In 2019, I divorced, at age 46, and went on to have more and better sex than I ever would have thought possible.
I had not imagined that the end of a 20-year relationship would mean a new era of high eroticism; I’d have needed to be delusional to think that. I was middle-aged, with two young children, a bunch of chronic illness and a bank account that was essentially handed over to divorce lawyers. My career was on life support, and after years away in bigger cities, I was back in my hometown, Montreal, enduring the kind of isolation that comes from exiting a relationship that has defined nearly half your life. Then the pandemic hit.
And yet.
In the beginning I thought it was just my own cool and unusual story. Returning to plentiful sex in my late 40s felt weirdly intuitive, like hearing an old favorite song and finding that of course I still knew all the words. There were new frills — I’d cook decadent meals, buy absurd lingerie, pretend that I always had Japanese whiskey hanging around — but I also found that I was better at sex, and that this was because I was older. I had fewer inhibitions, fewer hangups and more self-love than I did as a taut 24-year-old. And the culture of sex in the 2020s felt more exploratory, more forgiving. The date rapes and creepy professors that filled my 1990s were gone; the workplace harassment and idiotic full Brazilians that peppered my early 2000s were over. The fear of pregnancy was finished, as was the pressure to land a partner to make babies with. Everything that remained felt like a privilege: There was desire, and there was the ability to fulfill it.
It turns out this was not just my story. Five years since that divorce, it seems clear that what I have been doing privately is part of something bigger — a story that somehow belongs to my generation, and particularly the women of my generation.
The media’s confirming this has been kind of unrelenting. A few months ago, Netflix served me a scrolling bar of options labeled “Grown-Ass Women Living Their Best Lives,” full of movies about middle-aged women unrepentantly getting it on, not because they were weak but because they had arrived. Last year brought not one but two movies in which an accomplished, tastefully dressed Nicole Kidman (57) has a sexual affair with a much younger man, and one in which an accomplished, tastefully dressed Laura Dern (57) does the same. In literature, the 56-year-old actor Gillian Anderson put out “Want,” a collection of female sexual fantasies; Glynnis MacNicol, 50, wrote “I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself,” a popular memoir about going to Paris to get laid; Molly Roden Winter wrote the salacious “More,” about her open marriage. And of course there was Miranda July’s blockbuster novel, “All Fours,” a barmy midlife sextravaganza, which The New York Times named “the First Great Perimenopausal Novel” and which contained so many uncannily truth-telling moments that it nearly exploded all my messaging apps with shared photos of its pages.
A whole new cultural type seems to have landed. It feels worlds away from the traditional view of older women’s sexuality — which, if you look at the lion’s share of studies, you would conclude is incredibly depressing. Until the late 20th century, academic studies of aging women were dominated by what sociologists call the “misery perspective,” which emphasizes how people’s lives get worse as they age, burdened by factors like chronic illness and financial distress. Spend time reading papers with titles like “We’re Just Tired: Influences on Sexual Activity Among Male-Partnered Women in Midlife,” and you will emerge with a dour picture of what it means to be sexual and female at 50, a deflating biomedical index of problems, from diminished libido to painful sex to vaginal atrophy to breasts with no sensitivity. You will read about the possibility of new partners’ being ransacked by caregiving responsibilities — how, if you have a 10-year-old at home or an 80-year-old in a home (or both), chances are you are not out shopping for slinky skivvies to wear for liquid dinners à deux in bed. Add to this a ratio issue, rooted partly in the habit of men’s linking up with younger women, and the picture becomes even more grim.
But this year I looked around at the women I know and saw a completely different plane of existence. “The women I know” is, by definition, not a representative sample, but still: Two of my friends ended marriages because of their own sexual dissatisfaction. Another divorced and became a card-carrying polyamorist. Two of my friends in their 50s are seriously dating people in their 30s, and a few others are, like me, divorced and engaging in sex practices they’d never tried before. I am sure that every one of us recognizes aspects of the “misery perspective” in all those papers, but it does not describe our lives right now. I can tell, because when one of us needs an endometrial ablation for unrelenting perimenopausal bleeding, or a hysterectomy for fibroids growing larger than citrus fruits, or agrees to take an aging parent or a partner’s kids into her home, a big question inevitably seems to be: What will this do to my sex life?
I’ve come to think of this cadre of women as something like hardy garden perennials. Year after year, with the right conditions, perennials continue to flower. Likewise, the sexual Perennial finds herself still well rooted in an erotic life at an age when she may have expected it to fade or wither.
This is all the more remarkable because, for the culture as a whole, physical sex really is withering and fading. Among the most defining ongoing stories about sex in America today has been the drop-off in activity among Gen Z and Millennials. Blame for that decline has generally been placed on the way we live in the 21st century: the atomization of our social lives; the antidepressants that can kill the libido; the phones and social media that provide endless fascination, even on boring evenings when other things could be happening; the always-available porn that offers both problematic expectations of how in-person sex happens and a far less demanding alternative to it. For young parents, the intensity of modern child-rearing shrivels sex lives. For teenagers, a growing obsession with personal and psychological safety, a desire to be immune from discomfort, can flatten eroticism in some of the places it might flourish.
Last year I even saw one survey that, at a glance, seemed to me to suggest that people in their late 40s and early 50s might be having sex more frequently than those between 18 and 24. When I got in touch with the generational researcher Jean Twenge, whose best-selling books (most recently, “Generations”) have done much to explain the differences among birth cohorts, she was skeptical of those findings. But the subtler data she did pull up — mainly using General Social Survey data from 1989 to 2022 — still made a clear case for a kind of maverick sexiness among those currently in middle age.
When you track sexual frequency among age groups, something notable happens around 2007: a downward curve in activity among people 18 to 40 that turns into a sheer nosedive in the decade that follows. Today’s young adults are having sex 30 percent less often than young adults in the early 2000s. Such declines have occurred across the generational spectrum. But one generation, in its middle age, is experiencing a much less pronounced drop from the sexual frequency of its predecessors. Using the same measures, Twenge says, “the drop among Generation X is pretty small.” It’s only 9 percent.
The sexual Perennials of this generation do not fit neatly into any of the well-trodden archetypes of older women, like the cougar or the MILF — these degrading male-gaze notions of women precariously perched on the brink of undesirability. Pop culture is only now beginning to create new symbols of them, while those of the past feel silly or peculiar. (In the 1980s, Blanche Devereaux of “The Golden Girls” was often portrayed as a swooning, silk-draped clown for merely having a libido; at the start of that series she was supposed to be around 53, which is two years younger than Jennifer Lopez is now.) The Perennial’s vibe is not about finding a pocket of succor after the sun of youth has set. It is, rather, a power stance — a matter of caring less and less about such expectations the older you get.
I would love to imagine that this development is a permanent one — that the culture is finding a lasting perch for the sexuality of all older women. But I cannot shake a strong hunch that what we are seeing among middle-aged women is a function of the specific generation currently occupying those years. This is a cohort of women with formative experiences that do not resemble those of the generations surrounding them: a generation that began having sex earlier than any other on record, that stayed on the singles market for years longer than their parents, that is continuing to have sex even amid a broader sexual decline. I do not think it is a coincidence that the women I’ve written about thus far are part of Generation X, born between 1965 and 1980.
Gen X, a small generation compared with relatively larger cohorts like Millennials or Gen Z, “kind of dodged a bullet,” Twenge told me — by which she meant that while our lonely, iPhone-defined century came for everyone’s libido, some were defined by it, while others were merely affected. By the time the 21st century really landed, much of Generation X was already largely formed in terms of sexual habit. And this may be why, in middle age, it is shaping up to be possibly the sexiest generation on record. “You can even make the statement,” Twenge said, “that Gen X is the last sexy generation.”
I was born in about the middle of the Gen X span, in 1973. Like many Gen Xers, I lost my virginity early — in my case, at 15. By 2007, when the iPhone was introduced and the spiral of American sexual decline becomes highly visible, I was 34 and had been sexually active for nearly two decades. My sex ed was thoroughly analog, which is to say, human and exploratory, because there was no alternative. The internet was barely public, home computing was confined to blinking greenish screens and porn did not live on the surface of culture; if you wanted it, it was something you had to seek out in public places that were either embarrassing (newsstands) or creepy (bead-curtained back rooms, squalid theaters).
So the way that I figured out sex was all over the city: in guys’ houses or the field near my high school; in the back office of the boutique where I worked; in nightclubs entered with fake ID. Today, as a mother to two children whose whereabouts I am in 100 percent, constant awareness of, I think of my own pubescence with not a little bewilderment: I had parents and stepparents, and yet my childhood feels decidedly “Peanuts”-like in its absence of grown-ups. (The public-service refrain Americans were treated to at the time — “It’s 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are?” — sounds absolutely surreal today, when modern parenting has so thoroughly glued our children to the sides of our bodies.) I remember spending my youth in all kinds of places — libraries, swimming pools, parks, cafes, the subway — with sometimes random bunches of other people: kids I knew, kids I didn’t, kids who were good and kids who were problems. We were expected to figure out these interpersonal dynamics, the general weirdness that is other people, on our own.
Some have called Gen X a “forgotten” generation; others have labeled it “neglected” by parents whose 1960s and 1970s self-centering rendered children something of a nuisance. But the free-range vibe of the era’s parenting feels like a circumstantial issue as much as a choice. My divorced mother worked, but unlike the typical family in previous eras, there was no easy intergenerational arrangement to take care of me while she was not home, and unlike now, there was no question of my father’s helping out after school ended at 3:45, nor school day care programs for households like mine. Like so many others of my generation, I rode home on the city bus, let myself in, watched “Three’s Company” with a box of Ritz crackers and eventually grew up to make jokes about having been raised by wolves. Much of this generation learned to fend for itself young. Gen X was, on some level, the last generation to be raised this way, before new standards of safety and ideas about parental responsibility made children far more predominant in their guardians’ schedules.
For women, that toughness would come in handy in the 1990s, the decade during which most of today’s middle-aged people came of age. When I first had sex, I remember rushing home to call a girlfriend and tell her the news. There was a real sense of relief, of growing closer to hallowed adulthood — something we all wanted badly, not realizing this was partly because we were launched out of childhood too early. (You need not take my word for this: The teenage birthrate was no small crisis in the 1990s and dropped by 78 percent from 1991 to 2022.) At the time, it mattered less to me that, while fooling around, the guy in question had forced himself into me. That part was unpleasant, but it felt, as an occurrence, normal enough.
Looking back now, I find it insane that I did not recognize that I was raped. Even when I heard discussions about “date rape” a few years later, I remember feeling somewhat mewling or impostor-like counting myself as a victim. At the time, I just moved on — largely into a queer nightclub scene where I found what became a kind of home and a family. I did not yet much even like sex, but I had a lot of partners, and if something went wrong with a condom, or if another surprise entry occurred, I would go to a clinic and get a morning-after pill or an S.T.D. test, as if I were picking up a particularly terrifying coffee. In 1991, when I was 18 and starting college, I was in a vogueing house that won Montreal’s first vogue ball. By 1992, two out of the five members of the house were dead from AIDS, and one was H.I.V. positive. When I think of sex in those years, “fun” is not the first word that comes to mind.
In his book “The Naughty Nineties,” David Friend quotes Kathleen Hanna, the frontwoman of the riot grrrl band Bikini Kill, describing her ’90s feminism in a Times interview by saying that she didn’t just hit the glass ceiling; she pressed her naked breasts up against it. In its chicky, disobedient boastfulness, Hannah’s line feels so of the era, and yet today it invites a double take: Wouldn’t it be better for her to not be naked? But as Friend demonstrates, sex coated what felt like every corner of the 1990s culture, even to the highest echelons of power: Bill Clinton’s Oval Office semen stains, the Clarence Thomas hearings’ talk of “Long Dong Silver,” Prince Charles’s telling his mistress Camilla Parker-Bowles that he might be reincarnated as her Tampax. The ambience of female sexual emancipation and “girl power” was increasingly in the mainstream, but the surrounding culture was still entrenched in the kind of ogling, cigar-chomping sexism you might associate with earlier eras. Women were often tightly whaleboned into the most predictable sex roles, either fending off rapacious men or, as the decade deepened, appearing in movies and magazines as sex-crazed nymphettes who could never get enough.
By the time I finished college, I had integrated my own rather saw-toothed sexual history into a tough-as-nails, big-as-the-boys form of Camille Paglia-esque feminism. This wisecracking persona was nearly necessary at the Montreal newspaper where I worked, and where I endured more than one editorial meeting sitting on the lap of my editor. One Halloween, a fellow journalist showed up at a party in only tight white underwear and a cape, claiming to be dressed as “Rape Man.” This was not an environment I often questioned. I remember dreaming up ways to cultivate and exude a kind of tomboy-fatale stance of high ennui — an irony-steeped, seen-it-all, “whatever” type of womanhood, synonymous at the time with hipness and credibility. Cool women didn’t whine; we rolled our eyes at everything. I might even have imagined that being able to work under a heavy brume of machismo and high sexual charge, while submitting copy that was clean, was itself a kind of girl power. Of course, this protective cover ensured that such a workplace could run unobstructed.
I do not want to suggest that today’s Perennial is simply a callused product of so much formative chaos. The point is that today’s less toxic, less male-dominated sexual landscape might feel like a particularly nice and even forgiving landing place for women who lived through that era. Sexual frequency may have waned among the young, but the young have also helped to create a kinder and more open-minded world of sex, full of body positivity and gender questioning, consent culture and the acceptance of all kinds of desire. (Also, a recognition that the “adult” supervision of an H.R. department can be a positive thing.) In encountering all this, the Gen X woman — my postdivorce self very included — might feel as if she has reached some kind of welcoming flip side. She was primed for hard-core jungle combat in a pencil skirt and now, so many years later, finds herself in a womblike bouncy castle where women are invited not just to have orgasms but also to have important conversations about their orgasms.
Just as in all those movies on Netflix, the rise of the Perennial does feel like something of an intergenerational dance — what happens when the mores of one age cohort intermingle with those of others. In so many memoirs and films and TV shows, the older women are found in relation to younger men. It doesn’t track as cougar-ism; it feels more like serendipity. Even beyond the fact that you can now buy clitoral stimulators at the pharmacy and even insensitive dudes have heard that they shouldn’t shove themselves inside you without your OK, the very possibility of the Perennial has emerged from a random scrum of factors. You have women who found themselves free of marriage in middle age. (In 1980, the median age for women getting their first divorce was about 30; in 2020, it was around 40.) You have women who are more educated and earn more than ever. You have women who are interpersonally rugged and who can be light and easy with sex because they worked their way through so much difficult sex when they were young. And you have women who are, in certain ways, immune to the neutering forces of the 21st century — because, both sexually and socially, they were formed before it.
Nearly every woman I spoke to for this article — from Gillian Anderson to old girlfriends from my first newspaper jobs — mentioned that she felt as if she was living in a lovely interstice. “It’s like, right now the lights are on,” Anderson said. “We are open for business. And it’s not just that we are not giving up — we want to do more, and maybe there is this thirst to do it now.” I myself have seen, as menopause has come into the picture, how my libido has subtly changed: how the rampant desire and thoughtless lubrication that were available to me even four years ago, when I first divorced, take a little more work now. Sometimes, on days when my whole body hurts for no reason I can fathom, and the lines between my nose and the corners of my mouth make me feel as if I resemble a sad walrus, and my parents are angry at me for God knows what boomerish reason, and my kids are mounting campaigns for still more screen time, and the work and overwhelm are peaking to the point when a shower seems like a faraway dream, I, too, feel much more at home in the misery perspective.
The fleetingness is built in, and it might make the experience of being sexually existent in middle age feel even more special. What need not be fleeting is the effect this new opening could have on younger generations. When I first divorced, I sometimes tried to imagine aspects of my life as seen through the eyes of my two daughters, wondering if they found my romantic revitalization — something I did not think could be entirely hidden from them — to be weird. I was different from the flattened, married mother they knew until then. And I knew, from my own experience as a child of divorce, that what happens to your parents after a split can sink in deep, reframing a child’s whole sense of what adulthood is like. I thought about it a lot: For my own children, what messages, about life and age and womanhood, were being instilled? This may be the lasting question for today’s Perennials: What are we setting up our daughters for, and will it be good?
Some aspects of the type being created today are clearly worrisome. It feels, for instance, tied to — or is at the very least happening concurrently with — the fact that today’s 50-year-old women, not least the famous ones, can look the way women of 50 have never looked: sculpted, dewy, pert, with long manes and line-free brows and flat abs and blindingly white teeth. These standards are exhausting for anyone, but for the middle-aged, I would venture, more exhausting. No matter how self-loving, I do not think there is a 50-year-old woman on Earth who does not stand in the mirror at some point and feel as if some part of her body is melting like a candle over itself. Yet the general understanding — even in more enlightened offerings like Miranda July’s “All Fours” — is that physical aging is something that can be dealt with, a hurdle to be jumped over in order to be primed for sex. For July’s protagonist, the realization that her butt no longer looks round and contained but long, “like a pair of fat arms,” inspires a regime of workouts to make her backside so lifted “it would choke me.”
The message is that the Perennial works when the Perennial works out. All she needs is money, and insane amounts of time and effort, and, soon enough, knowledge of where to get Botox and fillers and lasers and bioidentical hormones and keratin hair treatments and vaginal rejuvenation and God knows what else. This aesthetic youthification — which brings the tyranny of a 20-something-defined hotness ever higher up the age range, to places where it is harder and harder to attain — feels apparent in movies such as “The Substance” (featuring 62-year-old Demi Moore) and “Babygirl” (with Kidman as the cryogenically nubile Romy). Both purport to comment on sexism and ageism while the youth-focused bodies and faces of their leads, these Everest-like achievements in Pilates or cosmetic alteration, play what feels like a co-starring role.
This is one road we could thoughtlessly amble down: one defined by youth, as if youth remained the only place where sex really belonged. We could embrace an aesthetic of privilege, bifurcating the women who can and the women who can’t. I worry, even, that by writing about any of this, I could be aiding the creation of a pressurized container, a standard that makes women feel bad or deficient for “aging poorly” if they are not having sex or not interested in it. All we will have accomplished, in this case, is to confine women within the same old rules of youth for an extra decade or two, before they are exiled, just as they were before. And maybe people like my daughters will look at 50-something women with that extra shirt button undone and think only that old people are embarrassing horndogs, still clinging to 20th-century licentiousness, and that relative asexuality is the better option.
But what the Perennial has for herself right now is something far better than all that, something that can stand up against the old rules of youth. There is research on this, too: Contra the misery perspective of aging, a new school called “critical gerontology” has focused on the positive effects of aging, including improved sex lives for women. According to Lisa Miller, author of the 2019 study “The Perils and Pleasures of Aging,” many women in middle age and beyond are now finding their “sexual voice,” experimenting and claiming the right to be satisfied. This is what I see around me. These women enjoy the most beautiful spoils of aging — things like caring less about social standards that they no longer have use for, or being more comfortable in their bodies precisely because they have lived in them for so long. It would be a shame if these benefits turned out to be nothing more than a temporary sweet spot that only one small generation lucked its way into. It is not simply about stretching the mores of youth. It can hold a much deeper meaning: an acceptance that the chapters of life have, over the past few decades, been reshuffled, and that there are more chapters than there used to be.
I am not telling you that 50 is the new 30. I am saying that when life’s milestones are moved around, new opportunities are created. My younger daughter often marvels — or maybe just scratches her head — over the fact that I am twice the age of some of the other mothers in the schoolyard, and yet nothing like a grandmother. Even though many of the women around me also had children in their late 30s or early 40s, this is information my kid is clearly unsure what to do with: her mother living in this unnamed category where age is very much upon me, but so much, from sex life to work life, is alive with change. This could mean that retirement is something I never get to do. But as Gillian Anderson says, another outcome is that I am open for business in so many ways, ways that now restore more than they exhaust.
The Perennial, I think, has a rare opportunity to shape this stage, to help redefine how it will one day be approached by women much younger. Maybe there will be two kinds of sex — sex for young people and sex for old people — and the second of those things will give our girls something to look forward to.
Mireille Silcoff is a writer and cultural critic based in Montreal. She has previously written about celebrities’ publicly revealing their illnesses, the fading of teen subcultures and “The Golden Bachelor.” Naila Ruechel is a photographer who is originally from Jamaica. She is known for her lush, elegant imagery with a heightened sense of intimacy.
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