If there is a Sex and the City generation, then, reluctantly, I am it. During the autumn of 1998, freshly moved to the UK's big city aged 28, my (male) flatmate summoned me downstairs to make me watch his latest obsession.
I didn’t love it. The clothes were fabulous. However, the premise that all these bright women were obsessed with finding a man felt curiously anachronistic, however athletic the intercourse. It didn’t feel modish to me, it felt weirdly pre-feminist.
This ambivalence only increased. There was nothing I would rather watch as fashion eye candy with the sound turned down at Chelsea’s Bliss nail bar. However, even as I became more of a sexually adventurous single gal myself, Carrie’s relationships with men struck me as plain ghastly craven, game-playing, pathetically needy.
Where other women bowed down to the cult of SatC, I bowed out; a response that cut me off from the rest of womankind more even than my dislike of chocolate.
Well, hold on to your Fendi baguette bags, Gen X. Next thing I know I'm 50, and tomorrow evening And Just like That, the hotly awaited sequel to Sex and the City, will strut onto British screens. Sarah Jessica Parker, who starred in the original series (running 1998-2004), reprises her role two decades on, Carrie and her pals having shock! aged two decades.
Cue what SJP has denounced as a good deal of “misogynist chatter”: 30-somethings have been usurped by 50-somethings and social media is in uproar.
As showrunner Michael Patrick King observes: “One bitchy response online was people sharing pictures of the Golden Girls. And I was like, ‘Wow, so it’s either you’re 35, or you’re retired and living in Florida. There’s a missing chapter here’.”
As 56-year-old Parker herself puts it: “Everyone has something to say. ‘She has too many wrinkles, she doesn’t have enough wrinkles.’ It almost feels as if people don’t want us to be perfectly OK with where we are, as if they almost enjoy us being pained by who we are today. I know what I look like. I have no choice. What am I going to do about it? Stop ageing? Disappear?”
Even 21st-century society reflects the age-old literary prejudice that a woman only had narrative interest as an ingenue, then the odd cameo as a terrifying crone. “Reader, I married him,” is her story’s end, some token old bag allowed back for revenge at the christening, with nothing in between.
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Advertise with NZME.Yet if this attitude is still in evidence, then it is suddenly and surely, on the decline. Where blue-jeaned Baby Boomers refused to grow old, so Generation X is actively embracing age - and refusing to be marginalised with it. Candace Bushnell, 62, author of the book Sex and the City, refers to these women as "the super middles".
"Super middles are everywhere," she declared to Oprah Daily. "These are people who say, 'Hey, you know what? I've wanted to do something good in the world and now I'm really going to try.' It's the age when you recognise you can still improve, and learn things, and take on new challenges."
The principal situation super middles are bent on improving is the midlife experience itself. Witness menopause campaigners Davina McCall, 54, Meg Mathews, 55, Mariella Frostrup, 59 this Friday, Trinny Woodall, 57, and Caitlin Moran, 46, who celebrates the happy state of "hagdom" in her 2020 memoir More Than a Woman.
Writer Sam Baker, 55, who started the podcast The Shift (on life after 40), is a compelling voice within this movement. She tells me: "Do a quick google of 'older woman' and Patrick King's observation is completely borne out you are either 30s and childbearing, or grey-haired on a Saga cruise. It would be funny, except it isn't. It's a shocking lack of imagination, not to mention a waste of experience and talent, to write off whole generations of women once they hit their mid-40s. You become culturally, not to mention professionally, invisible just as men become silver foxes, CEOs, and are endowed with gravitas."
It's a year now since her midlife memoir The Shift was published "and, in that year I definitely feel that women in their 40s, 50s and 60s have raised their voices and refused to vanish," she says.
“Look at Reese Witherspoon producing shows with roles for Laura Dern, Nicole Kidman, Kerry Washington, and Jennifer Aniston. Look at Andie McDowell gorgeously grey in Maid. There’s a long way to go, but women like SJP refusing to be grey-washed from our screens is a great start.”
Given that the modern tendency is to spend the years up to around 35 establishing one’s life, the whole period of actually living it happens between 40 and 70: relationships (for some), children (ditto), home-building, parental decline so much love, and loss, and incredibly hard slog. This is the “squeezed middle,” that great engine of society caught between the young and the old, and powering both.
For my own part, in the 15 years between 35 and 50, I have created a freelance career, acquired six nephews and nieces, spent eight riotous single years, gone on anti-depressants, nearly died, stopped drinking, lost both parents, acquired a life partner, a home and a dog.
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Advertise with NZME.If it’s been bloody difficult at times, it’s also been bloody interesting, and if you gave me the choice between 25 and 50 I’d pick middle-age every time. I have twice the years and am twice the person for it.
Lorraine Candy, 53, former editor of Elle and co-creator of the podcast Postcards From Midlife, notes: "There is a blind spot about women in midlife. And it feels like a conspiracy to keep us invisible at a stage when many of us have greater confidence than before and feel liberated from the self-doubt of youth.
“But we are the fastest-growing sector of the workforce, as women are finding out how to deal with the menopause, which may [previously] have stopped them in their tracks. Women are back in the room, restarting careers, dating younger men, leaving hopeless marriages, saying ‘No’ to stuff they don’t want to do.”
And a host of new midlife role models is emerging as a result: “High-profile women who talk about their experience. Many of us are finding our libido again, our energy, our health and our optimism ready for a vital second act. Generation X women are very vocal. We’re not going to slink off into the shadows and keep quiet about our newfound midlife power. Our message: brace yourself.”
The Daily Telegraph
