Wednesday Shit Talk: Hand Gen X A Cigarette

"Middle Age is Sexy Now." No shit, Sherlock.

Like every other woman over 40, I saw Babygirl last weekend and contemplated how Nicole Kidman’s Romy had a bad case of ladywood that led her straight to begging Harris Dickinson’s Sam to get his dick-in, son at the risk of the personal and professional empires she’d painstakingly built during of her 30s and 40s.

Get exactly what you want for Xmas without asking!

Naturally, think pieces about the film scattered like cockroaches to a crumb. The New York Times published a decent one, by Alexis Soloski, which points out how “middle age is sexy now” due to a sudden glut of Gen X women selling the menopause dream and making art about other women our age looking hot enough to get strange from young bucks.

She wrote:

“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 recognize 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.”

Indeed! Soloski understands how the overarching point of the film (written, directed, and produced by Halina Reijn—a woman) and all the other menopause revival content is a big fat pushback against ageism. We’re not done living/learning/FCKNG until we’re done.

A hot take from a much younger Marie Claire culture writer Sadie Bell also picks up on that MO, but she somehow landed on awkwardness as a thesis:

“Of course other films, from teen raunch comedies like Yes, God, Yes to coming-of-age movies like Diary of a Teenage Girl and LGBTQ+ dramas like Disobedience or Portrait of a Lady on Fire, have explored similar themes, especially in recent years. But Babygirl feels like the start of the next great chapter for erotic dramas in its openness to center a story on a woman, over 40, not shying from the messy and humorous parts of sex, while also being so damn honest about how brave it can be to fall in love with every side of yourself and your desires.”

Doing something new and verboten is always awkward, but I don’t think the inherent awkwardness was the crux.

What’s missing from both of these hot takes is the acknowledgment that Romy was bored shitless in the first place. And what frustrated me was how, until the bitter end of this film, Romy used her boom box instead of her voice to get what she wanted.

As Gen Xers, unilaterally voicing our desires is not always so easy, which is why we all love Samantha on SATC so damn much. We fumbled in the dark through feminism. Toxic masculinity was the only way of the world and, as our mothers did, we had to figure out how to get our personal and professional needs met while working within archaic systems designed to suppress and oppress us. We had no choice but to fool ourselves into trying to do it all and have it all without benefit of equal rights and pay, supportive “villages,” and socialized support systems, leaving us little time and/or energy for organization or effective self-advocacy. Greatest Gen and Boomer residue stained our brains with their puritanical ideations of women and sex for a long time (which, in an attempt to control us, some idiots are trying to bring back). We got the pill but felt compelled to turn on each other, calling each other “sluts” (not me, don’t look at me!). To top it off, we came of age during the AIDS crisis. We were made hyperaware that pleasure for pleasure’s sake always carried risk. One way or another, to FCK or not to FCK was always the question, and we were screwed either way.

This drove us toward a dream of self-realization however we defined it, but unless we were super lucky we could never quite have access to all of our true selves at once. In the boardroom, Romy made herself heard all day, every day. In the bedroom, not so much. If, like Romy, we were able to claw to the top of any heap, being a boss was a way to be heard, to be respected, to be equal at last. But, once we got there, it was like dancing atop a Jenga tower fashioned to buckle at any moment, so we had to maintain balance at all costs because one way or the other, we paid: Your partner might not be able to stomach your success, you never see your kids and they resent you, other women in the company would slit your throat for your position. Romy was desperate to keep all the walls up even though they were caving in. It’s obvious she read Lean In on her way up. You can tell by the way she dangled that carrot in front of Esme until her Millennial ass did what she had to.

This is also why she was so easily dickmatized. This film is cognizant of how those puritanical stains have made it difficult for some of us to speak up for ourselves. Even in that first hotel room rendezvous, Romy struggled with switching gears and it frustrated me. This may be an unpopular opinion but part of me wanted for her to be the dom in that relationship. If she had just grabbed Sam by the backpack and said, “I want you to grind my pussy into a pulp” for example, wouldn’t that affair have been the true key to her liberation? I get that she found it refreshing not to be in charge for once, but I was holding out for a hero.

Most importantly, no one is talking about the boredom that drove her to Sam in the first place, which is a huge Gen X issue. Romy’s life was as automated as the many shots of AI-operated bins zipping back and forth. If we aren’t careful to change shit up, our lives—especially if we’ve taken on the responsibility of other lives—present us with a conveyor belt of the same old predictable offerings reflecting the choices and commitments we made when we were in our 30s. But, as all humans do, we change and wake up in our 50s feeling like something is missing. We look back and realize all the experiences we passed up to be “good,” all the places we have yet to visit, all the things we’ve yet to experience, and we want to experience them while we still can, developing an insatiable craving for novelty—at home, at work, and in bed. This is why Babygirl is such a deeply resonant Gen X film. Just bring cigs for after, because you’ll need them.

PS: How the hell was Find Friends lost on Antonio Banderas?

Gilded Globules!

It’s also my job to watch the Golden Globes and whaddya know, many of my predictions were on point! Demi Moore’s win for her performance in The Substance (previously addressed here) was awesome, as were Karla Sofia Gascon’s and Zoe Saldaña’s wins in Emilia Perez (also discussed previously here, and predicted here), Jean Smart’s inevitable win for Hacks (called and celebrated here, too), and Jessica Gunning’s win as Martha in Baby Reindeer (DER).

I need to start betting on these things!

Until next time…

xx

MF