Today, Explained - Gen Sex

Episode Date: March 23, 2025

Gen X women are freeing themselves from the hangups of the '90s, and having the best sex of their lives. Media portrayals of middle-aged women are starting to catch up too. If you have a question for us, please call us at 1-800-618-8545 or send a note at vox.com/askvox. This episode was produced and sound designed by Victoria Chamberlin, edited by Miranda Kennedy, fact checked by Melissa Hirsch, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Jonquilyn Hill. Actress Demi Moore at a press conference for the film "The Substance." Photo by ZOULERAH NORDDINE/AFP via Getty Images.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Just go to indeed.com slash Vox CA right now and support the show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash Vox CA. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need. The housing crisis in the GTA has reached a critical point with more than two and three residents being affected.

Reporting that almost nine million Canadians are living in food insecure households. Over one million people in the GTA now live below the poverty line. ... just out today. Mental health support is the number one reason people are calling 211 first. At United Way, we wake up to a different alarm every day. Help us end poverty and build a better GTA any way we can. Donate today at unitedwaygt.org. Hi there, this is Sarah. What are we talking about? Charlotte's boyfriend's balls? Hey y'all, I'm Jon Glenn 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. This week, we're giving some attention to a generation that we don't talk about much, Gen X. We're starting off with Marey Silkoff, who wrote a piece about her own experiences with aging, and one of the ways that getting older has been pretty great. Doing it, and doing it, and doing it well. with aging and one of the ways that getting older has been pretty great. I split up from my ex in my late 40s and when I came out of it, I just thought that what

lay ahead of me would be a pretty spinsterish existence. 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 gonna want this bag of problems? And now I'm 50 and you know, that's what life is gonna be like. Gonna be orange Pico T in Masterpiece Theater and taking care of my kids

and hopefully remobilizing my writing, and that's it. Meow. And then instead what happened was, you know, 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. Like a total new world of openness and exploration and interest and comfort in myself

and even, I dare say, wisdom. 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, like, I really did it right, you know, or whatever. 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 and beyond today. Marais' 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? We asked you what it's been like navigating sex in your 40s and 50s, and listener Sarah answered. 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. I'm happy to meet someone for a casual encounter, but I just don't want the responsibility of, like,

having to please that person every day, and that just sounds exhausting to me. And, um, I think, like, for me, sex has always been, like, an entry point into a relationship, so I think it's, you know, I'm kind of framing it differently now. Eventually, someday, I think it's, you know, I'm kind of framing it differently now. 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.

So who are you into these days? Like, what does your ideal look like? Like, do you have a type? Um, 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 four or five guys I dated were about five years younger than me. So that's kind of my sweet spot right now. I always say I have a reverse dad complex. My dad was so good

that I'm not interested in older men. 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. I'm too old for you. You think I don't like power? No, I think you like to be told what to do. 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? I feel like women age differently than men. 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. So I feel like I I don't know, the older woman, younger man, it's like they can keep up with us a little bit better, maybe

energy wise, too, I think. 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 here. Um, 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? A hundred percent. Um, you know, there's something else that I think is interesting that's happening with that. Um, I feel like younger men kind of grew up in a little bit different era about like sex 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. Whereas, you know, I feel like men my age kind of didn't really have access to that information when I was growing up. Does it seem like sex is better for you now than it was when you were in your 20s?

Yeah, I think 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? That it was sort of a bargaining piece to get someone to 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. When did that switch happen for you? 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. 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. 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? They're killing it out there, they're killing it.

I feel like the media and just like the current climate has given us permission to spin on a pole at 50 if we want to. So things have gotten better for women in their 40s and 50s, but why? What's so different between the dating scene in 2025 and the dating scene in 1995? That's after the break. Support for this show comes from Indeed. You just realized your business needed to hire somebody yesterday.

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Maray says that things were different in the 80s and 90s. 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. It was weird and messy and confusing and often dangerous in ways things aren't as much now. It was tough out there in the 90s. Indeed, I did have a relationship with Ms. Lewinsky that was not appropriate. Men act like idiots to a degree because they want us to. 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.

Were you guys in Tahiti or something? And there was a lot of sex in the 90s, so there was kind of like a hardcore boot camp, if you will. You know, divorce is happening later than ever, right? 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. 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 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.

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 mores that were, for lack of a better way of putting it, very mid-century, right? And you know, free love and all of this stuff were basically boomer constructs, right? 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.

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. There wasn't, you know, there were a lot of issues when it came to harassment. 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, 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. 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. Like, you know, it's a much more open environment now. 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? I did both.

I mean, I met my first boyfriend post-marriage just through friends. I love that. Yes, first boyfriend post-marriage. Yes. And then my second boyfriend. No, this is great. I'm not going to go through the numbers, but the man I'm currently with now, I did meet online. And, you know, I actually loved online dating.

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? What I want for middle-aged women now is to have a relationship with someone who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's

not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who's not married, who 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? What I want for middle-aged women now, right?

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. 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. You know, baloney. You know, once you get into, you know, later decades than your fifties 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. 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, do it with the partner you're married to. 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. 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 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.

So that's how middle aged women are feeling about sex. But is this awakening just social? Or is there something biological to it? I am Dr. Wendasha Jenkins-Hall and I am a human sexuality researcher and educator. My interests deeply are into women's health and sexuality and really now that I'm 37, just looking at how our sex and sexuality changes as we age. Okay. our sex and sexuality changes as we age. Okay, so remember how Murray 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. We're getting the message that we're just no longer valuable sexually, that we're no longer desirable sexually, 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 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. We're going to be getting hair in crazy places, hot flashes. And so sex is just going to be uncomfortable. So the reality is, yes, bodies are changing. So yes, as we get closer to perimenopause and menopause, yes, estrogen does go down. Yes, we will see those changes with the vagina just due to

those hormonal changes. However, that does not necessarily mean that sex just goes away, that we're not going to be desirable, that we're're not gonna be able to go out and live and have our best sexual lives. 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. 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. We're starting to find ways to adjust with our changing mobility. So sex is not 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 mainstream culture.

So typically when it comes to the vagina as we get older, 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. And when I say have sex, that means partnered and solo, because you don't always have to have a partner to have sex. So, but I think just socially and how we're conditioned to understand sex, how we are 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, 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, identify women are women in the LGBTQIA community, right? So those are conversations 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. Sexuality is a journey. 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, it's going to change when you hit your 30s, 40s, 50s, and beyond. 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? 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 to with ourselves, we can better communicate with our partners. And that means that we can have better sex at any age. 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. The Bombs, Bar Rescue, The Challenge, and Jersey Shore. All totally free on Pluto TV.

Stream now, pay never. This week on Unexplainable, the final installment of Good Robot, our four-part series on the stories we tell about AI. So what I want you to do first is I want you to open up Chad GPT. This time, the robots. And I want you to say, I'm going to give you three episodes of a series in order. Come for our jobs. Why are you laughing? I don't know, it's like a little creepy.

Good Robot, a four part series about AI from Julia Longoria and Unexplainable, wherever you listen. This has explained 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? 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. 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. And I wonder how much of that has to do with what we're seeing in pop culture, you know, there's the baby girl of it all, there's the substance of it all, which was a huge commentary on women and aging. One single injection unlocks your DNA and will release another version of yourself. Do you think there's a there there? Is that something? Are there more portrayals of women in middle age? I think there are. I mean, I think we have to be kind of careful how we think of middle age. I think Hollywood and pop culture kind of thinks of middle age as any woman over the age of like 35 or 40. I think certainly we are seeing more kind of older women in Hollywood. Certainly baby girl was big and it led to this kind of conversation about age gaps

in relationships and certainly, you know, we usually see an older man and a younger woman. 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. So this is kind of having an effect, but certainly a substance, which was a movie I loved and have watched many, many times since it came out. Certainly this conversation about older women

and about aging. 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, that kind of thing. 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. 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. Lean over a mirror sometime and take a look at yourself. I think you better take a sedative before you look. You know, it was golden girls. It was Mrs.

Roper on Three's Company. It's macrame. I'm making a holder for my pot. It was Mrs. Roper on Three's Company. It's macrame. I'm making a holder for my pot. It was Mrs. Cunningham on Happy Days. 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? And certainly that taught me when I was younger,

here's a particular idea of what older women should look like, how much space they can take up, what they should have accomplished, what their lives look like. The depictions we see now are a lot different certainly than Golden Girls or Mrs. Roper for sure. 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. Everyone's like patting themselves on the back, like problem solved, cross that off the list.

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, 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. It was, you know, the year that Kate Winslet was nominated for mayor of East town and Gillian 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. And, 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. 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. The numbers still kind of show that it is very much younger women, younger actresses getting roles in Hollywood. We talked to Marei Silkov, 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. Also, can I just say Canadians, y'all are willing to go there in a way that Americans do not tend to be.

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 hangups. 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. 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? 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.

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. You know, like Nicole Kidman is a beautiful white woman, wealthy in the movie. I think, you know, what I would really like to see is a baby girl with someone who doesn't look like Nicole Kidman. You know, someone who is not stereotypic, you know, this idea of what we think of when we think of beauty. You know, she's a thin white woman for sure.

I'd like to see a different version of a woman in Baby Girl. Nicole Kidman, one thing she's going to do, she's going to play a distressed rich white woman on either a prestige drama series or a movie. She's going to wear a fabulous bunch of wigs doing it too, right? She's got, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then she's going to take time out to tell us about the power of movies. Somehow, heartbreak feels good in a place like this. Do you think society, and you know, by extension, movies, TV, do you think society's ready to kind of like

deal with a realistic depiction of the aging female body? God, no. No, not at all. I wish, I wish it was, I wish, you know, I was thinking about this. I was having a conversation with my best friend last night and we were sort of talking about representations of middle-aged women in pop culture. 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 kinds of messy, complicated lives that they have. And, you know, we were talking about Lena Dunham every year, and we were talking about

Lena Dunham, and we were talking about Lena Dunham, and we were talking about Lena Dunham, and we were talking about Lena Dunham, and we were talking about Lena Dunham, and we were talking about Lena Dunham, and we were talking about Lena Dunham, and we were talking about Lena Dunham, and we were talking about Lena Dunham, and we were talking about Lena Dunham, and we were talking about Lena Dunham, and we were talking about Lena Dunham, and we were talking about Lena Dunham, and we were talking about Lena Dunham, and we were talking about Lena Dunham, and we were talking about Lena Dunham, and we were talking about Lena Dunham, and we were talking about Lena Dunham, and we were talking about Lena Dunham, and we were

talking about Lena Dunham, and we were talking about Lena Dunham, and we were talking about Lena Dunham, and we were talking about Lena Dunham, and we were talking about Lena Dunham, and we were talking about Lena Dunham, and we were talking about Lena Dunham, and we were talking about Lena Dunham, and we were talking about Lena Dunham, and we were talking about Lena Dunham, and we were talking about Lena Dunham, and we were talking about Lena Dun women, these kind of messy, complicated lives that they have. And 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. 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. 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. 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. I would like to see more depicted. I think there is this particular representation. How hopeful are you that we'll get those portrayals as time goes on, you know? I like to think, I like to be hopeful. 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. And seeing that really seeing there was Demi Moore for the substance, Pamela Anderson for the last showgirl. I was loving kind of seeing 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. All right, thank you so much for explaining this to us. You're welcome. That's it for this week's show. If you have a question for us, give us a call. 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. You can leave a voicemail at 1-800-618-8545 or send an email to askvox at vox.com. Bonus points if that email is a voice memo. This episode was produced and sound designed by Victoria Chamberlain. It was edited by Miranda Kennedy, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, and engineered by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Christensdottir, who also composed the music. I'm your host, John Glenn Hill. Thanks for listening. Talk to you soon. Bye!