If you’ve read the news lately, you’ve probably heard that Americans may be in the middle of a sex recession. But at least one demographic of people are having the best sex of their lives: Gen X women. At least that’s the argument writer Mireille Silcoff makes in her most recent piece in the New York Times magazine.
In it, she explores her own middle-aged sexual awakening. “I was trying to explain a moment that I was really seeing everywhere,” she told Vox. Between her own life, her friends’ experiences, and the portrayals in pop culture that were popping up everywhere, she sensed a trend emerging. “There seems to be something new in the air having to do with 50-year-old women, their bodies, sex, and relationships.”
So what is in the air right now? And what’s behind these later-in-life sexual revelations? We talked to Silfcoff to find out exactly what’s going on here in this week’s episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in show. Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to Explain It to Me on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.
What prompted you to write about this in the first place?
I split up from my ex in my late 40s, after a very long relationship of 21 years. When I came out of it, I just thought that what lay ahead of me would be a pretty spinster-ish existence. I was really, really sick for a long time in my adulthood, and my marriage was very long and there were two children. I just felt like, “Well, who is going to want this bag of problems? Now I’m 50.” Life is going to be orange pekoe tea, Masterpiece Theater, taking care of my kids, and hopefully remobilizing my writing, and that’s it. And then instead what happened was I had 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: a total new world of openness, exploration, interest, comfort in myself, self-knowledge and even, I daresay, wisdom. It felt revelatory.
And at first, I felt like this was my weird, cool story. But then, as stuff started coming out of the culture, some of my other friends divorced and had similar situations to mine, I realized that 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.
What do you think the factors are in this mid-life sexual revitalization?
The women who are middle-aged now are — for the most part — Gen X. You’re starting to get some millennial middle-aged people as well. And Gen X women had a really interesting formative experience when it comes to sex in the 90s. Divorce is also happening later than ever.
Divorce and sexual exploration for women is a very old story: You get divorced and suddenly find a little piece of yourself sexually. I feel like that’s kind of a big part of the story as well. So women having a bit of this sexual rediscovery later and finding when they’re 47 or 55 that desire is still there, that sexual function is still there, that — thanks to the amazing strides that Gen Z and millennials have made opening up what’s acceptable sexually — acceptance is still there.
So Gen X women are more comfortable in their bodies. They may be more into figuring out kinks and things like that. 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 norms that were, for lack of a better way of putting it, very mid-century. There was an open attitude toward sex, and free love was a boomer construct. But what happened with all of that stuff is that when all of those ideas really came to roost in the late ’80s and the early ’90s — when women were suddenly working but men were still the bosses — it created a tough situation for the people who inherited that very open sexual culture.
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 bosses who were sexually predatory. There weren’t a lot of roadmaps for how to have sex or how to be a sexual person. That was both good and bad, because, for instance, many women didn’t experience orgasms because they just couldn’t figure out how and their male partners couldn’t figure out how so it just didn’t happen. I feel like that wouldn’t happen now. You’ve got things like OMG Yes, which is a website where you can find out how to have a female orgasm. It’s a much more open environment now in order to find out about sex. But at the same time among the younger generations, there is a bit of a cliff that’s happened with sexual frequency.
I want to talk about that a little bit. There are so many conversations right now about how young people are having less and less sex. It seems like there’s a backlash to sex positivity. Do you think millennials and Gen Z women take these sexual freedoms for granted?
You do take it for granted, as you should. The parents create the situation, and the young people take it for granted.
I think that the culture has basically conspired in every way imaginable against intimacy, against having an open and easy sexuality, against relationships. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that you really see the sexual drop off starting to happen in the same years that the iPhone was introduced. It’s in the same years that social media really got going.
“The culture has basically conspired in every way imaginable against intimacy, against having an open and easy sexuality, against relationships.”
People go out less, they hang out less. They do things together less in weird spaces where things can get weird. There was a lot more natural weirdness back in the day. And natural weirdness can lead to intimate moments which can lead to sex. I just feel like there’s a certain cleanliness of experience in the culture right now where people are so afraid to intermingle in those old ways. It has had a big effect on people’s ability to hook up or have casual sex or go from one boyfriend to another to another until you find one that you like. In some ways, I think it’s wonderful for middle-aged people who already had that socialization.
What do you hope for middle-aged women moving forward? Especially when it comes to sex, desire, and relationships?
Now is the time 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. I want women to know that it is fleeting because things don’t last forever. 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. 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 for women who aren’t into having sex, or who can’t have a very active sex life at the age of 50 to 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.
