I'm Helene Cooper. I cover the U.S. military for the New York Times. So I'm sitting in my car in a parking lot outside the Pentagon. I had a cubicle with a desk inside the building for years, but the Trump administration has taken that away. People in power have always made it difficult for journalists. It hasn't stopped us in the past. It's not going to stop us now. I will keep working to get you the facts. This work doesn't happen without subscribers to the New York Times.
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 at 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 at nytimes.com. We're so excited to hear from you. All right, on with the show. selamat menikmati And I love you more than any You're still alive. 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 Murray Silkoff. 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.
Marais 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.
And after talking to a bunch of her friends, Marais 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? 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 Murray Silkoff'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. The New York Times app has all this stuff that you may not have seen. I can immediately navigate to something that matches what I'm feeling. The way the tabs are at the top with all of the different sections. It's just easier to navigate that way. There is something for everyone. That's personalized.
page that you tap. That one's my favorite. I can also save my articles easily in this area. Right onto the byline. Click here if you'd like to listen to this article. I like that the cooking tab on top is really easily accessible. So if I'm on my way home and I'm just thinking, oh, what am I going to make for dinner? I'll just quickly go on to cooking and say, oh, I've got this in my pantry. I'm going to try out some of these recipes.
I see in here. I go to games always. Doing the many, doing the world. I loved how much content it exposed me to. Things that I never would have thought to turn to a news app for. is essentially The New York Times. Marais Stelkoff, welcome to Modern Love. Hi, it's a pleasure to be here. Marie, 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 a thousand 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 are women like me would freaking hate this piece. 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, you know, 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? 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. You know, 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, you know, I just thought that 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, au bout, 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 experiences as a teen early 20s like What do you remember about sort of 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 fabulon, so I kind of wanted to be ahead of the curve, like a fabulous kind of, you know, 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 like doing what everybody else was doing really at the cutting edge of whatever. sexual experience was at you know 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 that 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, etc., etc. 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' Tampac.
to Marla Maples. I mean, you know, 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 like nymphette who could never get enough. It's interesting because I feel like I'm hearing you speak as a cultural critic, which you are, you know, 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? Like 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 you know I remember the sex in 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? I don't know. Listeners, write in. Yes, listeners, please write in. back then it felt like every single thing existed for male titillation. 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 uh at some point
you know, confined to a declined bed with my head lower than my chest. I mean, really, really could not, 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 you know just living in long committed relationship with two young children and my health being what it was did not create you know 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 like 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 like 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 Pico 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 you know um so i had that kind of idea that that's what would happen post
And instead what happened was that my life exploded in a detonation of sex confetti. Well that is, I can picture us going to break right there. We'll be right back to hear about the explosion of sex that Marais ended up having in her late 40s. Stay with us. 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. 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. Were you... 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, 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?
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, it was just wonderful. Like it was wonderful. And I think like a lot of that, like not to intellectualize too much, but like, 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.
And I found that, like, I was really interested in taking up again where, quote-unquote, I had left off in my mid-20s. Wow. In these first... you know, 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 like it's not like everything disappeared disappeared disappeared right so it's like you know still a lot of issues uh 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 yeah!
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 seem 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 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, you know, 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 bot, right? So that's like, whatever. A bit more forgiving, but you know, 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 you know 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 happened. Love! 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 a story which is not about Gen X. This is part of the story that is about Gen Z and Millennial. 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 you know, be okay 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 okay, right? And also just...
The fact that you can go and buy a clitoral stimulator at Walmart, that's crazy. Like that that exists, that you can just do that. That's insane to me that I can go to the pharmacy and like buy a pint of milk. you know, some deodorant and like a cock ring is really, to me, feels incredibly new and incredibly kind of great. 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.
But for many years, I was absolutely not in a place of privilege. 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? So more comfortable asking for it, more comfortable asking for what I wanted. But I think the big thing... And, you know, any woman who's been in a locker room, I know it's a cliche to talk about like middle-aged women being naked in locker rooms and not caring.
it's like the younger women are like the ymca baby i understand it yeah yeah the younger women are covering themselves up or like you know going into the stall and the older women are just walking around letting everything hang out but i mean that 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 act- that i've been engaging in i mean you know they're good but they're not like
so off the wall where I'm hanging from chandeliers by clamps and straps. That's not what's going on here. What's going on here is feeling truly sensual and not being abashed about about it like not being embarrassed or kind of weenie or kind of like like i think all of that just creates a kind of place of comfort and once you're comfortable the bedroom or comfortable in yourself it kind of opens things up
for experimentation. You know, I was never much of a talker when I was young. Now I'm like, talking! I am talking! Yes, I'm saying all kinds of ridiculous things. So yes, you know. Stuff like that. 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 you were feeling
wasn't just your story alone. Of course you have all of these unique aspects to your story, your illness, you know, 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, you know, 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. 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, you know. Licking someone's butt. Licking someone's butt. So, you know, 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.
What was interesting was that, well, even if you divorce really late, that still holds true. I think that's a big part of the story. 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 made for netflix type movies 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 described? 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. 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 have things shifted in some way Yeah, I mean, things have settled down for sure. Also, like, I do want to say this, like, menopause does have an effect, and I am in menopause now, and my libido has actually, like, become a bit less voracious. It's still there. It's still great.
But like things can take a bit longer. I have to like 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 okay I don't really feel like doing that so much anymore or my priorities shifted or you know maybe I I don't know, want to do it once a month or not at all. I don't know. But I just want the journey to be organic in that way.
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! I'm gonna 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. Maraisilkoff. 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.
This episode of Modern Love was produced by Sarah Curtis. It was edited by Gianna Palmer and our executive producer, Jen Poyant. Production management by Christina Josa. The Modern Love theme music is by Dan Powell. Original music in this episode by Alicia B. E. Toop, Rowan Nemistow, and Dan Powell. This episode was mixed by Daniel Ramirez, with studio support from Maddie Maciello,
and Nick Pittman. Special thanks to Larissa Anderson, Mahima Jablani, Nelga Logli, Jeffrey Miranda, and Paula Schumann. The Modern Love column is edited by Daniel Jones. Mia 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.