Gen Sex

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Host: Hi there, this is Sarah. What are we talking about? Charlotte's boyfriend's balls?

Host: Hey y'all, I'm John Glenn Hill and this is Explain It To Me. Today, we're talking about doing it. Specifically, middle-aged ladies doing it and doing it well.

Host: This week, we're giving some attention to a generation that we don't talk about much, Gen X. We're starting off with Marae Silkoff, who wrote a piece about her own experiences with aging, and one of the ways that getting older has been pretty great.

Marae Silkoff: 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's going to want this bag of problems? And now I'm 50 and, you know, that's what life is going to be like. Going to be orange peaco tea 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.

Host: Marais' 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?

Host: We asked you what it's been like navigating sex in your 40s and 50s, and listener Sarah answered. 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.

Sarah: I'm happy to meet someone for a casual encounter, her, 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.

Host: So who are you into these days? Like, what does your ideal look like? Like, do you have a type? I feel like as I get older, my type is younger. I tend to be attracted to guys like maybe five years younger than me. I think the last like four or five guys I dated were about five years younger than me. So that's kind of my sweet spot right now.

Sarah: I always say I have a reverse dad complex. because 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.

Host: I feel like women age differently than men. And I think I've noticed this as I see someone I haven't seen for a really long time that I went to high school with or something. And the women look great and the guys are looking kind of old. So I feel like, I don't know, the older woman, younger man, it's like they can keep up with us a little bit better maybe energy wise too, I think.

Host: Yeah, it's interesting that you say that. Like I remember I went to my 10 year college reunion and all of the women, we were like, wow, all the women look great. And the guys are here.

Host: Do you feel like it's more acceptable to date younger guys than maybe it was for older generations? Like, do you think it's happening more now? It's more acceptable now?

Sarah: A hundred percent. You know, there's something else that I think is interesting that's happening with that. I feel like younger men kind of grew up in a little bit different era about, like, sex. And I have found that the younger guys I'm with tend to be better at sex because they, you know, feel like they care about, you know, how I feel.

Host: Does it seem like sex is better for you now than it was when you were in your 20s?

Sarah: Yeah, I think like sex is less of a tool now than it was in my 20s and 30s. I feel like it was an entryway to a relationship, right? That it was like sort of a bargaining piece to get someone to, you know, be in a committed relationship with me. And I feel like letting all of that go has kind of brought like the fun back to it.

Host: When did that switch happen for you?

Sarah: Turning 40 and seeing some of my older friends going through divorces, having been in, you know, multiple decade long marriages and then dating and having fun. And I think that was inspirational.

Host: Do you think it's kind of like a you're only as old as you feel thing? I mean, I don't know. It's just the way that like 40s and 50s are represented now are so different. Like we used to have golden girls and now like I don't know JLo is like spinning on a pole at 50 you know

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Host: This is Explained It to Me. I'm John Glyn Hill, and we're back talking about sex, women, and aging. Marais says that things were different in the 80s and 90s. It was a lot harder to navigate sex as a woman. Sexual harassment at work ran rampant. We did not talk about consent then the way we do now. And that was the basis for Gen X's formative sexual years. It was weird and messy and confusing and often dangerous in ways things aren't as much now.

Host: It was tough out there in the 90s. Indeed, I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate.

Host: Men act like idiots to a degree because they want us to.

Host: What do you do when you guys are making love? I'm sure Tommy's good because I saw you in a thong on your most recent vacation. Hey, where are you guys in Tahiti or something?

Host: And there was a lot of sex in the 90s. So there was kind of like a hardcore boot camp, if you will. You know, divorce is happening later than ever, right? And, you know, divorce and sexual exploration for women is a very old story that you get divorced and suddenly find a little piece of yourself sexually.

Host: 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, you know, sexual rediscovery later and finding that everything still works, sometimes much to their surprise, that desire is still there, that, you know, 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.

Host: Why do you think this is happening with Gen X women in particular? Why is this generation so different from boomers? 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?

Host: 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.

Host: 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.

Host: I'm 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?

Host: 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.

Host: What I want for middle-aged women now, right? 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.

Host: Things don't last forever, right? 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. 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.

Host: 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.

Host: 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 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 female body has grown important

Host: But is this awakening just social or is there something biological to it?

Host: I am. I'm Dr. Wendasha Jenkins-Hall, and I am a human sexuality researcher and educator. My interests deeply are into women's health and sexuality. And really, now that I'm 37, just looking at how our sex and sexuality changes as we age.

Dr. Wendasha Jenkins-Hall: OK, so remember how Murray said that middle aged women are sometimes surprised to find that everything's still working down there?

Dr. Wendasha Jenkins-Hall: Dr. Jenkins-Hall told us there's a reason for that. We're getting the message that we're just no longer valuable sexually, that we're no longer desirable sexually. And we tend to compare the bodies and the experiences of women in our middle age to those that are in their early 20s. And so we get that social and cultural messaging, but also as moving toward menopause. So for those of us who are going that perimenopause, menopausal area that our bodies are going to change. So we're going to be having more problems because our estrogen levels are going down. We're going to be getting hair in crazy places, hot flashes. And so sex is just going to be uncomfortable.

Dr. Wendasha Jenkins-Hall: So the reality is, yes, bodies are changing. So yes, as we get closer to perimenopause and menopause, yes, estrogen does go down. Yes, we will see those changes with the vagina just due to those hormonal changes. However, that does not necessarily mean that sex just goes away, that we're not going to be desirable, that we're not going to be able to go out and live and have our best sexual lives.

Dr. Wendasha Jenkins-Hall: Actually, sex for women tends to get better as we age simply because we're more experienced and we know our bodies better and we know what our bodies need and we know what we want and we know what we desire. And so even with those things that are happening to our bodies, we're starting to find ways that work around that.

Dr. Wendasha Jenkins-Hall: So we're not afraid of lube. 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 in the media or mainstream, mainstream culture.

Dr. Wendasha Jenkins-Hall: so typically when it comes to the vagina as we get older if you if you use if you use it you don't lose it and the vagina is a muscle it's an organ it's a muscle so 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.

Dr. Wendasha Jenkins-Hall: Heterosexual women tend to be bound by that a little bit more versus queer identifying women or women in the LGBTQIA 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.

Dr. Wendasha Jenkins-Hall: 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 going to change when you hit your 20s. is going to 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. Our partners come first. 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 on with ourselves, we can better communicate with our partners. And that means that we can have better sex at any age.

Host: But what about on TV and the big screen? The rise of the older woman as a sex symbol after this break.

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Host: 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.

Lisa Whittington-Hill: 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. And I wonder how much of that has to do with what we're seeing in pop culture.

Lisa Whittington-Hill: You know, there's the baby girl of it all. There's the substance of it all, which was a huge commentary on women and aging. One single injection unlocks your DNA and will release another version of yourself Do you think there a there there Is that something Are there more portrayals of women in middle age

Lisa Whittington-Hill: 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.

Lisa Whittington-Hill: 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 a substance, which was a movie I loved and have watched many, many times since it came out. certainly this conversation about older women and about aging.

Lisa Whittington-Hill: 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.

Lisa Whittington-Hill: 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. It's macrame. I'm making a holder for my pot. It was Mrs. Cunningham on Happy Days. After I fix your breakfast in the morning, who do you think clears the table and washes the dishes and scrubs the floor in there?

Lisa Whittington-Hill: Certainly that taught me when I was younger, you know, here's a particular idea of, you know, what older women should look like, how much space they can take up, what they should have accomplished, what their lives look like. You know, the depictions we see now are a lot different certainly than Golden Girls or Mrs. Roper for sure.

Lisa Whittington-Hill: I kind of think of like when Obama was elected and everyone was like, oh, my gosh, we did it, y'all. No more racism. Cool. Everyone's like patting themselves on the back. Yeah. Cross that off the list. Yeah. What does the data actually show when it comes to portrayals of, you know, older women in the media and pop culture in general?

Lisa Whittington-Hill: 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.

Lisa Whittington-Hill: 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.

Lisa Whittington-Hill: We talked to Marae Silkoff, 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. We are. We are a polite nation that is not afraid to go there.

Lisa Whittington-Hill: 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 hang-ups. 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.

Lisa Whittington-Hill: 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?

Lisa Whittington-Hill: Definitely. So I had a lot of, 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.

Lisa Whittington-Hill: You know, she's a thin white woman for sure. I'd like to see a different version of a woman in Baby Girl. Nicole Kidman, one thing she's going to do, she's going to play a distressed rich white woman on either a prestige drama series or a movie. She's going to wear a fabulous bunch of wigs doing it too, right? She's got, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then she's going to take time out to tell us about the power of movies.

Lisa Whittington-Hill: Do you think society, and you know, by extension, movies, TV, do you think society's ready to kind of like deal with a realistic depiction of the aging female body? God, no. No, not at all. I wish, I wish it was. I wish, you know, I was thinking about this. I was having a conversation with my best friend last night, and we were sort of talking about representations of middle-aged women in pop culture.

Lisa Whittington-Hill: And we were saying that we would really love to see a show like Girls, but about, like, depicting middle-aged women. You know, these kind of messy, complicated lives that they have. And, you know, we were talking about Lena Dunham, everything she went through, showing her own body and all the kind of negativity and body shaming. But I would love to see a show like that. Like, I would love to see a show where middle-aged women aren't always married or have been married or don't always have kids.

Lisa Whittington-Hill: I think when middle-aged women are depicted often on screen, there is this particular idea of what their lives should look like and what they should have achieved and what it looks like to be a middle-aged woman. And I am not married. I don't have kids. You know, I'm caring for an aging parent. You know, those kind of things I would like to see more depicted.

Lisa Whittington-Hill: I think there is this particular representation. How hopeful are you that we'll get those portrayals as time goes on?

Lisa Whittington-Hill: I like to think I like to be hopeful. You know, I think one of the things I really loved about The Substance and seeing Demi Moore get all this kind of recognition and award nominations is it does make me hopeful. And seeing that really seeing there was Demi Moore for The Substance, Pamela Anderson for The Last Showgirl. I was loving kind of seeing all that, which it does give me hope, but I am a Gen X cynic. So I'm always cautious as well.

Host: All right, Lisa, thank you so much for explaining this to us.

Host: You're welcome.

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Host: I'm your host, John Glynhill. Thanks for listening. Talk to you soon. Bye!