In Babygirl and other recent movies, popular culture is finally getting comfortable with the sexual lives of 50-something women, writes Alexis Soloski.
Babygirl, the Nicole Kidman movie that opened on Christmas Day, starts with an orgasm. And it ends with one. Others are spread throughout. Kidman plays Romy, a poised, high-femme CEO of a flourishing robotics company. Romy is married to Jacob (Antonio Banderas), a successful theatre director. They have two teenage children, and Romy sometimes trades her pussy-bow blouses for an apron to whisk up wholesome family meals.
So far, so having-it-all. But Romy is in the business of automation, and her life, personal and professional, feels automated, too. Sessions of eye movement desensitisation therapy and a passing reference to having grown up in a cult hint at troubles beneath Romy’s glossy surfaces. That first orgasm? It’s fake. Then Romy meets Samuel (Harris Dickinson), a 20-something intern at her company. Tentatively, they begin an affair, with elements of power exchange. Soon Romy is on her stomach, on the floor of some dingy hotel room, growling like an animal, experiencing real pleasure.
An erotic thriller and a fairy tale, Babygirl moves like a moral tragedy, in which a woman is punished for her personal freedom. But it dares a happy ending – “literally and figuratively”, Halina Reijn, the movie’s writer and director, said cheekily – which is unusual. It is also a movie that treats the sexual life of a woman in midlife (Kidman is a luminous 57) with bracing seriousness – which is not as unusual as it used to be.
Last year alone offered an abundance of age-gap romances centred on women in midlife, with Anne Hathaway stripping down to lingerie in a hotel room in The Idea of You; Léa Drucker cavorting in the grass in Last Summer; Kidman again, as a writer astride Zac Efron’s action star in A Family Affair. Turn the calendar page back to 2023, and you’ll find Julianne Moore baking oddly suggestive cakes in May December.
Add to that Ali Wong’s recent, riotous hour, Single Lady, in which she describes the many, many men who are after her “divorced mom energy”; Molly Roden Winter’s More: A Memoir of an Open Marriage, a sensation last winter; and Miranda July’s All Fours, the book of the summer, an autofictional account of the perimenopausal narrator’s consuming passion for a much younger man. Gillian Anderson, a sex symbol in her 20s for The X Files and again in her 50s for Sex Education, recently edited and introduced Want, a collection of sexual fantasies. In recent years, television has contributed series such as Big Little Lies, Catastrophe, Dead to Me, The Morning Show, Younger, And Just Like That, much of Kathryn Hahn’s later oeuvre and the seemingly endless Real Housewives franchise.
Historically, stories with an emphasis on straight sex and romance have centred women in the years of peak fertility, the years when men could presumably impregnate them. Romances are variations on the marriage plot. That plot’s presumed sequel? Babies. (What’s sexier than ensuring your genetic legacy?)
“We live in a patriarchy,” Reijn said, explaining the past absence of stories about women older than 40. “Even though we think we are emancipated, we are still stuck in the idea that women are redundant after menopause.”
But in the past few years, the Overton window of desirability has begun to shift. And the curtains are very sheer. To extend stories of love and sex past the point of female fertility appears, on its poreless face, liberatory and more inclusive. It suggests that women in midlife are desirable and worthy of a narrative focus that Hollywood has typically denied.
“That was true for a long time, that women in their 40s and 50s and up were ignored and invisible,” Jean Twenge, a social psychologist and the author of Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents – and What They Mean for America’s Future. “It’s a good thing that era is ending or at least waning.”
Perimenopause gets a makeover
In films past, sexually active older women were typically presented as scandalous. See Jane Wyman’s Cary Scott in All That Heaven Allows, from 1955, or Anne Bancroft’s Mrs Robinson in The Graduate, from 1967. (Depressingly, Bancroft was only 35 during filming, just six years older than Dustin Hoffman, and Wyman was 38 to Rock Hudson’s 30.)
Other times, the sexual older woman was depicted as ridiculous. Take, for example, Jennifer Coolidge as Stifler’s mom in American Pie, though Coolidge was all of 38 when the movie opened in 1999. A film like How Stella Got Her Groove Back, the 1998 romance starring a 40-year-old Angela Bassett, is the exception.
But recent representations are generally more nuanced. At first blush (even at second or third blush, some of these movies are really racy), the primary reason for the change is simple. Many more women can now be found behind the camera – as writers, directors and producers.
These movies also reflect fluctuating sexual politics. The #MeToo movement may have made stories about older men and younger women less palatable. (Is it possible to watch, say, Manhattan without feeling mild nausea?) Reversing that age gap preserves a sense of transgression while palliating some of the social dynamics, especially as the younger men in these new films are typically the sexual aggressors.
“It’s a way of dodging impropriety or exploitation,” said Maria San Filippo, a visual and media studies professor and author of Provocateurs and Provocations: Screening Sex in 21st Century Media. That said, in the best of these movies – Babygirl, May December, Last Summer, in which the younger man is the heroine’s 17-year-old stepson – power is queasily complicated, which carries its own erotic charge.
Even given this post-#MeToo climate, it’s doubtful so many of these films would be made were the culture not rethinking what menopause means and can look like. Menopause, clinically defined as a full year without a menstrual period, and perimenopause, the years of hormonal change preceding it, are in the midst of a makeover, with actresses proudly lending their names and creaseless likenesses to menopause and perimenopause ventures. Naomi Watts, who starred in the bonkers 2013 age-gap romance Adore, founded Stripes Beauty, a company offering “holistic menopause solutions”. Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop sells Madame Ovary, a supplement to ease hormonal change. Halle Berry is starting RESPIN, an online community focused on menopausal health.
It’s a truism that sex sells. And as these films, shows and corporate enterprises suggest, menopause might be sexy now.
“We are finally uncoupling women’s sexuality from our fertility years,” said Shira Tarrant, a professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies.
But as Tarrant acknowledged, that uncoupling is incomplete. And what exactly are those fertile years? Advances in reproductive technology have significantly increased their span. Actresses, Kidman among them, regularly have children after 40.
Beyond the bedroom, these on-screen bodies are mostly opaque. No character in these recent films mentions hormonal change or suffers the ordinary embarrassments of a hot flash or a “crime scene” period. If this new visibility is liberatory, it is also very limited. Are you perhaps a woman who is slim, conventionally attractive and more often than not white? Congratulations – you can represent your sex life for just a little longer. In these movies, limbs are lithe, faces smooth. The breasts are like military haircuts, high and tight. Thanks to advances in dermatology, cosmetics and surgery, women can be sexy at almost any age. As long as we look 32 forever.
Very occasionally, an imperfect body makes its way on-screen – Diane Keaton’s fleeting nude scene in the 2003 romantic comedy Something’s Gotta Give, Emma Thompson’s open robe in 2022’s Good Luck to You, Leo Grande – but typically, attractiveness equates to porelessness. This is the gruesome crux of the 2024 horror comedy The Substance, in which Demi Moore’s former starlet undergoes gooey agonies to retain her youth and beauty, birthing (asexually) a younger, hotter self.
And it’s funny, if you prefer your jokes bleak, that space is being made for mature women’s stories when the movies are much less invested in sex and the culture is experiencing a downturn in partnered sex generally. A study released last year found that there were 40% fewer sex scenes in the top movies of 2023 as compared with 2000. Even off-screen, every generation – not only the so-called “puriteens” – is having markedly less sex than their cohorts of a similar age 20 or 30 years ago.
A real happy ending
Maybe now is when I should admit that I’m not a neutral spectator of these movies. As a woman in my 40s, I have skin in the game – and some nights in front of the mirror I worry about that skin’s continued elasticity. (I have yet to experience a hot flash, but I did spend a few months contending with Burning Mouth Syndrome – as fun as it sounds – so perimenopause isn’t exactly notional.) I’ve spent my whole life looking to movies – and TV shows and pop music and novels and plays – for reflections of my own experience. Maybe that’s silly. I don’t really know another way to be.
I’ve felt grateful for these movies, for their fantasy versions of sexy, career-forward women in midlife. (I only wish I had lingerie that nice.) But often, I’ve felt disappointed or lightly embarrassed, as in A Family Affair, when Kidman’s character’s mother-in-law tells her, “You deserve to be happy, and you deserve to feel alive and to be seen.” Yes. Thanks. I know.
The most conventional of these movies – The Idea of You and A Family Affair – hinge on the outrageous idea that a younger man might desire an older woman. That’s it. That these older women should be desired, that they continue their relationships with younger men despite the objections of spoiled daughters, judgy exes and the tabloid media, that’s the happy ending. Which is fine. (Who doesn’t want the best for Kidman?) But it still equates value with being desirable to younger men. A happy ending that depends on Efron’s continued sexual interest is not one that I would confuse with liberation. Or empowerment.
Perhaps this helps to explain the radical appeal of Babygirl. Although it’s an unapologetically sexy movie, sympathetic to its characters’ kink, it isn’t ultimately about sex. For Romy, sex with Samuel is a gateway to self-knowledge and self-acceptance, an orgasmic means to an end rather than the end itself. Sex as a means of transformation has been a trope for men in movies going back to the Golden Age of Hollywood. It’s nice to see a woman getting equal, self-actualising play.
It suggests that there are many stories to tell about women in midlife, stories that take their worth as a given and don’t equate their value to their desirability. “We still have a lot to explore and discover as women, since we weren’t even allowed to get a business loan until 1987 without a male guardian,” Reijn said dryly.
The happily ever after of Babygirl doesn’t involve that younger man. It doesn’t really involve a man at all. Or babies. (Romy is the milk-drinker here; she needs no competition.) It demands that Romy recognise and pursue what she actively desires. That’s the promise and gift of some of the best of these works (like Wong’s hour, like All Fours, in which the narrator learns to choose “a life that was continually surprising”): that women in midlife can still take baby steps, sometimes in very high heels, toward authenticity and self-discovery. Now that’s a happy ending.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Alexis Soloski
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