Women of the year: Middle-Aged and getting more action than ever before

Mireille Silicoff, Why Gen X Women Are Having the Best Sex, NYTimes, 2025.

A whole new cultural type seems to have landed. It feels worlds away from the traditional view of older women’s sexuality — which, if you look at the lion’s share of studies, you would conclude is incredibly depressing. Until the late 20th century, academic studies of aging women were dominated by what sociologists call the “misery perspective,” which emphasizes how people’s lives get worse as they age, burdened by factors like chronic illness and financial distress. [...]

But this year I looked around at the women I know and saw a completely different plane of existence. “The women I know” is, by definition, not a representative sample, but still: Two of my friends ended marriages because of their own sexual dissatisfaction. Another divorced and became a card-carrying polyamorist. Two of my friends in their 50s are seriously dating people in their 30s, and a few others are, like me, divorced and engaging in sex practices they’d never tried before. [...]

I’ve come to think of this cadre of women as something like hardy garden perennials. Year after year, with the right conditions, perennials continue to flower. Likewise, the sexual Perennial finds herself still well rooted in an erotic life at an age when she may have expected it to fade or wither.

In contrast:

This is all the more remarkable because, for the culture as a whole, physical sex really is withering and fading. Among the most defining ongoing stories about sex in America today has been the drop-off in activity among Gen Z and Millennials. Blame for that decline has generally been placed on the way we live in the 21st century: the atomization of our social lives; the antidepressants that can kill the libido; the phones and social media that provide endless fascination, even on boring evenings when other things could be happening; the always-available porn that offers both problematic expectations of how in-person sex happens and a far less demanding alternative to it. For young parents, the intensity of modern child-rearing shrivels sex lives. For teenagers, a growing obsession with personal and psychological safety, a desire to be immune from discomfort, can flatten eroticism in some of the places it might flourish.

There's much more at the link.