Gen Sex

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Speaker 6 hi there this is sarah what are we talking about

Speaker 6 charlotte's boyfriend's balls

Speaker 8 hey all i'm jokelyn 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

Speaker 8 This week, we're giving some attention to a generation that we don't talk about much, Gen X.

Speaker 8 We're starting off with Marie Silkoff, who wrote a piece about her own experiences with aging and one of the ways that getting older has been pretty great.

Speaker 7 I split up from my ex in my late 40s and when I came out of it,

Speaker 7 I just thought that what lay ahead of me would be a pretty spinsterish existence.

Speaker 7 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?

Speaker 7 And now I'm 50 and, you know, that's what life is going to be like.

Speaker 7 Gonna be orange Pico T in Masterpiece Theater and taking care of my kids and hopefully remobilizing my writing and

Speaker 7 that's it.

Speaker 7 And then instead what happened was, you know, a lot of wonderful new relationships with a lot lot of wonderful men and the kind of sex that I don't think I had even had in my 20s.

Speaker 7 Like a total new

Speaker 7 world of openness and exploration and interest and comfort in myself and even, I dare say, wisdom.

Speaker 7 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, oh,

Speaker 7 like I really did it right, you know, or whatever.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 8 Marae'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?

Speaker 8 We asked you what it's been like navigating sex in your 40s and 50s, and listener Sarah answered.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 10 I'm happy to meet someone for a casual encounter, but I just don't want the responsibility of like

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 So I think it's, you know, I'm kind of framing it differently now.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 8 So who are you into these days? Like, what does your ideal look like? Like, do you have a type?

Speaker 10 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

Speaker 10 four or five guys I dated were about five years younger than me. So that's kind of my sweet spot right now.

Speaker 10 I always say I have a reverse dad complex. My dad was so good that I'm not interested in older men.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 2 I'm too old for you.

Speaker 12 No, I think you like to be told what to do.

Speaker 8 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?

Speaker 10 I feel like women age differently than men.

Speaker 10 I think I've noticed this as I like 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.

Speaker 10 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

Speaker 10 energy wise too, I think.

Speaker 8 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

Speaker 7 here.

Speaker 8 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?

Speaker 10 A hundred percent. Um, you know, there's something else that I think is interesting that's happening with that.

Speaker 10 Um, I feel like younger men kind of grew up in a little bit different era about like sex.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 Whereas, you know, I feel like men my age kind of didn't really have access to that information when I was growing up.

Speaker 8 Does it seem like sex is better than for you now than it was when you were in your 20s?

Speaker 10 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?

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 8 When did that switch happen for you?

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 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?

Speaker 10 They're killing it out there. They're killing it.
I feel like the media and

Speaker 10 just like the current climate has given us permission to spin on a pole at 50 if we want to.

Speaker 8 So things have gotten better for women in their 40s and 50s, but why?

Speaker 8 What's so different between the dating scene in 2025 and the dating scene in 1995?

Speaker 8 That's after the break.

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Speaker 8 This is Explain It to Me. I'm John Glenn Hill, and we're back talking about sex, women, and aging.
Marie says that things were different in the 80s and 90s.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 It was weird and messy and confusing and often dangerous in ways things aren't as much now.

Speaker 7 It was tough out there in the 90s.

Speaker 5 Indeed, I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate.

Speaker 12 Men act like idiots to a degree because they want us to.

Speaker 14 What do you do? Like when you guys are making love, I'm sure Tommy's good because I saw you in a thong on your most recent vacation. Where are you guys in Tahiti or something?

Speaker 7 And there was a lot of sex in the 90s. So there was kind of like a hardcore boot camp, if you will.

Speaker 7 You know, divorce is happening later than ever, right?

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 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,

Speaker 7 you know, sexual rediscovery later and finding that everything still works, 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.

Speaker 8 Why do you think this is happening with Gen X women in particular? Why is this generation so different from boomers?

Speaker 7 Boomers were constricted by a lot of societal mores that were, for lack of a better way of putting it, very mid-century, right?

Speaker 7 And, you know, free love and all of this stuff were basically boomer constructs, right?

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 There wasn't, you know, there were a lot of issues when it came to harassment.

Speaker 7 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?

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 Like, you know, it's a much more open environment now.

Speaker 8 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?

Speaker 7 I did both. I mean, I

Speaker 7 met my first boyfriend post-marriage just through friends.

Speaker 8 I love that. Yes.
First boyfriend post-marriage. Yes.

Speaker 7 And then my second boyfriend.

Speaker 8 No, this is great.

Speaker 7 I'm not going to go through the numbers, but the man I'm currently with now, I did meet online. And,

Speaker 7 you know, I actually loved online dating.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 7 What I want for middle-aged women now, right?

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 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, blah.

Speaker 7 Baloney, you know, once you get into, you know,

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 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

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 8 So that's how middle-aged women are feeling about sex. But is this awakening just social or is there something biological to it?

Speaker 13 I am Dr. Wandasha Jenkins Hall, and I am a human sexuality researcher and educator.
My interests deeply are into

Speaker 13 women's health and sexuality. And really now that I'm 37, just looking at how our sex and sexuality changes as we age.

Speaker 8 Okay, so remember how Marais said that middle-aged women are sometimes surprised to find that everything's still working down there? Dr. Jenkins Hall told us there's a reason for that.

Speaker 13 We're getting the message that we are just no longer valuable sexually, that we're no longer desirable sexually.

Speaker 13 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

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 We're going to be getting hair in crazy crazy places, hot flashes. And so sex is just going to be uncomfortable.
So the reality is, yes, bodies are changing.

Speaker 13 So yes, as we get closer to perimenopause and menopause, yes, estrogen does go down. Yes, we will see those changes with

Speaker 13 the vagina just due to those hormonal changes.

Speaker 13 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 to be able to go out and live and have our best sexual lives.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 And so, even with those things that are happening to our bodies, we're starting to find ways that work around that. So, we're not afraid of lube.

Speaker 13 We're starting to find ways to adjust with our changing mobility. So, sex is not

Speaker 13 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

Speaker 13 mainstream culture. So typically when it comes to the vagina, as we get older,

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 And when I say have sex, that means partnered and solo because you don't always have to have a partner to have sex.

Speaker 13 So, but I think just socially and how we're conditioned to understand sex, how we're 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.

Speaker 13 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

Speaker 13 identifying women or women in the LGBTQIA community, right? So those are conversations

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 Sexuality is a journey.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 It's going to change when you hit your 30s, 40s, 50s, and beyond.

Speaker 13 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?

Speaker 13 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 with ourselves, we can better communicate with our partners.

Speaker 13 And that means that we can have better sex at any age.

Speaker 8 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.

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Speaker 8 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?

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 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 hang-ups of their 20s, freedom from societal expectations of what sex could be, what it should look like.

Speaker 8 And I wonder how much of that has to do with what we're seeing in pop culture.

Speaker 8 You know, there's the baby girl of it all, there's the substance of it all, which was a huge commentary on women in aging.

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Speaker 8 Do you think there's a there there?

Speaker 8 Is that something? Are there more portrayals of women in middle age?

Speaker 11 I think there are. I mean, I think we have to be kind of careful how we think of middle age.
I think Hollywood in pop culture kind of thinks of middle age as any woman over the age of like 35 or 40.

Speaker 11 I think certainly we are seeing more kind of older women in Hollywood. Certainly Baby Girl was big and this led to this kind of conversation about age gaps in relationships.

Speaker 11 And certainly, you know, we usually see an older man and a younger woman.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 So this is kind of of having an effect, but certainly a substance, which was a movie I loved and have watched many, many times since it came out.

Speaker 11 Certainly this conversation about older women and about aging.

Speaker 11 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,

Speaker 11 that kind of thing.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 17 Lean over a mirror sometime and take a look at yourself. I think you better take a sedative before you look.

Speaker 11 You know, it was Golden Girls. It was Mrs.
Roper on Three's Company.

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Speaker 11 It was Mrs. Cunningham on Happy Days.

Speaker 18 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?

Speaker 11 And dust.

Speaker 11 And 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.

Speaker 11 You know, the depictions we see now are a lot different, certainly, than Golden Girls or Mrs. Roper, for sure.

Speaker 8 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 uh yeah everyone's like patting themselves on the back like yeah

Speaker 7 cross that off the list yeah

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 It was, you know, the year that Kate Winslet was nominated for Mayor of East Town and Jillian 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 The numbers still kind of show that it is very much younger women, younger actresses getting roles in Hollywood. Hollywood.

Speaker 8 We talked to Marie 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.

Speaker 8 Also, can I just say, Canadians, y'all are willing to go there in a way that Americans do not tend to be.

Speaker 11 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 less hang-ups.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 8 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?

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 You know, like Nicole Kidman is a beautiful

Speaker 11 white woman, wealthy in the movie.

Speaker 11 I think, you know, what I would really like to see is

Speaker 11 a baby girl with someone who doesn't look like Nicole Kidman.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 I'd like to see a different version of a woman in baby girl.

Speaker 8 Nicole Kidman, one thing she's going to do is she's going to play a distressed rich white woman on either a prestige drama series or a movie.

Speaker 11 She's going to wear a fabulous bunch of wigs doing it too, right?

Speaker 7 She's got, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 11 And then she's going to take time out to tell us about the power of movies.

Speaker 3 Somehow, heartbreak feels good in a place like this.

Speaker 8 Do you think society, and you know, by extension, movies, TV,

Speaker 8 do you think society is ready to kind of like deal with a realistic depiction of the aging female body?

Speaker 11 God, no.

Speaker 11 No, not at all. I wish, I wish it was.
I wish, you know, I was thinking about this. I was having a conversation

Speaker 11 with my best friend last night, and we were sort of talking about representations of middle-aged women in pop culture.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 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. I think there is this particular representation.

Speaker 8 How hopeful are you that we'll get those portrayals as time goes on, you know?

Speaker 11 I like to think, I like to be hopeful.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 And seeing that really, seeing there was Demi Moore for The Substance, Pamela Anderson for The Last Showgirl. I was loving kind of

Speaker 11 seeing all that, which it does give me hope, but I am a Gen X cynic, so I'm always cautious as well, you know.

Speaker 8 All right, Lisa, thank you so much for explaining this to us.

Speaker 10 You're welcome.

Speaker 8 That's it for this week's show. If you have a question for us, give us a call.

Speaker 8 Right now, we're working on some money-related episodes, and we'd love to know what questions you have about buying a home or using your credit card in this unpredictable economy.

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Speaker 8 This episode was produced and sound designed by Victoria Chamberlain.

Speaker 8 It was edited by Miranda Kennedy, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, and engineered by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristen's daughter, who also composed the music.

Speaker 3 I'm your host, John Glenhill.

Speaker 4 Thanks for listening.

Speaker 8 Talk to you soon.

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Speaker 2 Choose delivery or pickup and a week to love it or return it. Buy your car today with Carvana.
Delivery or pickup fees may apply. Limitations and exclusions may apply.

Speaker 2 See our seven-day return policy at Carvana.com.