Mireille Silcoff
Appearances
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
I think I felt very much... like Rip Van Winkle in a way, you know, like I was emerging from a long sleep or like I was some weird raw worm kind of emerging from the earth blinking, like what in the world is going on? I went from being someone who had been chronically, chronically ill for 15 years to somebody who had,
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
had a cushion around her brain and could jump and could run and could be physically embodied in ways that were completely impossible. And that happened in the span of under one hour on an operating table where I was awake. Wow. On fentanyl, but awake. But suddenly I was in my late 40s. I was free of marriage. My children were not babies anymore.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
I remember, like, I don't know, it must have been around my 49th birthday or something like that. Walking around, I was having quite a bit of sex and just thinking, like, Everybody in the world is having sex.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
And I had my body for the first time since I was 32 years old. And the level of gratitude at just being able to even carry my own groceries or wear flip-flops because I could never wear flat shoes before. Like, I can't even describe to you. So you could imagine... The level of gratitude and the level of wonder I had at being able to re-encounter sex with that newly fixed body.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
I'm trying to think of the right words. I mean, it was just wonderful. Like, it was wonderful. And I think, like, a lot of the, like, not to intellectualize too much, but, like, it was really fabulous to see, like, I still had the interest. Everything still worked.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
My body still looked nice, maybe because it had been preserved in amber from so many years of, like, just being stuck in bed, you know. Just laying down. And I found that, like, I was really interested in taking up again where, quote, unquote, I had left off in my mid-20s.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
What surprised me about myself was how easy it was for me to embark on a new life when everything was really quite against me. Hmm. Single mom, still carrying some illness. It's not like everything disappeared, disappeared, disappeared, right? So it's still a lot of issues. Money issues. I'm a working journalist. So there was a lot going on.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
that kind of could paint this picture of it being very hard. It was also COVID. It was not an easy time in the world. And while all of that is certainly true, and yet, I saw opportunities in this life stage. I saw opportunities that were possible both in bed and outside of bed. Some new power that I seemed to own that I was kind of shocked at. I was completely surprised.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
Well, first of all, my libido was as high as it was when I was in my 20s. So that was a complete surprise. That was a complete surprise. And I really did not see that coming. But the other thing that was so wonderful was that I didn't give a fuck as much as I did in my 20s about like... You know, does my butt look big?
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
I mean, now we want our butts to look bigger, so that's useful because in the 90s, nobody wanted a very big butt, right? So it's like, whatever. You're a bit more forgiving. But, you know, the body positivity hit me too, and I was just letting my freak flag fly of things. I've got a cesarean scar, you know, whatever. Yeah.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
It was all fine, and I didn't have issues with it, and I felt sexy that way, even with, you know, all of the signs of age very much upon me. So that was a surprise. But the other thing that was a surprise was the ability to bring... the layered knowledge that you accumulate reaching your 50s or reaching your late 40s to the bedroom.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
And I found that having that type of mind or mind-body situation made me much more playful and made me much less self-conscious and made me out for kind of like adventures in bed that I really don't think I would have entertained so easily in the cool 90s.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
Like, why are we talking about analingus? How is this a thing?
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
I mean, my desire was just to have sex nonstop as much as I possibly could for a really long time. That really happened.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
Well, I feel that this is a huge part of the story. And this is part of a story which is not about Gen X. This is part of the story that is about Gen Z and millennials who have created a sexual landscape that is more fair, more open, more accepting, more consent culture, body positivity, gender questioning. All of these things are because of generations younger than my own, right?
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
And so encountering this new landscape where you could question your gender in bed, or you could, you know, be okay with your cesarean scar, or... your boobs looking old or having a big ass or whatever your hang-up would have been in 1997. That's okay, right? And also just the fact that you can go and buy a clitoral stimulator at Walmart, that's crazy. Like, that that exists?
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
That you could just do that? That's insane to me, that I can go to the pharmacy and, like, buy a pint of milk, you know, some deodorant, and, like, a cock ring is really... To me, feels incredibly new and incredibly kind of great.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
Because I was a woman with a long career behind her. Because I was a woman who had endured a decade and a half of catastrophic illness. Because I was a woman with two children who needed me. Because I was a woman who knew who her girlfriends were. Because I could earn my own way. And all of those things conspired, came together, and it is a place of privilege, I will say that for sure.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
But for many years, I was absolutely not in a place of privilege, right? So all these things conspired together to create a self-knowledge that... followed me into the bedroom. Hell yes.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
Well, for one thing, I think I felt comfortable asking for sex.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
Which I'm not sure in my younger years I was that comfortable doing. I don't know if I was such a first move maker. And so that changed. And that's a huge change, right? Certainly. So more comfortable asking for it, more comfortable asking for what I wanted. But I think the big thing...
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
And, you know, any woman who's been in a locker room, I know it's a cliche to talk about like middle-aged women being naked in locker rooms and not caring. It's like the younger women are like... I've been to the YMCA, baby. I understand it. Yeah, totally.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
The younger women are covering themselves up or like, you know, going into the stall and the older women are just walking around letting everything hang out. But I mean, that's true in the bedroom as well, right? And so I think a lot of it was just confidence. When I actually think of the sex... acts that I've been engaging in.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
I mean, you know, they're good, but they're not like so off the wall where I'm like hanging from chandeliers, you know, by clamps and straps. Like there's not, that's, that's not what's going on here. What's going on here is feeling truly sensual and not being a bash about it, like not being embarrassed or kind of weenie or kind of like, I think all of that just creates a kind of place of comfort.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
And once you're comfortable in the bedroom or comfortable in yourself, it kind of opens things up for experimentation. You know, I was never much of a talker when I was young. Now I'm like talking. Are you dirty talking? ridiculous things. So yes, you know, stuff like that.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
I think it was when other girlfriends of mine divorced and had similar stories.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
They divorced and then they partnered up pretty quickly and started having sex and having conversations about sex. how their partner enjoys analingus or, you know, this stuff. And I'm like, how am I sitting around at 50 or whatever it was with a girlfriend who's the same age as me and we're sitting in our Gen X uniform of the mother jeans with the Levi's shirt tucked into the jeans.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
I love that look. Thank you. And I wear the same thing every day. And the slightly graying hair. And we're sitting around talking about, you know. Licking someone's butt. Licking someone's butt. So, you know, it was just like it was really a moment.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
Divorcing later is a huge piece of the puzzle. I divorced in my late 40s. And divorce is often a catalyst for sexual exploration among women. And what was interesting was that, well, even if you divorce really late, that still holds true. And so I think that's a big part of the story. So I noticed this among my girlfriends. And then very, very quickly, I began noticing it in the culture.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
And noticing it in the culture, I just saw the same things that everybody else has seen this year. I had a Netflix scrolling bar serve to me called Grown-Ass Women Living Their Best Lives, which was filled from top to bottom with these kind of... almost made-for-TV-ish type movies, like whatever, made-for-Netflix type movies about grown-ass women having affairs with younger men.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
That seemed to be like a big theme. So there was a lot of that. There was one with Laura Dern. There was one with Nicole Kidman. There was suddenly just a lot of material. And so taking that along with my own experience and what I was seeing with the women around me, it just seemed like, well, this is a moment, right?
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
I think that with women my age, I'm just going to coin something called owning the hot mess. LAUGHTER
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
I think that there is, with all of the responsibilities and all of the sleeplessness and difficulty, and kids are glued to the sides of our body now as they've never been before. Parenting is much more intensive for the women my age who are still parents to kids who haven't flown the coop yet. Yet, in all of that, there is also an amount of power, an amount of mastery.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
Yes, it's a mess and we're running from thing to thing to thing to thing. Yet, part of this mess has to do with the fact that we've got this mess because we can handle it. I think that the 50-year-old woman mattering in society, that translates to the bedroom.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
Yeah. I mean, things have settled down for sure. Also, like I do want to say this, like menopause does have an effect. And I am in menopause now. And my libido has actually like become a bit less voracious. It's still there. It's still great. But like things can take a bit longer. I have to like work a bit more to get to places that were just very easy and natural to get to even five years ago.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
And that's fine. It's all part of the process because I also find that the fleetingness of this middle-aged moment is part of its specialness and part of its poignancy.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
I want to do whatever feels natural. Right now, still having a pretty healthy sex life feels natural. It doesn't feel like a burden. It doesn't feel bad. It still feels great. But when it doesn't anymore, I would like to have that same confidence, that same self-knowledge, and that same power within myself to say, okay, I don't really feel like doing that so much anymore. My priorities shifted.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
Or, you know, maybe I... I don't know, want to do it once a month or not at all. Or I don't know, you know, but I just want the journey to be organic in that way. And the answer truly is I don't know, because I never would have thought that this was happening to me in my 50s.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
So I can't really imagine what my 60s are going to be like, especially because for most of my adult life, I didn't think I was going to reach my 60s.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
I'm going to say a crazy thing that one friend said to me. And I don't know if this is true, but she said that I was fucked back to life.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
I was absolutely certain that everybody except the type of women I was writing about who are women like me would freaking hate this piece.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
And that was the surprising thing to me was that really the piece was widely appreciated by all different types of women, according to the comments, you know, some men as well, and across the generational spectrum, which to an extent is what I was going for, right?
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
I wanted to show that middle age might be something that women who are younger than Gen X, which is the cohort that I wrote about the most in this piece, can look forward to. who were you expecting the most ire from? Two groups. Number one, the experience of many women in their 50s is not a highly sexual experience.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
Many women in their 50s have been in very long marriages, and we all know what can happen to sex in very long marriages. You know, people have health concerns. Some people grow disinterested in sex. Menopause has effects as well. So a highly sexual 50-something woman might... might be super irritating as an archetype to women who aren't feeling that way.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
So that was one group that I thought would be hate readers, and they weren't. And then the second group that I thought would be hate readers are millennials and Gen Z. who I describe in the piece as having much less frequent sex and much less active sex lives than Gen X women or even boomers were having at their age.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
And so I felt like there might be some bad feeling from the younger generation of women that they might feel like I was calling them out as not having good sex lives or not having the same prowess. Like, you know, I just thought that that might be annoying.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
And in fact, what happened with many millennial women in particular wrote to me and said that they loved reading the piece so much because they felt like it gave them something to look forward to, that sex might come into your life in a different way at an unexpected time later in life, that that is a new possibility. Right.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
Well, I would say that I started really young in terms of being a kind of cultural animal and a social animal. So I was working by the age of 13. I entered the club scene by the time I was 14 or 15. Very young. I was in a rush, ever so slightly unparented. I mean, by today's standards, 13. phenomenally unparented.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
And so I feel like I lived the Gen X experience, as we would say here in Quebec, au bout, which means to the living end. I was a music journalist. I was a club reporter. So I wrote about nightclub culture. I had a rave fashion line. I was a voguer in a voguing house.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
The experience of the Gen X child, for some cultural reasons and some just deep, deep economic societal kind of reasons, was much more free range than it is right now. So by the time I had sex, which was at the age of 15, I felt like a grown-up. I felt like this person who was working, who was earning her own money, who had experienced so much already. Mm-hmm. We couldn't wait to be adults.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
I mean, kids started young. So I remember in grade eight in my high school, who had had oral sex, who had not had oral sex. I always wanted to be a bit of a fabulon. So I kind of wanted to be ahead of the curve, like a fabulon. kind of, you know, very sophisticated person. I was dead set on that kind of persona from a very young age.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
And so I just wanted to be out there and, like, doing what everybody else was doing, really at the cutting edge of whatever sexual experience was at, you know, in 1980-whatever. And so I just remember going straight from never having kissed a boy to... Basically having sex in the span of about a year and a half.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
I don't think I thought a lot about my pleasure. I think I thought a lot about being a sexual person, about pleasing my partners. I think that was a very huge thing that I thought about a lot, of coming off a certain way. The way being mature? Mature, sophisticated, up for anything, not somebody who would be oversensitive about anything. I really wanted to come off as a tough person. Yeah.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
I kind of think about sex in the 90s as being this crazy jungle. Yeah, tell me about it because I wasn't around then. Yeah, it was not good. I think that you had the world that the 60s opened up, but then you also had...
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
had those people who had opened up the world of free love in all the positions of power, in what was on TV, in what was in film, in what was going to make it onto the radio, et cetera, et cetera. So free love suddenly transferred and translated and transmuted and kind of like insinuated itself into what feels like every corner of the culture.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
from the Oval Office with Bill Clinton to now King Charles with wanting to be Camilla Parker Bowles as Tampax to Marla Maples. I mean, it just never stopped. And I think there were these female archetypes that were really in the mix at the time that many of us felt like, well, that's just what you needed to be like. So you were either fending off rapacious men
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
And being like, oh, he, he, he, you know, like, no, no, no. Or you were this like nymphette who could never get enough.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
Yes. And I wanted to jump in and I did. And I had many partners and I took many morning after pills and I had many STD tests because it was the era of AIDS and COVID. condoms broke. And, you know, I remember the Sex and the City era where it was threesomes are the new blowjobs, right? So things were just getting more and more extreme.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
And suddenly every guy around the turn of the millennium wanted a threesome. I don't think anybody really liked those threesomes, frankly. And I don't know. Listeners, write in. Yes, listeners, please write in. Back then, it felt like every single thing existed for male titillation.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
And I was part of that. And yes, it was exhausting. I didn't know it at the time. I just thought sex is something you do all the time. It's tiring. Maybe you don't enjoy it that much, but you do it and you do it because you're a sexy woman. It's weird things like that.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
My story was very much sidetracked by the fact that at the age of 32, I became catastrophically ill with a really rare condition called spontaneous cerebrospinal fluid leak syndrome. I was very...
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
very very ill for many many many years uh at some points you know confined to a declined bed with my head lower than my chest i mean really really could not could not move and and in a lot of pain because when you have no spinal fluid you have no cushion around your brain which means that your brain is clanking against your skull all the time so it was not an easy way to live
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
There is something real happening here with women who are older, and it has to do with power. It doesn't have to do with being like a young person. It has to do with being like an older person.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
Yet you figure things out. That toughness comes back. The toughness comes back. So within the marriage, we had two kids. I very much raised them from bed. My ex-husband did a lot of heavy lifting. There was always some help in the house, too. That was hard. being sick and a young mother and also displaced at one point to a new city. We had to move to Toronto. That was extremely hard.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
So the overwhelm of just living in a long-committed relationship with two young children and my health being what it was did not create the best conditions to have the best And so there were many, many years, which were just years of survival, I would say.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
I think that, like, on every level. let's call it top of the brain, no. I felt like I was never going to get better and never going to be cured. Did I think that I would experience pleasure in life again, joy in life again, bodily pleasure, even sexual interest? Yes, because I never really lost that. It just kind of went under for a while.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
But then if I'm going to talk about a bit lower down in my body, some kind of like different self-knowledge, I think that I always somewhere believed or had some notion that somehow I was going to get out of the thing that I had been told I was never going to get out of.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
When my ex-husband and I divorced, I really thought that I was going to live a very quiet life and of Orange Pico Tea and Masterpiece Theater. And taking care of my children and once in a while having a nice dinner with a friend and reading a lot of good books and taking walks. And that was what life was going to be like for me.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
In a way, I was accepting an older version of what it meant to be middle-aged, which means that middle age is kind of the opening to senescence. You know, it's the opening to becoming an old person. You know what I mean? Gray hair with a cane, whatever. I had a cane, right? So, you know, so I had that kind of idea that that's what would happen post-divorce.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
And instead what happened was that my life exploded in a detonation of sex confetti. Okay.
Today, Explained
Gen Sex
And now I'm 50 and, you know, that's what life is going to be like. I'm going to be Orange P. Cote in Masterpiece Theatre and taking care of my kids and hopefully remobilizing my writing, and that's it. And then instead what happened was, you know, a lot of wonderful new relationships with a lot of wonderful men and the kind of sex that I don't think I had even had in my 20s.
Today, Explained
Gen Sex
Like a total new world of openness and exploration and interest and comfort in myself and even, I dare say, wisdom. And it felt revelatory. And at first, as I write in the article, I felt like this was my weird, cool story. Like, you know, like, I really did it right, you know, or whatever. But then, you know, as stuff started coming out in the culture and...
Today, Explained
Gen Sex
some of my other friends divorced and had similar situations to mine, I realized that, you know, what I had been doing or what I had experienced post-marriage was really part of a much larger cultural story that might ring true for many women in America and beyond today.
Today, Explained
Gen Sex
And there was a lot of sex in the 90s, so there was kind of like a hardcore boot camp, if you will. Divorce is happening later than ever, right? And divorce and sexual exploration for women is a very old story that you get divorced and suddenly find a little piece of yourself sexually.
Today, Explained
Gen Sex
And so I feel like that's kind of a big part of the story as well, that you're seeing a lot of women divorcing later in life. And so having a bit of this sexual rediscovery later and finding that everything still works
Today, Explained
Gen Sex
sometimes much to their surprise, that desire is still there, that sexual function is still there, that thanks to the amazing strides that Gen Z and millennials have made to opening up what's acceptable sexually, that acceptance is still there.
Today, Explained
Gen Sex
Boomers were constricted by a lot of societal mores that were, for lack of a better way of putting it, very mid-century, right? And, you know, free love and all of this stuff were basically boomer constructs, right? But I see Gen X as being a generation of women who really were plunked into an extremely sexualized landscape and were needing to fend for themselves.
Today, Explained
Gen Sex
There wasn't a lot of support for how to navigate, you know, bosses who were sexually predatory, for instance, or whatever. There wasn't a lot of belief. There wasn't, you know, there were a lot of issues when it came to harassment. But there also wasn't, there weren't a lot of roadmaps, right, for how to have sex or how to be a sexual person or whatever. And that was both good and bad, right?
Today, Explained
Gen Sex
Because many women, for instance, didn't experience orgasm because they just couldn't figure out how and their male partners couldn't figure out how. And so it just didn't happen. And I feel like that wouldn't happen now. You've got things like OMG Yes, for instance, which is like a website where you can find out how to have a female orgasm. Like, you know, it's a much more open environment now.
Today, Explained
Gen Sex
And then my second boyfriend. No, this is great. I'm not going to go through the numbers, but the man I'm currently with now, I did meet online. And, you know, I actually loved online dating.
Today, Explained
Gen Sex
So I'm talking about the elder millennials and the Gen X women who are middle-aged now is for them to seize the moment, to see that we are living in an era where a number of factors have come together in a perfect storm to create a truly interesting, generative, wonderful, and joyful possibility for women to be sexual at the age of 50 or whatever it is. Things don't last forever, right?
Today, Explained
Gen Sex
And like, I'm not going to be like the boomers who are like, we're forever young. We're never going to blah, blah. You know, baloney. You know, once you get into, you know, later decades than your 50s or what, you know, things change. priorities change, body changes, illness comes into the picture. You know, there's all kinds of things that change.
Today, Explained
Gen Sex
And so what I would love to see is women who are able to indulge in this moment, whether they are married, whether they're not married, you know, do it with the partner you're married to. If you're not married, go out there and have confidence that there are people that want you, that there are people that are interested in you, and often they're younger.
Today, Explained
Gen Sex
I want women to really, really, really feel that. And for women who aren't into having sex or a very active sex life or who can't have a very active sex life at the age of 50, I want them to still bask in the glory of the fact that for the first time in, I would say, all of humanity, the middle-aged female body has grown important.
Today, Explained
Gen Sex
I split up from my ex in my late 40s. And when I came out of it, I just thought that what lay ahead of me would be a pretty spinsterish existence. I was really, really sick for a long time in my adulthood. And my marriage was very long and there were two children. And I just felt like, well, who is going to want this bag of problems?