Latest news with #MireilleSilcoff
New York Times
16-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Modern Love' Podcast: Gen X? More Like Gen Sex.
'When I actually think of the sex acts that I've been engaging in, I mean, they're good, but they're not so off-the-wall like hanging from chandeliers or by clamps and straps. No, that's not what's going on here. What's going on here is feeling truly sensual and not being abashed about it.' Mireille Silcoff recently wrote an article for The New York Times Magazine titled 'Why Gen X Women Are Having the Best Sex.' At a time of life when many women describe feeling less visible and less desirable, Silcoff said, her life instead 'exploded in a detonation of sex confetti.' On today's episode, Silcoff shares the juicy back story to her popular article, from her coming of age in Montreal to the surprising sexual resurgence she experienced after her divorce. Silcoff reflects on what it feels like to be a highly sexual person in her early 50s and tells us how being part of Gen X is central to her newfound freedom. For an upcoming episode about location sharing, the Modern Love team wants to hear your location-sharing story. Did something happen that made you regret sharing your location with someone? Was there a moment when you were thankful that you had? Where were you? What happened? How did your relationship change as a result? The deadline is May 1. Submission instructions are here. Here's how to submit a Modern Love essay to The New York Times. Here's how to submit a Tiny Love Story.
Vox
24-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Vox
The only generation not in a sex recession
is the host of Explain It to Me, your hotline for all your unanswered questions. She joined Vox in 2022 as a senior producer and then as host of The Weeds, Vox's policy podcast. If you've read the news lately, you've probably heard that Americans may be in the middle of a sex recession. But at least one demographic of people are having the best sex of their lives: Gen X women. At least that's the argument writer Mireille Silcoff makes in her most recent piece in the New York Times magazine. In it, she explores her own middle-aged sexual awakening. 'I was trying to explain a moment that I was really seeing everywhere,' she told Vox. Between her own life, her friends' experiences, and the portrayals in pop culture that were popping up everywhere, she sensed a trend emerging. 'There seems to be something new in the air having to do with 50-year-old women, their bodies, sex, and relationships.' So what is in the air right now? And what's behind these later-in-life sexual revelations? We talked to Silfcoff to find out exactly what's going on here in this week's episode of Explain It to Me, Vox's weekly call-in show. Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to Explain It to Me on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you'd like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@ or call 1-800-618-8545. What prompted you to write about this in the first place? I split up from my ex in my late 40s, after a very long relationship of 21 years. When I came out of it, I just thought that what lay ahead of me would be a pretty spinster-ish existence. I was really, really sick for a long time in my adulthood, and my marriage was very long and there were two children. I just felt like, 'Well, who is going to want this bag of problems? Now I'm 50.' Life is going to be orange pekoe tea, Masterpiece Theater, taking care of my kids, and hopefully remobilizing my writing, and that's it. And then instead what happened was I had a lot of wonderful new relationships with a lot of wonderful men and the kind of sex that I don't think I had even had in my 20s: a total new world of openness, exploration, interest, comfort in myself, self-knowledge and even, I daresay, wisdom. It felt revelatory. Explain It to Me The Explain It to Me newsletter answers an interesting question from an audience member in a digestible explainer from one of our journalists. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. And at first, I felt like this was my weird, cool story. But then, as stuff started coming out of the culture, some of my other friends divorced and had similar situations to mine, I realized that what I had been doing or what I had experienced post-marriage was really part of a much larger cultural story that might ring true for many women in America and beyond today. What do you think the factors are in this mid-life sexual revitalization? The women who are middle-aged now are — for the most part — Gen X. You're starting to get some millennial middle-aged people as well. And Gen X women had a really interesting formative experience when it comes to sex in the 90s. Divorce is also happening later than ever. Divorce and sexual exploration for women is a very old story: You get divorced and suddenly find a little piece of yourself sexually. I feel like that's kind of a big part of the story as well. So women having a bit of this sexual rediscovery later and finding when they're 47 or 55 that desire is still there, that sexual function is still there, that — thanks to the amazing strides that Gen Z and millennials have made opening up what's acceptable sexually — acceptance is still there. Related The online sex police are always watching and always so mad So Gen X women are more comfortable in their bodies. They may be more into figuring out kinks and things like that. Why do you think this is happening with Gen X women in particular? Why is this generation so different from boomers? Boomers were constricted by a lot of societal norms that were, for lack of a better way of putting it, very mid-century. There was an open attitude toward sex, and free love was a boomer construct. But what happened with all of that stuff is that when all of those ideas really came to roost in the late '80s and the early '90s — when women were suddenly working but men were still the bosses — it created a tough situation for the people who inherited that very open sexual culture. I see Gen X as being a generation of women who really were plunked into an extremely sexualized landscape and were needing to fend for themselves. There wasn't a lot of support for how to navigate bosses who were sexually predatory. There weren't a lot of roadmaps for how to have sex or how to be a sexual person. That was both good and bad, because, for instance, many women didn't experience orgasms because they just couldn't figure out how and their male partners couldn't figure out how so it just didn't happen. I feel like that wouldn't happen now. You've got things like OMG Yes, which is a website where you can find out how to have a female orgasm. It's a much more open environment now in order to find out about sex. But at the same time among the younger generations, there is a bit of a cliff that's happened with sexual frequency. I want to talk about that a little bit. There are so many conversations right now about how young people are having less and less sex. It seems like there's a backlash to sex positivity. Do you think millennials and Gen Z women take these sexual freedoms for granted? You do take it for granted, as you should. The parents create the situation, and the young people take it for granted. I think that the culture has basically conspired in every way imaginable against intimacy, against having an open and easy sexuality, against relationships. I don't think it's a coincidence that you really see the sexual drop off starting to happen in the same years that the iPhone was introduced. It's in the same years that social media really got going. 'The culture has basically conspired in every way imaginable against intimacy, against having an open and easy sexuality, against relationships.' People go out less, they hang out less. They do things together less in weird spaces where things can get weird. There was a lot more natural weirdness back in the day. And natural weirdness can lead to intimate moments which can lead to sex. I just feel like there's a certain cleanliness of experience in the culture right now where people are so afraid to intermingle in those old ways. It has had a big effect on people's ability to hook up or have casual sex or go from one boyfriend to another to another until you find one that you like. In some ways, I think it's wonderful for middle-aged people who already had that socialization. What do you hope for middle-aged women moving forward? Especially when it comes to sex, desire, and relationships?
