The Magazine Article.
You know, that story about sex and Gen X women that everyone sent everyone else last week.
My name is not Naomi. It’s a nom de plume to protect my identity. Though names and certain details have been changed, all the stories are true.
Two days before I published my first post on this Substack I woke up to find a flurry of texts from friends alerting me to a brand new New York Times Magazine cover story about how Gen X women are having the best sex.
Then one of my cats hit me in the face because it was time for breakfast.
Writer Mireille Silcoff was born in 1973, as was I. She begins her story with mention of her 2019 divorce, her struggles with her career, and her return to her hometown of Montreal, where, she says, she endured the “kind of isolation that comes from exiting a relationship that has defined nearly half your life.” And yet, Silcoff tells us, despite all these challenges — not to mention the arrival of a pandemic and the pressures of being a mother to two kids — the 46-year-old found herself having great, “plentiful” sex.
Silcoff’s thesis is that there’s something special about Generation X and sex that “…somehow belongs to my generation, and particularly the women of my generation.” (“In an era plagued by sex negativity, only one generation seems immune: mine,” reads the subhed on her story.) Silcoff situates this in Generation X’s experience of childhood, adolescence and young adulthood, before the introduction of smartphones and social media, when sex ed was “thoroughly analog, which is to say, human and exploratory.”
“The internet was barely public,” she writes. “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).”
Silcoff’s piece is persuasive and incisive, though not particularly earth-shattering. Maybe that’s because she’s exploring territory and tugging at threads that have been tugged at elsewhere over the past year: Miranda July’s bestselling book All Fours; Glynnis MacNichol’s memoir I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself; Ali Wong’s standup special “Single Lady”; the films Babygirl and The Substance. I talk to my friend Alison, a divorced Gen X-er who is herself going through a sexual renaissance, and she tells me that what felt most interesting about the article was not so much the argument it was making but how many people sent it to her thinking that the argument was somehow new.
I don’t think that’s entirely fair — devoting the cover of your general interest magazine to the sex lives of middle-aged females is fairly out of the ordinary. But there are elements of Silcoff’s story that were hard for me to identify with…or areas of squandered inquiry that didn’t go unnoticed. For one thing, she was definitely more successful at sex than I was in my youth, having lost my virginity at the ripe old age of eighteen. (She was 15.) Silcoff says that she had sex in lots of places: nightclubs, high school fields and in the offices of the businesses in which she worked part time. She enjoyed, as she puts it, “a lot of partners.” All of which suggests to me that perhaps some of Silcoff’s insights about Gen X women and sex are informed by her past successes, whereas mine are informed by my past failures.
Furthermore, the women Silcoff seems to be writing about — and for — are financially well-off and on the fairer side of the fairer sex. (All the women in the photographs accompanying her article appear to be Caucasian). She expresses concern 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,” she adds. “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.”
Maybe! But beauty standards vary according to, among other things, race and class, and these sound, well, ”blindingly white.”
At least she never mentions Gwyneth Paltrow.
I wait a few days before reading the comments on the story. There are a lot — at the time of this writing, 1,492 of them. (The comments section appears to be closed.) I am not surprised to see that most negative responses come from men. Andrew in Brooklyn complains that the story is “a long article about sex after fifty and NOT A SINGLE man is mentioned or interviewed.” (Lol.) Another dude feels the need to confess that he doesn’t feel “intrigued” by the subject matter. Others accuse Silcoff of “man-bashing” and being in a mid-life crisis. “It seems like there are a lot of middle & upper class women circa age 50 who are somewhat delusional about their value in the dating market,” scoffs Richard Ralph from Birmingham.
Other commenters complain about the timing of the article, coming, as it is, in the midst of a maelstrom of Trump executive orders that appear intended to crush what’s left of American democracy. When I mention all this to Alison, she tells me that the comments on the Times’ Instagram post about the story are particularly obnoxious and over the top. “A lot of it feels like ageism,” she says. I go to take a look.
“Respectfully, we got more serious shit to talk about other than older women knocking boots,” is the first comment I come across.
I mean, I get it. I’ve also been wondering whether or not now is the time to be writing and oversharing about my sex life, considering that this country’s democratic traditions, institutions, safety nets, and commitments are being dismantled before our very eyes. And this is just a personal Substack we’re talking about!
The thing is, a “sex life” — mine, yours, theirs — is part of life. And I can’t change the fact that there’s an overlap between my second puberty and a political environment that is scaring the shit out of everyone I know. Though it’s entirely possible that I’m using sex as a distraction from other terrifying parts of my everyday, including parental aging and fear of professional irrelevance, my friend Rachel points out that we need to keep on living, create community and cultivate joy, despite what appears to be a coup by nihilist white Christian nationalists who hate women. (Among other people.) Maybe even because of it.
“We have to remember that we’re alive and have purpose in this world that is not dictated by small, hateful men who want nothing more than for us to not enjoy or own bodies and lives,” she says to me one day. (Rachel is very wise.) “We’re all trying to figure whit out. No one knows how to approach this moment. Don’t tell us how we’re doing it wrong.”
I ask Natalie, who is herself a major oversharer, for her thoughts. She says that it isn’t so much that writing about sex feels unseemly at this moment in history as it comes across as stale. “I find this tsunami of confessional sex essays so boring,” she tells me. She tells me some other things too, and I feel my face redden: She’s talking about me! I point this out, a little defensively.
“I don’t care, I’m not going to read the newsletter.”
I laugh. I’m not surprised. And I don’t take it personally. After all, Natalie has been married for decades and has great sex on the regular. I don’t think she understands what it is to be single, or divorced. Or both.
The day I starting writing this post I get a text from my friend Maggie, with whom I’ve reconnected because she saw my photo on the Hinge profile of a man who sent her a “like.” The man is a friend’s ex-boyfriend, and, for some reason, his profile features an image of him sitting next to me in a restaurant. (Yes, it’s weird and creepy and yes, I should tell him to take it down.)
Maggie is a year older than me, also divorced, and, like Silcoff, is mother to two kids. (She also has a Substack about her dating life.) Maggie’s text is a link to a magazine story claiming that what we commonly call a “mid-life crisis” is actually a phenomenon based on what’s called a “Chiron Return.” (This all feels very LA, but bear with me.)
Apparently, something happens between the ages of 46 and 53 — happens astrologically, that is — wherein the smallest planet in the solar system, Chiron, returns to the place where it was when we were born. And stays. For over half a dozen years.
I thought the smallest planet in the solar system was Mercury, but no matter.
According to the magazine story, the return of Chiron, also known as the “wounded healer,” offers us the opportunity to address old injuries and unresolved issues, and “another chance for you to align with your soul’s true intention.”
“Anything that keeps resurfacing, that still needs to be healed will come back up at this time in your life,” it explains. “You may even experience an intense healing crisis or be left facing the consequences of choices and decisions you’ve made in the past, but you can also experience a real sense of completion, of coming back home to you and your true calling.”
“I feel like this is where I’m at currently,” Maggie says. “Maybe you are too!”
I laugh and tell her that somehow I don’t think that being an older woman knocking boots and writing about it is my “true calling,” but it’s where I’m at right now, and it’s a fuckload of fun.
Chiron or no Chiron, I know that I’m lucky. Blessed, even. I have enough time and financial security to be able to spend multiple hours a week focused on my sex app — and the conversations, dates, ghostings and (semi-regular) sexual encounters that result from my engagement with it.
Many of my single female friends inhabit similar spaces. (With the exception of Natalie.) And though we don’t take our privileges for granted, we also won’t apologize for them. Nor are we willing to concede to accusations or assumptions that an acute interest in sex — and sex as experienced by women — is a de facto focus on the superficial. Only a man would say that.
Which brings me to the gentleman in the Instagram comments of the New York Times, who needs to please sit down. And stay there. Because there’s literally nothing preventing anyone from agitating to save democracy by day and knocking boots by night. I mean, hasn’t he heard? Women are great at multitasking. And, as my friend Olivia says, only sluts can save us.