Which I don’t know in that case (I know she’s been on successful shows in her alternative Brit version), but in general you’d expect reunion shows to face that. If for some reason they did a Seinfeld remake would you expect them to have to pay Michael Richards as much as Julia Louis-Dreyfus? It’s not sex there, but that one can’t get arrested otherwise now, while the other one broke the Seinfeld curse probably most of any of the four.