00:03:28.960So I think that piece, though, is really about women outside of partnership. Right. Like it's a lot a lot of that piece was talking to women who've been recently divorced or who haven't married and are at an age where for most of history, you get slapped with the sort of like spinster, sad spinster.
00:03:49.000and the reality of it is anything but that so i think it's like oh things can be great you know
00:03:57.960at a time when you're told everything is going to be terrible well you've been at the forefront
00:04:03.900of that ethos i try my best well it's a good word show thank you yeah thank you
00:04:10.820Yeah, that ethos of that things can be great for women in our 40s and 50s, a time when in the past, culturally, we have been relegated to quote unquote spinsterhood.
00:04:24.680When we've been told that we're dried out, used up, non-sexual beings, whereas men in their 40s and 50s have been the ones who get to have a midlife crisis, who go out and buy a convertible and start doing it with a bunch of young, hot babes.0.94
00:04:42.520That has been the cultural stereotype. I do not think that has matched the reality of women in their 40s and 50s. But I will say I do think the cultural stereotype is finally starting to catch up with movies like Baby Girl, which I do have problems with, with books like Miranda July's All Fours, and with books like yours, mostly here to enjoy myself.
00:05:07.680Like we're finally catching up to women's reality that we have not been these spinsters, that we have been having good sex in our 40s and 50s for a long time.
00:05:19.940I don't know. Do you think this is where I don't we don't know because we have so few stories.0.64
00:05:24.280I mean, Blanche in Golden Girls is a good Golden Girls.
00:05:27.420I mean, again, I'll just talk about Golden Girls all day long.
00:05:31.660it is that's our only subject cultural my cultural um you know bellwether i mean so there is some
00:05:39.640sense that like of course she was sort of over sexed as the character but there is some sense
00:05:44.080in the culture that like oh great sex is still available to you after a certain age but i also
00:05:51.920wonder and we've talked about this and written about this um which is part of this i think is
00:05:58.840connected to women not having to remarry for financial stability, which has been the case0.99
00:06:05.200for most of history that, let's say, I mean, this is a stereotype, but stereotypes exist for a
00:06:10.600reason, which is your husband in your 40s, let's say the kids are off to college, your husband
00:06:16.440leaves you for a younger woman, and you need a financial framework around your life that
00:06:25.040is not available to you outside of marriage for the most part, especially to keep up a standard
00:06:30.660of living if you're a person in the upper middle class or whatever. So I do wonder if part of this
00:06:37.480renaissance, and renaissance suggests it happened before, part of this moment is that you're looking
00:06:45.040at women who have financial agency, who've had bodily autonomy, possess a degree of self-knowledge
00:06:51.580from both of these things that just, you know, benefits your sex life. Liz Lenz is doing one of0.94
00:06:58.760my What's Up Pussycat Q&As for the newsletter tomorrow. She said something that has come up a
00:07:03.920couple of times, which is like, when talking about sex, it's like, if you're having bad sex,
00:07:08.920you speak up. Or if you're not enjoying yourself, you articulate it immediately. And I think that's
00:07:13.840as a woman of a certain age. Yeah, I'm not enjoying this. Do it different or goodbye.1.00
00:07:18.680um and that sense of obligation of sort of like oh well is he enjoying himself that i think i can
00:07:24.940only speak for myself what was absolutely a part of sex when i was younger has like completely
00:07:29.540disappeared and i also think what movies like baby girl completely miss is it's that degree
00:07:34.620of confidence that's so appealing to younger men right that it's this sense of like i know what i
00:07:40.480like i know what i want and let me articulate this to you and you know get on it or maybe get off it
00:07:48.240And exactly. I do. I think there are so many different factors at play. And I want to keep talking about this again because we haven't had enough women's stories about this because women's voices have not been elevated for most of history. We just haven't gotten stories about women having great sex or having great love affairs after that one love affair we're supposed to have in our 20s that leads to marriage and babies.
00:08:17.320Right. Or you hear about it as like, like she was a trailblazer or she was an iconoclast or she was unique or she was strange or she was, you know, you hear about it as like an individual experience and not reflective of a cultural experience.
00:08:33.080And I think one of the reasons that New York Times Magazine Gen X piece, which only mentions my book in one sentence and tripled sales for the last two weeks.
00:11:46.980And I didn't go deep into the comments of that piece because I've had enough of the comment section in my life.0.99
00:11:52.360Most commenters are such just wet noodle losers.
00:11:57.960i'm sorry i can't i went i went into my podcast comments the other day and i went to a spiral0.96
00:12:03.100of depressing doom we're stuck in a global comment section right now with this administration so i
00:12:08.740don't know why you have to double down on dumb it was a bad bad choice when i was having a really0.81
00:12:14.860good day and feeling great i was like all right well now you're up for it now's the time to look0.96
00:12:18.940at goodreads and then immediately i would tank your because you never absorb all of the good
00:12:25.100comments you only fixate on the two bad comments and so i just i don't read them at all anymore
00:12:29.980i'm grateful that people who review the book take the time to do so but i don't engage with it at
00:12:35.680all but i did see some of the comments on the times instagram about the gen x story and
00:12:40.960and it was you know it was women having sort of similar conversations to us but there was
00:12:47.660definitely the men in there being like uh no one wants to have this is a joke no one wants to have
00:12:54.200said this is desperate and i was like i think you know people tell on themselves when they talk like
00:12:58.680that right it's like they do you they do you want us you want women to be desperate and you want this
00:13:05.620not to be true because it it puts an expectation on you that you have to step up some behavior if
00:13:11.300you want to access this and maybe move out of your parents basement frank you stop being such
00:13:15.920rage machines yeah and actually take i mean in the general sense of this moment we're in
00:13:22.440actually spend time considering the well-being of others on a very basic level and the and this
00:13:30.060moment is giving a lot of people permission to not have to engage with other people's feelings
00:13:37.040or well-being and so it's just it's just so typical to see it in the comments and then you're
00:13:41.500just like i i don't have to engage with this because i don't live a life that requires me to
00:13:47.180tolerate awfulness in order to survive other than the news nope all right quick break when we get
00:13:55.200back i am going to dive into the comment section okay we're back we're talking about the new york
00:14:07.920times article that claims gen x women are having the best sex of their lives i love this line from1.00
00:14:14.140that, you know, she's just describing herself as a 46 year old woman. And she says, I had fewer0.99
00:14:20.040inhibitions, fewer hangups, more self love than I did as a taut 24 year old. And the culture of sex
00:14:27.300in the 2020s felt more exploratory, more forgiving. The date rapes and creepy, creepy professors that0.97
00:14:34.040filled my 1990s were gone. The workplace harassment and idiotic full Brazilians that peppered my early1.00
00:14:40.4802000 oh god we're over i i felt this so hard in my freaking soul yeah yeah yeah i i when was the0.99
00:14:50.580last time you waxed i haven't waxed since i've never been children i haven't heard i used to
00:14:55.300fall brazilian oh god i had an allergic reaction to wax once and never went back i've also been
00:14:59.900a competitive swimmer um since i was 10 so the razor is my friend but never no please are you
00:15:04.840kidding me no this this is what comes to with the sense of like so much is available to me you're
00:15:10.360just like what does ellie say my friend ellie in paris who's like you'll like what i give you
00:15:17.000like it's like you know what i mean you're lucky at that sense of like you're lucky for what i'm
00:15:21.320giving you yes yes yes this idea of meeting sort of outrageous expectations costly ones painful
00:15:27.980ones is no longer in my vocabulary and i don't know i mean i think we do a disservice to men
00:15:36.660i can't believe that sentence just came out of my mouth and no i say all the time i think that
00:15:42.060you know men we need to talk more about men okay my experience has never been someone being like
00:15:49.060oh i don't i think we do a disservice to the expectations of men by assuming they will only
00:15:57.600be attractive to this very pruned physical body and the truth is when the majority of
00:16:06.580them are covered in fur but also i think like what's attractive about people is is so much more
00:16:12.700dynamic than that and the way we exist on screens right now diminishes that and actually men enjoy
00:16:20.960your body too for reasons that have nothing to do with capitalism right you know what i mean like so
00:16:26.000much of this is has nothing to do with physical enjoyment for anyone and that if you're at a
00:16:30.900point in a relationship where the person in a relationship says to you i will enjoy this so
00:16:34.360much more if you altered this physical part of your body then you can have that conversation but
00:16:40.280it's not like you're opening gambit certainly not mine no no no absolutely not absolutely not
00:16:46.660i um there's so much in in this article that i that i love that i want to quote we should have
00:16:54.560her on the on the show actually you should have her on we should have her on the show i also think
00:17:00.020you know tied to what you're saying and tied to to gen x we grew up without social media we grew
00:17:08.820up without phones and i really think some part of this has to do with our experience of relationships
00:17:17.680pre-apps and that some of the exhaustion i encounter with women younger than me is the
00:17:25.260gamification of dating and love. And I'm so sympathetic to that because when I go on the
00:17:31.920apps for an extended period of time, I am just like this. I feel awful. This is awful. I don't
00:17:37.080want to speak to a man ever again. And I and I recognize that if that's your only experience1.00
00:17:42.820with this, like it's just horrible. And the idea that younger people are having less sex,
00:17:48.000I'm like, this does not surprise me if the way you're engaging in these conversations is through
00:17:52.380these terrible apps where when one thing goes wrong there's still 15 other people out there
00:17:56.700you haven't met any of them you can project onto them what you want like it's so um dehumanizing
00:18:02.880and sex is a human experience hopefully no absolutely absolutely this one line that i love1.00
00:18:10.240uh when she's talking about these gen x women is quote i've come to think of this cadre of women0.97
00:18:15.600as something like hardy garden perennials right i mean oh i love that image year after year with0.86
00:18:22.720the right conditions perennials continue to flower likewise the sexual perennial finds herself still
00:18:28.760well rooted in an erotic life at an age when she may have expected it to fade or wither yeah
00:18:36.720you know i think often pamela druckerman um the writer who did bringing up baby the yeah about
00:18:43.800how to be a how to be a parent the way french parents parent right um wrote a series for the
00:18:49.800financial times i believe a number of years ago and about women in midlife i think um and one of
00:18:55.980the pieces is talking about menopause and studies show that american women claim uh diminished sex
00:19:04.720drive when they hit menopause but that french women do not in tying that to the culture in
00:19:11.220Europe and in France, more particularly, of like the sexual agency of women as they age
00:19:18.180versus America, which is just a constant, until very recently, a constant barrage of
00:19:24.620insults and delegitimization of women as they age.0.88
00:19:29.260And that physically we're conditioned to think that we lose our sex drive as we age.
00:19:33.740Whereas if we were in a culture that celebrated it, it might be different.
00:19:36.720And I think about that constantly because we have internalized all of this, all of us from a very young age. And I think for women, you get to a certain age, you fall off the cultural map. And if you're the sort of person that just goes to explore on your own, you really realize very quickly that their narrative of that you're fed and the reality of life are just diverge in extreme ways.
00:20:00.120very very different i want to talk about my issue with baby girl really quick before i might be
00:20:06.520you know i hated that movie in a way i've not hated i'm going to be so long yeah i know you
00:20:12.020hated it um you wrote a great piece about hating it i want to hear why you hated it my biggest issue0.96
00:20:17.460is that nicole kidman doesn't look like a 50 year old woman yeah yeah that she doesn't have the body
00:20:23.540of any 50 year old woman i know and i'm surrounded by women who look amazing okay who have taken care0.96
00:20:29.720of themselves and not in, you know, a moneyed way, but just, you know, care for their bodies.0.93
00:20:36.560Her body doesn't, her body looks like a child's, frankly. Her body looks like a child's. Her face
00:20:41.400doesn't move. She doesn't have any of, any of the contours, the wrinkles, the moles of a 50-year-old
00:20:48.740woman, okay? And so I don't like a movie that is supposedly celebrating women in middle age
00:20:55.280embracing their sexuality, featuring a woman who looks like she's 23 because she's had millions of
00:21:01.400dollars of work. And yes. And additionally, has the emotional maturity of a 23 year old. That's
00:21:10.280the thing that really makes me crazy about these films that feature older women and younger men
00:21:16.120is that on the paper, we know they're older, even though, as you say, they all have
00:21:21.060these highly, highly tailored bodies to make them look like they're basically teenagers.
00:21:26.980But their emotional maturity is still that of a teenager or an early 20s something like
00:21:31.940culturally. We are so unwilling to afford women the agency of maturity. I think that is so1.00
00:21:39.880terrifying. And that is one of many things that drove me crazy about that movie. I will say
00:21:44.340the people in my life who loved that movie, the women in my life. And it was articulated to this
00:21:50.500to me by a friend who said I've been in I think her exact words were the jail of a long-term
00:21:56.860marriage um and that's why it appealed to me and I said fair like I they've been married for 20
00:22:03.740years and someone else who'd been married for since their early 20s mid-20s so the exact same
00:22:08.040thing to me like disconnected and I was like oh I get that to some women who've been in long-term
00:22:15.840relationships, this is like sort of a campy fantasy that you're are willing to let go of the
00:22:21.920parts that really made me crazy. But as a person who's like closer to the reality
00:22:27.760of the sex she's experiencing, I found it offensive on just like literally every level,
00:22:33.420but mostly the idea that a younger man would be attracted to an insecure older woman who looks
00:22:38.800like a 22 year old versus the reality of it, which is, in my experience, younger men are
00:22:44.620attracted to your confidence and that physicality is like second to that and also this idea that
00:22:52.820you have to be well maintained to be physically attractive or attract you know any man is is as
00:23:00.700we both know a complete lie um that's used to punish women so i i mean i hate it i i i had no
00:23:08.480sense of humor about that movie um which i think other people brought to it i hate i still it makes
00:23:14.120me angry and the thing that makes me the most angry which ties into all this is that he gets
00:23:18.880her to agree that she wants to be a sub by blackmailing her which is the exact opposite of
00:23:26.040how those dynamics are supposed to work and again does not afford her the agency to choose the thing
00:23:31.080that's happening to her like you can choose to be submissive that's a choice it all makes me nuts
00:23:35.980yeah yeah yeah hated it an entire podcast on how much i hated that movie i i recognize that other
00:23:42.960people had different reactions and that their reactions are coming from a place that I don't
00:23:46.540live and that's worthwhile. Fair. Well, you know, I also think it's interesting. Let's talk about
00:23:53.100this and dig into the comments of the New York Times piece. Oh, God. I have to read one more
00:23:56.440quick break. But, you know, I think there's also a distinction between people in a long-term
00:24:01.820marriage and people that started that long-term marriage when they were in their 20s. Oh, for
00:24:05.500sure. I started mine at 34. Yeah. At which point I also already knew what I liked and I married a
00:24:12.640grown-ass man so i think that that is also interesting people who feel like they spent
00:24:19.660their 20s with one person maybe never had that kind of growth yeah that puts you in this kind
00:24:26.880of confident place that's what i heard over and over again in the she wants more podcast right
00:24:30.74020 oh someone was talking about that podcast at dinner the other night um and how much they loved
00:24:35.600it uh which again early on this right like we're these are these things are we are sensing things
00:24:41.800that were in the culture before they got mainstreamed into Nicole Kidman's body.
00:24:48.260I think also we're talking about 20, like marriages that are two decades and the kids
00:24:54.640are getting out of high school. It's a different dynamic. But depending, the thing is, I'm 50 now.
00:25:01.400And so some of my friends got married later and they're still in the early kids years,
00:25:05.480even though they're only a few years younger than me. And some of my friends are one or two
00:25:08.660years older than me and their kids are in college. So I'm getting it from like straddling this huge
00:25:13.900spectrum of experience. And then some people are like me, who is, you know, living very differently,
00:25:20.520living very differently. OK, one more one more break and we're diving into the comments on this
00:25:23.740time space. All right, we're back. We're talk. We're back. And we're talking about how Gen X
00:25:36.560women are probably having better sex than than you than you college kids these days uh a lot
00:25:42.720to be sad for i mean oh my god no i'm so sad i'm so sad for college kids for a variety of reasons
00:25:47.980i truly believe that college kids are no longer having fun i do not think kids in their early
00:25:53.72020s are having any more fun and i just i feel very sad for them we might be the last people
00:25:59.640who had fun we might be the last people who had fun yeah i mean truly i don't mean that i then i
00:26:05.020there's a chapter and i'm most here to enjoy myself about that but i just am like oh my god
00:26:08.660i wouldn't be younger for anything in the world oh i recognize such enormous empathy like they're
00:26:15.160on a burning planet as we all are but this the degree that social media has removed joy from so
00:26:21.280much and the flip side of that which i think the author of the gen x piece talked about a bit which
00:26:25.040is like i don't know how i mean some of the sex we were having in college was not great either
00:26:33.540no like not so i don't remember i don't remember a lot of it because i was a binge drinker so there
00:26:39.460was that i just think you know like i think there is something to be said for what is in this moment
00:26:46.160is like again you know what you like and you aren't afraid to articulate it and that is what
00:26:51.700uh that is what results in good sex hopefully and also we were not inundated with porn to the
00:26:58.200degree everyone younger than us was like this did not inform our idea of sex or you know who who
00:27:06.260gets to enjoy what or positions or like god all the other things that come along with everybody
00:27:11.260being raised on too much porn like it's a con it's much more complicated now um it's yeah we
00:27:16.480hit the jackpot of timing i just i really think it comes back to that all the time i say that all
00:27:20.620the time and nick calls us the bridge generation yeah which i think is interesting because i'm
00:27:27.200I'm technically an elder millennial as a September of 80, but I really, I much more identify with X.
00:27:34.640But I think that there is a sliver of elder millennial and X that is this bridge generation that grew up with both no technology and then technology as we were coming into our own.
00:27:48.240And so we're kind of the bridge in a way between older X and then younger millennial.
00:27:53.160Yeah, because there's not like both ways.
00:27:55.540yeah i mean when does gen x start 1960 yeah ish 60 ish 60 60 mid 60s mid 60s probably 64
00:28:05.380so like 10 years before you were born so i think of yes nick and i are the nick and i are the same
00:28:10.840age you and nick are the exact same age 74 was a good year for you too 74 no i got i got both my
00:28:16.220people in 74 yeah it was quite vintage um for sure for sure because i think of people that's like
00:28:22.040I mean, all this generation talk is so faulty, but there's definitely a to have your childhood to be born before the Internet, to have your childhood squarely in the 80s, like the great benefit of this, like on the scope of history, time and place, we landed the best version of childhood.
00:28:42.620um and that is great but yeah it makes me sad for people who don't like it's getting it's not
00:28:52.120getting better and literally things are not getting better right you know in many ways
00:28:55.640anyways okay go into the comment all right so let's take a deep dive first i started out with
00:29:00.920the ones that the times picked to highlight oh god i find that very interesting because
00:29:05.960it's just like a a cadre of and which is that a that's a word i never know if i'm saying right
00:29:11.220You're really on the vocabulary today.
00:29:13.060We, you know, I got some sleep last night because I had some NyQuil.
00:29:17.100So, but it feels like they choose the most enlightened men they can find.
00:29:27.240Like, while we know a lot of enlightened men, like this little crew that they choose to highlight is very.
00:29:35.600Also, when I hear it, half the time I hear an enlightened man, I'm just like, oh, you've done the reading and you're mimicking it. I almost prefer people who are not enlightened because I feel like they're more trustworthy. I believe them versus men who sort of like parrot these talking points where I'm like, oh, you're probably the worst person and I'm just going to have to dig to find it.
00:30:00.440As an in-shape, stable center of Gen X 1972, man whose life path has left him a widower and who only has eyes for women of my generation, I cannot express how happy I am about this.
00:30:12.780Oh, God, I saw that. I did see that comment.
00:30:14.200I love and only have interest in the women of my generation, and I'm so happy that they are empowered and confident.