Middle-aged escapist fantasies involving a sexy older woman attracting the attention and affection of a younger lover seem to be having something of a moment this summer. Anne Hathaway, playing 39-year-old Solenn, rushes off to tour Europe with her boy-band paramour. your idea, adapted from the book of the same name by Robin Lee. Nicole Kidman falls for her daughter’s celebrity boss Netflix’s family relationship, It will be released later this month. Even in real life (or online, anyway), fans have gone gaga over its photos Natalie Portman takes a smoke break with Paul MescalAnd Demi Moore enjoys a glamorous lunch in the South of France with Joe Jonas. All of this has prompted Vogue to wonder if we are headed for a “May-December Summer“
A hot older woman and a handsome young man have a fantasy of finding love together A favorite trope of romance novels, where it is considered a sexy subversion of the more typical older man/younger woman love story. Yet for all that, it’s shockingly unusual to find any of this pop culture paying sustained attention to the actual process of what it’s like to inhabit a woman’s body as you enter middle age. Sometimes it feels like coming-of-age romances are trying to sidestep menopause, with hormonal changes, hot flashes, and fuzzy minds holding onto their heroines saying, “No, no, it’s not too late” — for a great romance, for sex. , to be evaluated as a capable player in the sex market.
Its heroine your idea, Solenn, 39, caught just before perimenopause can be a concern. She can begin her relationship with a younger man (20 in the book, 24 in the film) without fear of noticeable wrinkles or gray hair. She is more mature than her lover, but the world has not yet begun to perceive her as middle-aged or sexually irrelevant. Moreover, in the film, Hathaway looks no older than she does now Diary of a princess 23 years ago. Significantly, the action of the plot must stop before middle age becomes undeniable. Before she turns 41, Solenn dumps her young lover, leaving menopause in the shadows, the unspoken horror that entire books and movies circle around.
“Women in our culture are taught to measure our self-worth by how men perceive us.”
In the literary landscape, at least, we’ve begun to see writers trying different strategies over the past few years to turn the lens of fiction onto menopause. In 2019, Sarah Manguso, sent into early menopause by a hysterectomy, Her search for menopause literature is chronicled in the New Yorker. She found memoirs and essays and hoped for “a wave of work by and about women that is, literally, a once-in-a-lifetime experience.” In 2023, The Guardian hailed the rise of “hot-flash lights”. Citing a new run of magical realist novels aimed at menopause what Stephen King did for Menstruation CarrieUses horror and superpowers as metaphors for the hormonal roller coaster.
Now, Miranda July has entered the chat about her new novel All fourAlready delighted with its title The first great perimenopause novel. July, who is also a filmmaker and performance artist, calls such auteur critics “cookie” in a way that reads part appreciative, part sentimental. She has long been preoccupied with what sex is like for women, and now, at age 50, she is undergoing menopause.
inside All four, an unnamed 44-year-old narrator attempts to embark on a road trip from LA to New York City, only to decide to blow $20,000 on redecorating the house, instead of stopping at a motel in a quaint suburb 20 minutes from her home, and a young Initiates a sexual relationship with a man. Struggling to explain herself to her husband, the narrator comes up with the bright idea of telling him she’s entering menopause so he’ll stop asking questions. When she finds out that he’s not actually lying and that she has actually started perimenopause, she doesn’t take the news well.
what makes All four What feels so fresh and exciting is how brazenly and confidently it handles that dilemma your idea And its people can only talk around: Women in our culture are taught to measure our self-worth by how desirable men find us. We are also taught that once we reach menopause, we are no longer desirable. So what will happen to us?
may be All four Dare to suggest, we can have our escapist fantasy and not make it so escapist.
“Man-wise, I’ll never get what I want again.”
At the beginning of the novel, the narrator is Dr All four Older women seem to lose their desirability. As such, he finds them contemptible, despicable and beneath contempt. When he sees an older woman at the gynecologist, he imagines “gray labia, long and loose, sacks of balls emptying his balls.” He marvels that the woman is “seemingly unconcerned or unaware that she had nothing to look forward to, cunt-wit.”
For the narrator, the prospect of losing sexual currency feels like the loss of his own life. His family history backs him up. Her grandmother and aunt both died by suicide at the age of 55, their faces unbearable.
So when the narrator realizes she’s attracted to 31-year-old Davey, the second man she talks to in the LA suburb where she’s hiding, she’s immediately struck by a terrifying thought: He’s too old for her. “It was my first experience of being very old,” she recalls. “Suddenly my lust was unspeakable, inappropriate.” He’s old enough at 44 that the idea of his wish has become more of a joke than something he can expect to be repaid. What makes it worse is that she knows it won’t just happen to younger men like Davey, but to men her own age. “People-wise, I’ll never get what I wanted again,” he realizes.
Yet instead of being rejected, she learns that Davey is also infatuated with her. For her, this could be interpreted in two ways: a sign that she’s secretly still young, or a sign that something is wrong with Davey. He feels inappropriate to his mother; She lost her virginity to her mother’s best friend when she was in her 40s; Maybe that’s why he’s behind the narrator?
Regardless, she feels like the last shreds of her youth, one last end before she’s grateful for the winks of 80-year-old men. She fears that if she says the wrong thing to Davey, he’ll suddenly realize how old she is, “like in a horror movie where the pretty girl’s face is wrinkled, then a skeleton, and finally a pile of dust.”
Yet when his relationship with Davey is at its best, the narrator finds himself thriving. In his shabby motel room, now decorated in a pretty pink space scented with tonka beans, the narrator turns off all the lights and dances with Davey. They don’t have sex, but she feels a sexual energy within herself, fully present and embodied, which is completely different from her “mind-rooted” detached sexuality with her husband. She becomes one of a particular gender and a particular age, free as a child in the beautiful pink womb she has made for herself.
Eventually, inevitably, the narrator’s relationship with Davey ends. After a while, her doctor tells her that she has entered perimenopause. For the narrator, this is a double tragedy. She is losing not only her sexual capital, she fears, but the sexual power she has recently discovered within herself, her access to “body-rooted sex.” She became obsessed with a graphic on the Internet showing a “hormonal cliff” in her early 40s, when estrogen production suddenly stops.
“That’s it. It’s over,” he tells his best friend. She has officially entered the part of her life where age-gap romance heroines fear to tread.
At this point the book is only halfway through. As if July were saying, “You don’t know.”
“Practicing Unity”
In traditional coming-of-age stories, the older woman’s redemption comes from the love of a younger man. inside All four, the narrator’s redemption comes in two ways. The first is through a sexual relationship with Audra, the older woman to whom Davey lost his virginity.
Throughout the first half of the novel, the narrator both pity and hate Audra as someone who was once a great beauty but is now clearly over the hill. Once in bed with her, however, the narrator finds Audra sexy, not despite her age, but because of it. “Her skin had begun to thin like a banana with age, but instead of being plump it felt incredible, velvety hot water,” the narrator muses.
By the end of their night together, the narrator begins to let go of his horror at the concept of age. It began to seem possible, he realized, “not to outdo antiquity exactly, but to match its strangeness, its brilliant features.” The idea is not to stop time before menopause has a chance to arrive, but to find what is strange and sexy and exciting about the experience of age: not to deny age or allow it to make one genderless, but to find sexuality and strength. Age itself
The narrator’s second release comes from his decision to hold on to the motel room. Negotiating new boundaries for marriage with her husband, the narrator meets her friends and various lovers there every Wednesday night and interrogates them about their feelings about marriage, aging, and sex. The pink beauty of the room breaks all barriers: her friends bathe and eat butter cookies and massage her while talking. The motel room is, the narrator realizes, a place where he can become a version of himself unencumbered by age or gender, with or without the lust to run the show.
As the narrator “practices oneness,” his fears seem to disappear or reorganize themselves. She reinvents her marriage, her motherhood, and her work so that she no longer feels trapped between them. Hormonal cliff graphic disappears from the internet. She learned that the hormone science of menopause isn’t really perfect yet, but what is clear is that women experience the best mental health of their lives after menopause. Forced to face the times, he is able to create a life for himself where his strength does not depend on the currency of youth.
For too long, serious literary novels have stuck to the question of how to deal with menopause with adolescent angst. Meanwhile, pop culture has devoted its energies to pretending that menopause can simply be ignored or stopped in its tracks, that with just the right amount of plastic surgery, fillers, or just blessed genetics, a woman can stay 29 forever and therefore win forever. can do A man is young enough to test his sexual prowess.
That’s part of the joy of animating the present moment in our celebration of older woman/younger man romance. When we get excited about these stories, we start talking about how Natalie Portman, Demi Moore, Anne Hathaway, Nicole Kidman and the rest haven’t aged. Of course they have, because we all have. We mean that they retain the power that our culture considers a woman’s most valuable power, which is the ability to pass as a youthful sexual object, still capable of bearing a child.
its narrator All four Is in the process of losing the ability to carry a child. She fears that she is losing her ability to attract men. He shows this problem straight in the face. Then he explodes them with open joy.
