The Free Press
The first time you meet Romy, you hear her before you see her, moaning in ecstasy as she sits astride her naked husband. The camera pans over her strawberry-blonde hair, her smooth forehead, her open mouth. A skilled aesthetician has clearly had a hand here, and so it’s hard to guess how old she is. Forty-five, maybe? Fifty? The moaning reaches a crescendo, and Romy collapses next to her husband, who tells her he loves her.
“I love you,” she says back.
And then, she climbs out of bed and skips quietly down the hall, sprawls on the floor with a laptop, and masturbates to pornography. Because that gasping orgasm you just saw? Much like her thick eyelashes and lovely, shapely lips, it’s entirely fake.
Romy, played by Nicole Kidman, is the protagonist of the new film Babygirl, which hit theaters in the last days of 2024. She’s a high-achieving, artfully injected, happily married mother of two, who spends her days managing the company she founded and her nights having intercourse she never enjoys—because what she wants, what she needs, is something her husband can’t give her. When she meets the man who can—the man who knows, somehow, that Romy “likes to be told what to do”—a steamy affair commences. His name is Samuel, he’s about 25 years old, and riskiest of all, he’s her intern.
“Do you want to lose everything?” he asks her.
Romy’s answer to this question is both yes and no, and in this, she is not alone—at least, if the art of the last several years is to be believed. The vision of self-immolating midlife female lust depicted in Babygirl is a ubiquitous presence in the culture, where stories abound about fortysomething women finding sexual fulfillment in the arms of much younger men.
In 2022, we had Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, starring Emma Thompson as a widow who hires a young male sex worker to help her experience the orgasm she’s never had. The following year there was May December, featuring Julianne Moore as a thinly veiled version of Mary Kay Letourneau, the teacher who spent over seven years in prison for the statutory rape of her 12-year-old student and then married him upon her release. Last year, there was The Idea of You, in which Anne Hathaway plays a 40-year-old divorced mom who becomes romantically entangled with a musician 16 years her junior.
And then there was Miranda July’s blockbuster 2024 novel All Fours, which The New York Times called “the first great perimenopause novel.” In it, a 45-year-old wife and mother abruptly leaves her family and moves into a motel, where she spends two months mired in an emotionally and sexually acrobatic liaison with a younger man—a plot point that appears to have inspired a mass real-world liberation movement among female readers who see All Fours as an aspirational tale rather than a cautionary one.
“This is a novel that made women blow up their lives; every book group had a friend of a friend whose life had been shaken to its foundations,” reads The Guardian’s glowing appraisal, which discusses how All Fours has become a “bible” for some readers. A similar exploration from the Times waxes poetic about the spectral oasis of “shimmering possibility” that lies just beyond the exit from marriage and family life.
If the buzz surrounding these stories is to be believed, we are currently in the midst of an epidemic of dissatisfaction among women of a certain age and certain level of achievement—an existential malaise for which the only cure is to break vows, shatter norms, and, most importantly, do the deed of darkness with one’s 24-year-old SoulCycle instructor. After Babygirl was released last month, the NYT movies section announced “Middle Age Is Sexy Now.”
As a middle-aged woman, I am no doubt the target audience for this sentiment, which I wish I could find validating instead of vaguely suspicious. Is sexy the best word, really, to describe what’s happening in these stories? To be in midlife, to be a woman, to be tormented by the excruciating nearness of that moment when you are well and truly too old to start over—and on the heels of this, to be seized by the urge to smash that nuclear button and burn it all to the ground, to rattle the foundations of your life so hard that it resets the clock back to. . . okay, not zero, but how about 22? Twenty-six? Even 31! To prove to yourself that you still have time, that it’s not too late, that you are still not just visible but vital enough to tumble into bed with some nubile young thing—as if this will make you younger by extension, as opposed to what it actually makes you feel, which is that much older by comparison.
I couldn’t help noticing that Babygirl never actually shows Romy and Samuel naked in flagrante, which speaks to the subtlety of director Halina Reijn’s touch but also to the tenuousness of the fantasy she’s created—which would be shaken, if not shattered, by the sight of a supple young body pretzeled together with one whose flesh has gone crepey with age. Even for someone like Nicole Kidman, who, at 57, can still pass for 15 years younger from the front and for a teenager from behind, there are certain parts of the body—the neck, the hands, the elbow creases—where the passage of time makes its mark.
This dreamy romanticization of complicated or even self-destructive sex is something Babygirl has in common with shows like Sex and the City, which 27 years ago presented us with a new paradigm of female sexuality: the Woman Who Has Sex Like a Man—which is to say, whenever, with whomever, casually, and without compunction. This new spate of stories is arguably the logical endpoint of that same paradigm: What could be more male, after all, than hitting middle age and having an existential crisis with a side of schtupping the secretary?
Except: The man who bangs the nanny and abandons his family in a quest to feel young again is a pathetic and contemptible figure, if not a predatory one. His female counterpart, meanwhile, is adventurous, daring, the envy of group chats everywhere. If the sexual revolution gave women equality, the pop feminism of the current era grants us a sort of immunity: If you find the notion of a woman betraying her husband and abandoning her family distasteful, it’s only because—as The Guardian writes in its paean to All Fours—she’s “just too radical to stomach.”
It is noteworthy that in the end, Babygirl declines to inflict much in the way of consequences on Romy. Yes, she is discovered—first by a female assistant, who blackmails her, and then by her husband, who throws her out of the house. But this is only temporary: Ultimately, Romy is spared the total destruction of her career, her marriage, and her family. In the movie’s final scene, she lies face down on the floor, grunting, while the husband she cheated on brings her to climax. And if this position in some sense represents a diminishment, it is also a victory: This is what she wanted. At the beginning of the movie, she had it all, but only now is she satisfied.
Indeed, it is characteristic of these stories that all the lying and cheating and intern-boinking is more or less written off as forgivable for the sake of female empowerment, which seems to be defined as a woman getting whatever she wants. (All Fours—spoiler alert—also ends thusly, with the protagonist’s husband agreeing to an open marriage.) For these women, risking everything for the sake of extramarital orgasms with a person who doesn’t love you is not a destructive and selfish impulse to be resisted, but the path to a higher realm of self-actualization. They owe nothing to the world, or to their occupations, or to the people who love and rely on them; certainly they cannot be expected to honor the promises they’ve made if it means denying themselves something they desire.
Films like Babygirl are brave in that they acknowledge that women, empowered to have sex like men, will do exactly that—up to and including taking inappropriate liberties in the workplace with their much younger underlings. Where they fail is in pretending that this makes them heroic figures, as opposed to total sleazebags.
What equality truly demands of us is not just the license to behave just as badly as men, but to be held to the same standards of human goodness. This is the nature of middle age—when you aren’t too old to start over, but you’re definitely old enough to know better. Eventually, the path ahead of you becomes narrowed by the choices behind you; eventually, you become accountable not just to yourself but to others, too. And if some shimmering possibility presents itself, be it another lover or another life, the truly heroic thing to do is to understand the difference between a possibility and a promise, between a fantasy of what might have been and the deep-rooted truth of the life you’ve chosen—and to gently close the door.
