Gen X women are freeing themselves from the hangups of the '90s, and having the best sex of their lives. Media portrayals of middle-aged women are starting to catch up too. If you have a question for us, please call us at 1-800-618-8545 or send a note at vox.com/askvox. This episode was produced and sound designed by Victoria Chamberlin, edited by Miranda Kennedy, fact checked by Melissa Hirsch, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Jonquilyn Hill. Actress Demi Moore at a press conference for the film "The Substance." Photo by ZOULERAH NORDDINE/AFP via Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
This week, we're giving some attention to a generation that we don't talk about much, Gen X. We're starting off with Mireille Silcoff, who wrote a piece about her own experiences with aging and one of the ways that getting older has been pretty great.
Check it out.
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?
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.
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...
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.
Mireille's piece in the New York Times magazine resonated. It went viral, and it seems like it's definitely ringing true. I mean, she got a book deal out of it. But how common is her experience really? We asked you what it's been like navigating sex in your 40s and 50s, and listener Sarah answered.
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Chapter 2: How do Gen X women navigate dating in their 40s and 50s?
She called in from Chicago, and she's been having a great time dating and not looking for a relationship in this era of her life.
I'm happy to meet someone for a casual encounter, but I just don't want the responsibility of like having to please that person every day. And that just sounds exhausting to me. And I think like for me, sex has always been like an entry point into a relationship. So I think it's, you know, I'm kind of framing it differently now.
Eventually someday I may want to pursue like a life partner, but I just feel like now isn't the time. And a lot of it is because of the dating no man's land in the early 40s. Yeah.
So who are you into these days? What does your ideal look like? Do you have a type?
I feel like as I get older, my type is younger. I tend to be attracted to guys maybe five years younger than me. I think the last four or five guys I dated were about five years younger than me, so... That's kind of my sweet spot right now. I always say I have a reverse dad complex. My dad was so good that I'm not interested in older men.
I feel like older women and younger guys is kind of a thing that's going on right now, you know, in movies and TV.
I'm too old for you. You think I don't like power?
No, I think you like to be told what to do.
Is that something you're seeing too? And do you see it in your friend group or does it just seem like, you know, a pop culture thing?
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Chapter 3: What cultural shifts have influenced sex for middle-aged women?
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.
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?
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.
Okay, so you're a Gen X woman living in a Gen Z world. You get to take advantage of the good and the bad. You're dating. How have you been doing on the apps? I did both.
I mean, I met my first boyfriend post-marriage just through friends.
I love that. Yes, first boyfriend post-marriage. Yes.
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.
What do you hope for middle-aged women moving forward, especially when it comes to sex, when it comes to desire, when it comes to relationships?
What I want for middle-aged women now, right?
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Chapter 4: Why is sex better for women in their 40s and 50s?
We're starting to find ways to adjust with our changing mobility. So sex is not dying. It's just changing and looking different. And that's just something that is not highlighted or something that we don't see happening. in the media, our mainstream culture. So typically when it comes to the vagina, as we get older, if you use it, you don't lose it.
And the vagina is a muscle, it's an organ, it's a muscle. So if we use it more often, we can continue to have the best sex of our lives. And when I say have sex, that means partnered and solo, because you don't always have to have a partner to have sex.
So but I think just socially and how we're conditioned to understand sex, how we are conditioned to understand pleasure, how we're conditioned to, I would say, our sexual scripts and what, quote unquote, women are supposed to be doing during sex, how we're supposed to be the pleasers. Right. And men are the receivers.
And a lot of times you're focusing on your partner's pleasure as opposed to your own. Heterosexual women tend to be bound by that a little bit more versus queer identifying women or women in the LGBTQ community. Right. So those are conversations that we don't tend to have as much. So, yes, I think we're starting to see more so of a sexual awakening for cis het women. Sexuality is a journey.
We are sexual from the womb to the tomb and understanding that who we are sexually when we start having sex, whether that means as a teenager, it's gonna change when you hit your 20s, it's gonna change when you hit your 30s, 40s, 50s and beyond.
So a lot of times we are caught up to think that, hey, we should be pleasers or our partners come first or our sexual experiences were great if our partners came. But did you come? So understanding that your pleasure is your responsibility and that we have to learn our bodies, that we have to say, hey, at this point in my life, this is what I like versus this is what I don't like.
And be able to communicate that with our partners, because the more comfortable we get to with ourselves, we can better communicate with our partners. And that means that we can have better sex at any age.
So that's how sex shows up and works in real life. But what about on TV and the big screen? The rise of the older woman as a sex symbol after this break. This is Explain It To Me, and now we're going to get into the depictions of middle-aged women on the screen. Things have gotten better, but is better enough? Is it realistic? That's what we wanted to ask Lisa Whittington-Hill. No relation.
She's the author of Girls Interrupted, a book about the ways pop culture fails women. You know, we've been talking about this idea that women are hitting middle age and for one reason or another experiencing this newfound almost freedom around sex, you know, freedom from these hangups of their 20s, freedom from societal expectations of what sex could be, what it should look like.
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Chapter 5: How do younger partners change the dating dynamics?
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Do you think there's a there there? Is that something? Are there more portrayals of women in middle age?
I think there are. I mean, I think we have to be kind of careful how we think of middle age. I think Hollywood and pop culture kind of thinks of middle age as any woman over the age of like 35 or 40. I think certainly we are seeing more kind of older women in Hollywood. Certainly Baby Girl was big and it led to this kind of conversation about age gaps in relationships and certainly...
You know, we usually see an older man and a younger woman. I was reading, too, kind of after Baby Girl, there's this new trend kind of now where people are widening kind of the age range on their dating apps. So this is kind of having an effect, but certainly Substance, which was a movie I loved and have watched many, many times since it came out, certainly this conversation about older women now.
and about aging. So I think the thing we always have to be careful about is not thinking, okay, like Hollywood's ageism problem is solved because we have baby girl or we have the substance, that kind of thing.
Yeah, it just seems, I don't know, like there's this major difference between and just like that and, I don't know, Golden Girls, which it's like, oh, these are about women in the same age range, which is so wild.
They really are. And when I was growing up, certainly as Gen X, those were kind of, the Golden Girls were a depiction of middle-aged, older women that I saw.
Lean over a mirror sometime and take a look at yourself. I think you better take a sedative before you look.
You know, it was Golden Girls. It was Mrs. Roper on Three's Company.
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Chapter 6: What are the challenges and joys of dating apps for Gen X?
What does the data actually show when it comes to portrayals of, you know, older women in the media and pop culture in general? Sure.
I think it's really interesting because I remember this article came out, a New York Times article came out in 2021. And it was right after the Emmys had happened and the Emmys had a bunch of older women nominated. It was, you know, the year that Kate Winslet was nominated for mayor of Easttown and Gillian Anderson for The Crown and Jean Smart for Hacks.
sort of saying, oh, you know, look at all these older women nominated and the ageism problem has been fixed. But then you actually look at the data and it is still younger women, younger actresses getting roles. So we kind of see this on stage. And I think that's what I talk about. You have to be careful how you kind of think of it.
You know, just because we see all these women on stage doesn't mean the problem's been solved. The numbers still kind of show that it is very much younger women, younger actresses getting roles in Hollywood.
We talked to Marae Silcoff, who wrote that piece, about how Gen X women are kind of uniquely positioned to be freer about sex, thanks to kind of like all these different factors. Also, can I just say, Canadians, y'all are willing to go there in a way that Americans do not tend to be. Oh, yeah.
We are. We are a polite nation that is not afraid to go there. I mean, I thought that article was really great and I agreed with so much of it about certainly at my age, I have way less hangups. I care less about stuff. I wish I could travel back in time and tell my younger self not to care so much about certain things.
Let's talk about the movie Baby Girl. I understand you have some strong feelings about it. Did you think it sets kind of an unrealistic standard on what aging could and should be? Definitely.
So I resisted seeing Baby Girl for a very long time. I was sort of reading about it and sort of hearing about it, but I kind of resisted watching it. I think it's interesting that in the movie Nicole Kidman's character is 49, but Nicole Kidman is actually 57 in real life. I think that's interesting, 49. I think it's totally unrealistic.
You know, like Nicole Kidman is a beautiful white woman, wealthy in the movie. I think, you know, what I would really like to see is a baby girl with someone who doesn't look like Nicole Kidman. You know, someone who is not stereotypical, you know, this idea of what we think of when we think of beauty. You know, she's a thin white woman for sure.
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