This article explains how a hurricane I didn't know I had made land fall on OG-Fudd. It's a whole specific subset of a population (+ my personality🌀, a subset of a subset). Catch one if you can. What category storm was I then, I wonder? I was wide open hearted. I had no idea I had that magic in me. And no idea what could set it off, either. He figured all that shit out.
Read on. Though they are in limited supply, and apparently the last of their species, there are all kinds, including women who are not 🌀, ones who might be 🪶 or 💃 or 🌻... better
#TULIPS
Why Gen X Women Are Having the Best Sex
In an era plagued by sex negativity, only one generation seems immune: mine.
By Mireille Silcoff
Feb. 5, 2025
Updated 7:22 a.m. ET
In 2019, I divorced, at age 46, and went on to have more and better sex than I ever would have thought possible.
I had not imagined that the end of a 20-year relationship would mean a new era of high eroticism; I’d have needed to be delusional to think that. I was middle-aged, with two young children, a bunch of chronic illness and a bank account that was essentially handed over to divorce lawyers. My career was on life support, and after years away in bigger cities, I was back in my hometown, Montreal, enduring the kind of isolation that comes from exiting a relationship that has defined nearly half your life. Then the pandemic hit.
And yet.
In the beginning I thought it was just my own cool and unusual story. Returning to plentiful sex in my late 40s felt weirdly intuitive, like hearing an old favorite song and finding that of course I still knew all the words. There were new frills — I’d cook decadent meals, buy absurd lingerie, pretend that I always had Japanese whiskey hanging around — but I also found that I was better at sex, and that this was because I was older. I had fewer inhibitions, fewer hangups and more self-love than I did as a taut 24-year-old. And the culture of sex in the 2020s felt more exploratory, more forgiving. The date rapes and creepy professors that filled my 1990s were gone; the workplace harassment and idiotic full Brazilians that peppered my early 2000s were over. The fear of pregnancy was finished, as was the pressure to land a partner to make babies with. Everything that remained felt like a privilege: There was desire, and there was the ability to fulfill it.
It turns out this was not just my story. Five years since that divorce, it seems clear that what I have been doing privately is part of something bigger — a story that somehow belongs to my generation, and particularly the women of my generation.
The media’s confirming this has been kind of unrelenting. A few months ago, Netflix served me a scrolling bar of options labeled “Grown-Ass Women Living Their Best Lives,” full of movies about middle-aged women unrepentantly getting it on, not because they were weak but because they had arrived. Last year brought not one but two movies in which an accomplished, tastefully dressed Nicole Kidman (57) has a sexual affair with a much younger man, and one in which an accomplished, tastefully dressed Laura Dern (57) does the same. In literature, the 56-year-old actor Gillian Anderson put out “Want,” a collection of female sexual fantasies; Glynnis MacNicol, 50, wrote “I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself,” a popular memoir about going to Paris to get laid; Molly Roden Winter wrote the salacious “More,” about her open marriage. And of course there was Miranda July’s blockbuster novel, “All Fours,” a barmy midlife sextravaganza, which The New York Times named “the First Great Perimenopausal Novel” and which contained so many uncannily truth-telling moments that it nearly exploded all my messaging apps with shared photos of its pages.
A whole new cultural type seems to have landed. It feels worlds away from the traditional view of older women’s sexuality — which, if you look at the lion’s share of studies, you would conclude is incredibly depressing. Until the late 20th century, academic studies of aging women were dominated by what sociologists call the “misery perspective,” which emphasizes how people’s lives get worse as they age, burdened by factors like chronic illness and financial distress. Spend time reading papers with titles like “We’re Just Tired: Influences on Sexual Activity Among Male-Partnered Women in Midlife,” and you will emerge with a dour picture of what it means to be sexual and female at 50, a deflating biomedical index of problems, from diminished libido to painful sex to vaginal atrophy to breasts with no sensitivity. You will read about the possibility of new partners’ being ransacked by caregiving responsibilities — how, if you have a 10-year-old at home or an 80-year-old in a home (or both), chances are you are not out shopping for slinky skivvies to wear for liquid dinners à deux in bed. Add to this a ratio issue, rooted partly in the habit of men’s linking up with younger women, and the picture becomes even more grim.
But this year I looked around at the women I know and saw a completely different plane of existence. “The women I know” is, by definition, not a representative sample, but still: Two of my friends ended marriages because of their own sexual dissatisfaction. Another divorced and became a card-carrying polyamorist. Two of my friends in their 50s are seriously dating people in their 30s, and a few others are, like me, divorced and engaging in sex practices they’d never tried before. I am sure that every one of us recognizes aspects of the “misery perspective” in all those papers, but it does not describe our lives right now. I can tell, because when one of us needs an endometrial ablation for unrelenting perimenopausal bleeding, or a hysterectomy for fibroids growing larger than citrus fruits, or agrees to take an aging parent or a partner’s kids into her home, a big question inevitably seems to be: What will this do to my sex life?
I’ve come to think of this cadre of women as something like hardy garden perennials. Year after year, with the right conditions, perennials continue to flower. Likewise, the sexual Perennial finds herself still well rooted in an erotic life at an age when she may have expected it to fade or wither.
This is all the more remarkable because, for the culture as a whole, physical sex really is withering and fading. Among the most defining ongoing stories about sex in America today has been the drop-off in activity among Gen Z and Millennials. Blame for that decline has generally been placed on the way we live in the 21st century: the atomization of our social lives; the antidepressants that can kill the libido; the phones and social media that provide endless fascination, even on boring evenings when other things could be happening; the always-available porn that offers both problematic expectations of how in-person sex happens and a far less demanding alternative to it. For young parents, the intensity of modern child-rearing shrivels sex lives. For teenagers, a growing obsession with personal and psychological safety, a desire to be immune from discomfort, can flatten eroticism in some of the places it might flourish.
Last year I even saw one survey that, at a glance, seemed to me to suggest that people in their late 40s and early 50s might be having sex more frequently than those between 18 and 24. When I got in touch with the generational researcher Jean Twenge, whose best-selling books (most recently, “Generations”) have done much to explain the differences among birth cohorts, she was skeptical of those findings. But the subtler data she did pull up — mainly using General Social Survey data from 1989 to 2022 — still made a clear case for a kind of maverick sexiness among those currently in middle age.
When you track sexual frequency among age groups, something notable happens around 2007: a downward curve in activity among people 18 to 40 that turns into a sheer nosedive in the decade that follows. Today’s young adults are having sex 30 percent less often than young adults in the early 2000s. Such declines have occurred across the generational spectrum. But one generation, in its middle age, is experiencing a much less pronounced drop from the sexual frequency of its predecessors. Using the same measures, Twenge says, “the drop among Generation X is pretty small.” It’s only 9 percent.
The sexual Perennials of this generation do not fit neatly into any of the well-trodden archetypes of older women, like the cougar or the MILF — these degrading male-gaze notions of women precariously perched on the brink of undesirability. Pop culture is only now beginning to create new symbols of them, while those of the past feel silly or peculiar. (In the 1980s, Blanche Devereaux of “The Golden Girls” was often portrayed as a swooning, silk-draped clown for merely having a libido; at the start of that series she was supposed to be around 53, which is two years younger than Jennifer Lopez is now.) The Perennial’s vibe is not about finding a pocket of succor after the sun of youth has set. It is, rather, a power stance — a matter of caring less and less about such expectations the older you get.
I would love to imagine that this development is a permanent one — that the culture is finding a lasting perch for the sexuality of all older women. But I cannot shake a strong hunch that what we are seeing among middle-aged women is a function of the specific generation currently occupying those years. This is a cohort of women with formative experiences that do not resemble those of the generations surrounding them: a generation that began having sex earlier than any other on record, that stayed on the singles market for years longer than their parents, that is continuing to have sex even amid a broader sexual decline. I do not think it is a coincidence that the women I’ve written about thus far are part of Generation X, born between 1965 and 1980.
Gen X, a small generation compared with relatively larger cohorts like Millennials or Gen Z, “kind of dodged a bullet,” Twenge told me — by which she meant that while our lonely, iPhone-defined century came for everyone’s libido, some were defined by it, while others were merely affected. By the time the 21st century really landed, much of Generation X was already largely formed in terms of sexual habit. And this may be why, in middle age, it is shaping up to be possibly the sexiest generation on record. “You can even make the statement,” Twenge said, “that Gen X is the last sexy generation.
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