luck9 Why Gen X Women Are Having the Best Sex

In 2019, I divorced, at age 46, and went on to have more and better sex than I ever would have thought possible.

I had not imagined that the end of a 20-year relationship would mean a new era of high eroticism; I’d have needed to be delusional to think that. I was middle-aged, with two young children, a bunch of chronic illness and a bank account that was essentially handed over to divorce lawyers. My career was on life support, and after years away in bigger cities, I was back in my hometown, Montreal, enduring the kind of isolation that comes from exiting a relationship that has defined nearly half your life. Then the pandemic hit.

Disciplinary proceedings against Dr. Wax tested the tenure protections of professors and whether such protections allow them to voice opinions that many might find inappropriate or downright insulting. Many students said that they could not trust Dr. Wax to grade students without bias. But many professors — even those who found her comments profoundly racist — objected to disciplining her on the grounds of academic freedom.

And yet.

In the beginning I thought it was just my own cool and unusual story. Returning to plentiful sex in my late 40s felt weirdly intuitive, like hearing an old favorite song and finding that of course I still knew all the words. There were new frills — I’d cook decadent meals, buy absurd lingerie, pretend that I always had Japanese whiskey hanging around — but I also found that I was better at sex, and that this was because I was older. I had fewer inhibitions, fewer hangups and more self-love than I did as a taut 24-year-old. And the culture of sex in the 2020s felt more exploratory, more forgiving. The date rapes and creepy professors that filled my 1990s were gone; the workplace harassment and idiotic full Brazilians that peppered my early 2000s were over. The fear of pregnancy was finished, as was the pressure to land a partner to make babies with. Everything that remained felt like a privilege: There was desire, and there was the ability to fulfill it.

It turns out this was not just my story. Five years since that divorce,panaloko casino it seems clear that what I have been doing privately is part of something bigger — a story that somehow belongs to my generation, and particularly the women of my generation.

The media’s confirming this has been kind of unrelenting. A few months ago, Netflix served me a scrolling bar of options labeled “Grown-Ass Women Living Their Best Lives,” full of movies about middle-aged women unrepentantly getting it on, not because they were weak but because they had arrived. Last year brought not one but two movies in which an accomplished, tastefully dressed Nicole Kidman (57) has a sexual affair with a much younger man, and one in which an accomplished, tastefully dressed Laura Dern (57) does the same. In literature, the 56-year-old actor Gillian Anderson put out “Want,” a collection of female sexual fantasies; Glynnis MacNicol, 50, wrote “I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself,” a popular memoir about going to Paris to get laid; Molly Roden Winter wrote the salacious “More,” about her open marriage. And of course there was Miranda July’s blockbuster novel, “All Fours,” a barmy midlife sextravaganza, which The New York Times named “the First Great Perimenopausal Novel” and which contained so many uncannily truth-telling moments that it nearly exploded all my messaging apps with shared photos of its pages.

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