‘Modern Love’ Podcast: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex. | USAEMALL.com

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Hey, everyone. It’s Anna. The “Modern Love” podcast team is working on an episode about location sharing, and how we decide whether to let a partner, friend, or family member track our whereabouts. On the one hand, using your phone to share your location might help you stay connected and build trust, but it can also test the boundaries of your relationship in uncomfortable ways.

Tell us your location sharing story. Was there a moment you really regretted sharing your location with someone or a moment you were very glad you did? Where were you? What happened? How did your relationship change as a result?

Record your answer as a voice memo and email it to modernlovepodcast@nytimes.com, and we may end up featuring it on the show. One more time, tell us how location sharing has affected a relationship in your life, and send it as a voice memo to modernlovepodcast@nytimes.com. We’re so excited to hear from you. All right, on with the show.

Everywhere I look right now, there seem to be articles and books about women in middle age, with titles like, “Rediscovering Desire in Perimenopause,” or, “Middle Age is Sexy Now.” Plus, of course, you have the wild success of Miranda July’s novel, “All Fours.” And actually, July is coming on the show soon to talk about the impact of her book, so stay tuned for that.

So women in their 40s and 50s are being centered in the cultural conversation in a way they’ve never been before. But why? I mean, women entering middle age going through menopause, that’s not a new phenomenon. So what is it about this generation of women that’s making this life transition seem so sexy? And what can other generations learn from this one? Enter writer Mireille Silcoff.

There is something real happening here with women who are older, and it has to do with power. It doesn’t have to do with being like a young person. It has to do with being like an older person.

Mireille is a writer from Montreal, Canada, who recently wrote an article for “The New York Times Magazine” called, “Why Gen X Women are Having the Best Sex.” In it, she writes about getting divorced at 46 and going on to have more sex and better sex than she’d ever had before.

I remember, like — I don’t know — it must have been around my 49th birthday or something like that — walking around. I was having quite a bit of sex and just thinking, like, everybody in the world is having sex. [LAUGHS]

And after talking to a bunch of her friends, Mireille realized, she wasn’t the only one.

What the F is happening here? We’re 50. Like, why are we talking about analingus? How is this a thing?

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Well, from “The New York Times,” I’m Anna Martin. This is “Modern Love.” Each week, we talk about sex, love, friends, family, and all the complexity of human relationships. On today’s episode, we get the juicy backstory to Mireille Silcoff’s popular essay. She tells me about the unlikely sexual resurgence she experienced in her late 40s, and why being a Gen X woman is central to her newfound freedom. Stay with us.

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Mireille Silcoff, welcome to “Modern Love.”

Hi, it’s a pleasure to be here.

Mireille, I want to start off by saying, you wrote this piece for “The New York Times Magazine” that really resonated with people. You had over 1,000 comments on “The New York Times” website, which is a lot. You also got a ton of emails from people sharing their own experiences, having the best sex of their life in their 50s. Did you expect this response when you published the piece, or was this a surprise?

I was absolutely certain that everybody, except the type of women I was writing about, who were women like me, would freakin’ hate this piece.

[LAUGHS]:

And that was the surprising thing to me, was that, really, the piece was widely appreciated by all different types of women, according to the comments, some men as well, and across the generational spectrum — which, to an extent, is what I was going for, right? I wanted to show that middle age might be something that women who are younger than Gen X, which is the cohort that I wrote about the most in this piece, can look forward to.

Who were you expecting the most ire from?

Two groups. Number one, the experience of many women in their 50s is not a highly sexual experience. Many women in their 50s have been in very long marriages, and we all know what can happen to sex in very long marriages. People have health concerns. Some people grow disinterested in sex. Menopause has effects as well.

So a highly sexual 50-something woman might be super irritating as an archetype to women who aren’t feeling that way. So that was one group that I thought would be hate readers, and they weren’t.

And then the second group that I thought would be hate readers are millennials and Gen Z, who I describe in the piece as having much less frequent sex and much less active sex lives than Gen X women or even boomers were having at their age. And so I felt like there might be some bad feeling from the younger generation of women, that they might feel like I was calling them out as not having good sex lives or not having the same prowess, right? Like, I just thought that might be annoying.

And in fact, what happened with many millennial women, in particular, wrote to me and said that they loved reading the piece so much because they felt like it gave them something to look forward to, that sex might come into your life in a different way, at an unexpected time later in life, that that is a new possibility.

One of the things you point to in your essay is the link between you being a Gen X woman and the freedom that you felt as a newly single person in your 40s. So I want to ask, sort of zoom out, like, how much has being a Gen X woman shaped your identity? And in what ways has it shaped your identity?

Well, I would say that I started really young in terms of being a kind of cultural animal and a social animal. So I was working by the age of 13. I entered the club scene by the time I was 14 or 15, very young. I was in a rush, ever so slightly unparented, I mean, by today’s standards, phenomenally unparented.

And so I feel like I lived the Gen X experience, as we would say here in Quebec, [FRENCH], which means “to the living end.” I was a music journalist. I was a club reporter, so I wrote about nightclub culture. I had a rave fashion line. I was a voguer in a voguing house.

Voguer as in vogue dancer.

Vogue dancer. So I did all those things, right?

What about that feels so archetypically Gen X to you?

The experience of the Gen X child, for some cultural reasons and some just deep, deep economic, societal kind of reasons, was much more free range than it is right now. So by the time I had sex, which was at the age of 15, I felt like a grown-up. I felt like this person who was working, who was earning her own money, who had experienced so much already. We couldn’t wait to be adults. We just wanted it so badly.

I want to dig into the kind of sexual side of your experience as a teen, early 20s. Like, what do you remember about coming into your sexuality at that time? Was it exciting?

I mean, kids started young. So I remember in grade 8, in my high school, who had had oral sex, who had not had oral sex. I always wanted to be a bit of a [FRENCH]. So I kind of wanted to be ahead of the curve.

What does that mean?

OK, like a fabulous, kind of, very sophisticated person. I was dead set on that kind of persona from a very young age. And so I just wanted to be out there and doing what everybody else was doing, really, at the cutting edge of whatever sexual experience was in 1980, whatever. And so I just remember going straight from never having kissed a boy to basically having sex in the span of about a year and a half.

And what was your relationship to your sexuality early on?

I don’t think I thought a lot about my pleasure. I think I thought a lot about being a sexual person, about pleasing my partners — I think that was a very huge thing that I thought about a lot — of coming off a certain way.

The way being mature?

Mature, sophisticated, up for anything, not somebody who would be oversensitive about anything. I really wanted to come off as a tough person.

Yeah.

I kind of think about sex in the ‘90s as being this crazy jungle.

Yeah, tell me about it because I wasn’t around then.

Yeah. It was not good. I think that you had — the world of the ‘60s opened up. But then you also had those people who had opened up the world of free love in all the positions of power in what was on TV, in what was in film, in what was going to make it onto the radio, et cetera, et cetera.

So free love suddenly transferred and translated and transmuted and kind of, like, insinuated itself into what feels like every corner of the culture, from the Oval Office with Bill Clinton to, now, King Charles with wanting to be Camilla Parker Bowles’s Tampax, to Marla Maples.

So I mean, it just never stopped. And I think there were these female archetypes that were really in the mix at the time that many of us felt like, well, that’s just what you needed to be like. So you were either fending off rapacious men and being, like, oh, he-he-he, you know? Like, no, no, no. Or you were this nymphet who could never get enough.

It’s interesting because I feel like I’m hearing you speak as a cultural critic, which you are, looking back on this era. But when you were in the era at the moment, it felt like I’m hearing you say sex was everywhere, and you wanted to be a part of it. Does that feel fair to say? In the moment, when you didn’t have the zoom out perspective of now, it was, like, sex is everywhere, and I want to jump in.

Yes. And I wanted to jump in, and I did. And I had many partners, and I took many morning after pills. And I had many STD tests because it was the era of AIDS, and condoms broke. And I remember “The Sex and the City” era where it was threesomes are the new blowjobs, right?

So things were just getting more and more extreme. And suddenly every guy around the turn of the millennium wanted a threesome. I don’t think anybody really liked those threesomes, frankly, and I don’t know —

Listeners, write in.

Yes, listeners, please write in. Back then, it felt like every single thing existed for male titillation.

Yeah.

And I was part of that. And yes, it was exhausting. I didn’t know it at the time. I just thought, sex is something you do all the time. It’s tiring. Maybe you don’t enjoy it that much. But you do it, and you do it because you’re a sexy woman. It’s weird things like that.

I know from your article that you met your husband in your 20s, and you two were together for 21 years. How did your relationship to sex evolve once you got married?

My story was very much sidetracked by the fact that at the age of 32, I became catastrophically ill with a really rare condition called spontaneous cerebrospinal fluid leak syndrome. I was very, very ill for many, many, many years, at some points, confined to a declined bed with my head lower than my chest. I mean, really, really could not —

Oh, my gosh.

— could not move, and in a lot of pain because when you have no spinal fluid, you have no cushion around your brain, which means that your brain is clanking against your skull all the time. So it was not an easy way to live. Yet you figure things out.

That toughness comes back.

The toughness comes back. So within the marriage, we had two kids. I very much raised them from bed. My ex-husband did a lot of heavy lifting. There was always some help in the house, too. That was hard, being sick and a young mother, and also displaced at one point to a new city. We had to move to Toronto. That was extremely hard.

So the overwhelm of just living in a long, committed relationship with two young children and my health being what it was, did not create the best conditions to have the best sex life. And so there were many, many years which were just years of survival, I would say.

Did you ever think that things might change for you? Like, did you fantasize about having a healthy body again?

I think that on every level — let’s call it top of the brain — no. I felt like I was never going to get better and never going to be cured. Did I think that I would experience pleasure in life again, joy in life again, bodily pleasure, even sexual interest? Yes because I never really lost that. It just kind of went under for a while.

But then if I’m going to talk about a bit lower down in my body, some kind of different self-knowledge, I think that I always somewhere believed or had some notion that somehow I was going to get out of the thing that I had been told I was never going to get out of.

Did you picture what that life on the other side would look like? And particularly, like — because this is a conversation ultimately about your sex life — did you picture what your sex would look like on the other side? Like, what was the best case scenario?

When my ex-husband and I divorced, I really thought that I was going to live a very quiet life of orange pekoe tea and masterpiece theater and taking care of my children, and once in a while, having a nice dinner with a friend, and reading a lot of good books, and taking walks. And that was what life was going to be like for me.

In a way, I was accepting an older version of what it meant to be middle-aged, which means that middle age is kind of the opening to senescence, you know? It’s the opening to becoming an old person. You know what I mean — gray hair, with a cane, whatever. I had a cane, right? So I had that kind of idea, that that’s what would happen post-divorce. And instead, what happened was that my life exploded in a detonation of sex confetti.

Well, that is — I could picture us going to break right there. We’ll be right back to hear about the explosion of sex that Mireille ended up having in her late 40s. Stay with us.

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So you told our team that over a period of many years dealing with this illness, you had spinal surgery 12 times. Is that correct? And it didn’t work?

Yeah.

But right after you got divorced, this, frankly, miraculous — that is not too strong a word, it is miraculous — thing happened where you tried the surgery one more time, and it did work. What was that like for you, having dealt with this for over a decade?

I think I felt very much like Rip Van Winkle, in a way.

Huh.

You know? Like I was emerging from a long sleep or like I was some weird, raw worm kind of emerging from the earth, blinking. Like, what in the world is going on? I went from being someone who had been chronically, chronically ill for 15 years to somebody who had a cushion around her brain and could jump and could run and could be physically embodied in ways that were completely impossible. And that happened in the span of under one hour on an operating table where I was awake.

Wow.

On fentanyl, but awake.

But suddenly I was in my late 40s. I was free of marriage. My children were not babies anymore. And I had my body for the first time since I was 32 years old.

And the level of gratitude at just being able to even carry my own groceries or wear flip-flops — because I could never wear flat shoes before — like, I can’t even describe to you. So you could imagine the level of gratitude and the level of wonder I had at being able to re-encounter sex with that newly fixed body.

Can you describe one of the first times you had sex after your marriage? What was that like for you?

I’m trying to think of the right words. I mean, it was just wonderful. Like, it was wonderful. And I think a lot of the — not to intellectualize too much, but it was really fabulous to see, like, I still had the interest. Everything still worked. My body still looked nice, maybe because it had been preserved in amber from so many years of just being stuck in bed.

Laying down.

You know? And I found that I was really interested in taking up again where, quote unquote, “I had left off” in my mid-twenties.

Wow. In these first sort of sexual encounters after divorce, what surprised you about yourself?

What surprised me about myself was how easy it was for me to embark on a new life when everything was really quite against me. Single mom, still carrying some illness — it’s not like everything disappeared, disappeared, disappeared, right? So it’s, like, still a lot of issues, money issues. I’m a working journalist.

So there was a lot that kind of could paint this picture of it being very hard. It was also COVID. It was not an easy time in the world. And while all of that is certainly true — and yet, I saw opportunities in this life stage. I saw opportunities that were possible, both in bed and outside of bed, some new power that I seemed to own that I was kind of shocked at. I was completely surprised. It blindsided me, to be honest.

What was that power?

Well, first of all, my libido was as high as it was when I was in my 20s, so that was a complete —

Hell yeah.

— surprise. That was a complete surprise, and I really did not see that coming. But the other thing that was so wonderful was that I didn’t give a fuck as much as I did in my 20s about, like, does my butt look big? I mean, now we want our butts to look bigger, so that’s useful, because in the ‘90s, nobody wanted a very big butt, right? So it’s whatever. You’re a bit more forgiving.

But the body positivity hit me, too, and I was just letting my freak flag fly of things. I’ve got a cesarean scar. You know, whatever. It was all fine, and I didn’t have issues with it. And I felt sexy that way, even with all of the signs of age very much upon me. So that was a surprise.

But the other thing that was a surprise was the ability to bring the layered knowledge that you accumulate, reaching your 50s or reaching your late 40s, to the bedroom. And I found that having that type of mind or mind-body situation made me much more playful and made me much less self-conscious and made me out for kind of, like, adventures in bed that I really don’t think I would have entertained so easily in the cool ‘90s.

Were you surprised by your own desires? And what were they?

I mean, my desire was just to have sex nonstop as much as I possibly could for a really long time. That really —

Love!

That really happened.

But I mean, I imagine it must have also been a little intimidating to put yourself out there. I mean, it had been 20 years since you’d been on the dating scene. What was that new scene like?

Well, I feel that this is a huge part of the story, and this is part of the story which is not about Gen X. This is part of the story that is about Gen Z and millennials who have created a sexual landscape that is more fair, more open, more accepting, more consent culture, body positivity, gender questioning. All of these things are because of generations younger than my own, right?

And so encountering this new landscape where you could question your gender in bed, or you could be OK with your cesarean scar, or your boobs looking old, or having a big ass, or whatever your hang up would have been in 1997, that’s OK, right?

And also just the fact that you can go and buy a clitoral stimulator at Walmart, that’s crazy. That exists, that you could just do that? That’s insane to me that I can go to the pharmacy and buy a pint of milk, some deodorant, and a cock ring — is really, to me, feels incredibly new and incredibly kind of great.

Yeah. Is it safe to say, you weren’t just having sex and having a lot of it, you were having really good sex?

I was having the best sex of my life.

Boom.

Yeah.

Tell me why.

Because I was a woman with a long career behind her; because I was a woman who had endured a decade and a half of catastrophic illness; because I was a woman with two children who needed me; because I was a woman who knew who her girlfriends were; because I could earn my own way.

And all of those things conspired, came together. And it is a place of privilege, I will say that for sure, you know. But for many years, I was absolutely not in a place of privilege, right? So all these things conspired together to create a self-knowledge that followed me into the bedroom.

Hell yes. Hell yes. What did you feel comfortable doing or asking for in the bedroom that gave you this experience of the best sex of your life? Like, what is a specific way that empowerment was channeled?

Well, for one thing, I think I felt comfortable asking for sex.

Yeah.

Which I’m not sure, in my younger years, I was that comfortable doing. I don’t know if I was such a first move maker. And so that changed. And that’s a huge change, right?

Certainly.

So more comfortable asking for it, more comfortable asking for what I wanted. But I think the big thing — and any woman who’s been in a locker room — I know it’s a cliche to talk about middle-aged women being naked in locker rooms and not caring.

[LAUGHS]:

It’s, like, the younger women are, like —

I’ve been to the YMCA, baby.

Exactly.

I understand it. Yeah, totally.

Yeah. The younger women are covering themselves up or going into the stall, and the older women are just walking around, letting everything hang out. But I mean, that’s true in the bedroom as well, right? And so I think a lot of it was just confidence.

When I actually think of the sex acts that I’ve been engaging in, I mean, they’re good, but they’re not, like, so off the wall where I’m, like, hanging from chandeliers by clamps and straps. Like, that’s not what’s going on here.

What’s going on here is feeling truly sensual and not being abashed about it. Like, not being embarrassed or kind of weenie or kind of, like, ew. I think all of that just creates a kind of place of comfort. And once you’re comfortable in the bedroom or comfortable in yourself, it kind of opens things up for experimentation.

Yeah.

I was never much of a talker when I was young. Now I’m talking. I am talking.

Are you dirty talking?

Yes, I’m saying all kinds of ridiculous things. So yes, you know, stuff like that. [LAUGHS]

[LAUGHS]:

Stuff like that.

Stuff like that. She trails off. She’s thinking about something. I can tell. I mean, at what point did you realize that this kind of sexual resurgence were feeling wasn’t just your story alone? Of course, you have all of these unique aspects to your story — your illness, your divorce. But can you tell me what made you realize, like, maybe this isn’t just a me thing, maybe this is actually a Gen X thing, maybe this is a generational thing? What was the moment that you started to realize that?

I think it was when other girlfriends of mine divorced and had similar stories.

Like they were having banging sex?

Yes. They divorced, and then they partnered up pretty quickly and started having sex and having conversations about how their partner enjoys analingus or this stuff. And I’m like, how am I sitting around at 50, or whatever it was, with a girlfriend who’s the same age as me, and we’re sitting in our Gen X uniform of the mother jeans with the Levi’s shirt tucked into the jeans and —

I love that look.

Thank you. And I wear the same thing every day — and the slightly graying hair. And we’re sitting around talking about —

Licking someone’s butt.

— licking someone’s butt.

[LAUGHS]:

So it was just, like — it was really a moment.

I mean, so let’s talk about that moment. Like, what had changed for you and your girlfriends that made these things you were talking about even possible?

Divorcing later is a huge piece of the puzzle. I divorced in my late 40s. And divorce is often a catalyst for sexual exploration among women. And what was interesting was that, well, even if you divorce really late, that still holds true. And so I think that’s a big part of the story.

So I noticed this among my girlfriends. And then very, very quickly, I began noticing it in the culture. And noticing it in the culture, I just saw the same things that everybody else has seen this year. I had a Netflix scrolling bar served to me called “Grown-Ass Women Living Their Best Lives,” which was filled from top to bottom with these kind of, almost, made-for-TV-ish type movies, like, whatever — the made-for-Netflix-type movies —

Grown-ass women.

— about grown-ass women having affairs with younger men. That seemed to be like a big theme. So there was a lot of that. There was one with Laura Dern. There was one with Nicole Kidman. There was suddenly just a lot of material. And so taking that, along with my own experience and what I was seeing with the women around me, it just seemed like, well, this is a moment.

I mean, I want to get back to the Gen X of it all. Those movies you’re talking about, are they real? Like, women in their 40s and 50s tend to have a lot of responsibility. How are some of them also having amazing sex, as your article describes?

I think that with women my age, I’m just going to coin something called “owning the hot mess.”

I love that, grown-ass women owning the hot mess.

Grown-ass women owning the hot mess. I think that there is, with all of the responsibilities and all of the sleeplessness and difficulty, and kids are glued to the sides of our body now as they’ve never been before — parenting is much more intensive for the women my age who are still parents to kids who haven’t flown the coop yet. And yet, in all of that, there is also an amount of power, an amount of mastery.

So yes, it’s a mess, and we’re running from thing to thing to thing to thing. And yet, part of this mess has to do with the fact that we’ve got this mess because we can handle it. And so I think that the 50-year-old woman mattering in society, that translates to the bedroom.

Right now, it’s been five years since your divorce. Has anything changed for you in terms of your sex life? Are you still in the sort of voracious stage you were in immediately post-divorce? Have things shifted in some way?

Yeah. I mean, things have settled down for sure. Also, I do want to say this. Menopause does have an effect, and I am in menopause now. And my libido —

Oh.

— has actually become a bit less voracious. It’s still there. It’s still great. But things can take a bit longer. I have to work a bit more to get to places that were just very easy and natural to get to even five years ago. And that’s fine. It’s all part of the process because I also find that the fleetingness of this middle-aged moment is part of its specialness and part of its poignancy.

What do you want your love life and your sex life to look like as you enter this new phase, as you enter menopause?

I want to do whatever feels natural. Right now, still having a pretty healthy sex life feels natural. It doesn’t feel like a burden. It doesn’t feel bad. It still feels great. But when it doesn’t anymore, I would like to have that same confidence, that same self-knowledge, and that same power within myself to say, OK, I don’t really feel like doing that so much anymore, or my priorities shifted, or maybe I — I don’t know — want to do it once a month or not at all, or I don’t know.

But I just want the journey to be organic in that way. And the answer truly is, I don’t know because I never would have thought that this was happening to me in my 50s. So I can’t really imagine what my 60s are going to be like, especially because for most of my adult life, I didn’t think I was going to reach my 60s.

Man, I’m excited for you.

Me, too.

[LAUGHS]:

I’m going to say a crazy thing that one friend said to me. And I don’t know if this is true, but she said that I was fucked back to life.

I want to center that in you, so it’s like —

I fucked myself back to life.

Period.

Exactly.

[LAUGHS]: Mireille Silcoff, thank you so much for talking to me today.

Thank you. It was really a pleasure. I loved it.

Before we head to the credits, I want to share a fun update with you. We’ve decided to offer a little something extra for “New York Times” subscribers who are also fans of the “Modern Love” column. Now, in addition to our regular episodes of the show, like this one, which we’ll keep publishing every Wednesday, “New York Times” subscribers will also get the latest “Modern Love” essay read aloud in your podcast feed every Friday. This is something you’ve been reaching out and asking us for, and we’ve been listening to you. So this is our way of saying, thanks for listening to us.

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This episode of “Modern Love” was produced by Sara Curtis. It was edited by Gianna Palmer and our executive producer, Jen Poyant. Production management by Christina Djossa. The “Modern Love” theme music is by Dan Powell. Original music in this episode by Elisheba Ittoop, Rowan Niemisto, and Dan Powell. This episode was mixed by Daniel Ramirez, with studio support from Maddie Masiello and Nick Pittman. Special thanks to Larissa Anderson, Mahima Chablani, Nell Gallogly, Jeffrey Miranda, and Paula Szuchman.

The “Modern Love” column is edited by Daniel Jones. Miya Lee is the editor of “Modern Love” projects. If you want to submit an essay or a Tiny Love Story to “The New York Times,” we’ll have the instructions in our show notes. I’m Anna Martin. Thanks for listening.

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