Glynnis.
"Let the men figure out how to tell better stories about men."
Glynnis MacNicol is a 50-year-old writer and the author of the book “I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman’s Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris,” which chronicles the 6 weeks she spent living and loving (sex, and food, and herself) in Paris during 2021.
A few weeks ago, on the eve of the first anniversary of the publication of her book — and following her return to New York after running a writing workshop in Paris — I talked to Glynnis about tantric massage, making money, and sex with European men.
What follows is a condensed and edited version of our conversation.
NAOMI: What do you think of all this focus and commentary on our generation of women and sex? Where is this coming from?
GLYNNIS: So I wrote an op-ed last May that was actually prescient in a way that I wish it wasn't. But I actually think, I mean we're more or less the same age, but that we are evidence of two key laws in this country: One, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, which was the law that made it possible for women to get credit cards and bank accounts in their own name without male oversight, and Roe v. Wade. So you're seeing the culmination of Gen X women being born into a world where agency, both over our finances and our bodies, was technically something we had access to our whole lives. And the outcome of this is a lot of us not relinquishing our enjoyment, for lack of a better word, or our understanding of self.
We're getting better as we age, as opposed to this sort of sense of you'll cease to be appealing, you'll cease to be attractive. And I think you are evidence of both these things in the world and which is simultaneously connected to this vicious, violent rollback we're seeing of everything going on.
This is something my gynecologist said to me years ago during an appointment and I was describing symptoms, and she's like, “Well, it might just be your age.” And I said, “Well, how do we not know the answer to that?” And she's like, “Because research hasn't been done into perimenopause or anything about aging women's bodies. But you're part of the generation that is used to having answers to everything. You've been raised with answers to everything, and you're all going to come to this experience furious that no one can tell you what's going on and you're going to demand it.”
So I kind of see the same thing at work here, which is that, although Gen X never gets the attention the other generations get, we actually were raised with this idea of having access to most things and we're in a rage. I don't ever buy that sort of quiet generation not sense. I actually think we're pretty demanding and at the forefront of everything. We'll probably save the world subsequently.
But to answer your question more succinctly, my impression of why we're seeing all this is both the infrastructure of the world that we grew up in that allowed us access to determine self-identity and simultaneously being a generation that actually used to getting what we wanted. And we are like, “Well, I'm not going quietly into that good night as an aging woman who doesn't get that invisibility that I think was attached certainly to our mother's generation when we were growing up. It does not apply to our lives and nor will we allow it to.”
NAOMI: So what does it have to do with sex?