By Jill E. Duffy
The female midlife crisis is no longer a crisis. It’s a reckoning. And some women are finding it’s the time of their lives.
Women over 40 are pursuing better sex (especially after divorce), competing in extreme sports, and adopting new identities. After decades of body-shaming culture, they’re sloughing off the stigma and embracing their physicality. They’re tallying up their life’s experiences and making calculations about what else they want, what else they deserve, and asking what will bring them pleasure.
A huge part of women reclaiming midlife begins with redefining it. “We are witnessing a cultural shift in how we think about menopause,” according to Janie Steckenrider, a professor at Loyola Marymount University and an expert in sex and aging. The middle point of life isn’t defined solely by menopause, though it’s a significant marker.
“Up until a few years ago, menopause was only viewed in terms of loss,” Steckenrider said – loss of childbearing ability, estrogen production, libido, and youth. On average, menopause starts at 52, but perimenopause begins eight to ten years earlier, so around ages 42-44. That’s midlife if you plan to reach or exceed the life expectancy for women in the U.S. of 80.2.
Some women don’t experience physical symptoms of perimenopause or menopause at all, though they’re still subject to other life events that tend to happen around the same age. Midlife is often when people deal with the death of a parent, divorce, illness, and children moving out of the house (although today, many women at 40 are starting families).
According to Applewhite, an author and activist who educates people about ageism, these transitions can lead to greater confidence. “It gets simpler and clearer, and you are less apologetic,” she said. As we get older, “we come into our power. We know what we’re good at,” she said. “It’s a scientific fact that older people get better at emotional regulation. We don’t sweat the small stuff.”
From a generational lens, Steckenrider said she is not surprised by the new female midlife trend toward pleasure-seeking and adventure instead of loss and despair. Gen X women, who now make up the 46-60 age group, were risk-takers as teens and especially fast-paced with sexual experiences compared with the generations before and after them. Gen X is also deeply counter-cultural. They don’t care about fitting in or aligning with cultural norms. They’re happy to throw old ideas about the female midlife crisis out the window.
Date younger. That’s the advice Applewhite has for many women over 40 who are looking for sex or companionship, but not marriage or a family. “There’s loads of younger men who are genuinely attracted to older women,” she said, whereas the pool of older men who are available is small. As to whether it’s “age-appropriate,” Applewhite said there is no such thing when dealing with adults.
Better sex, or getting the sex you want, is a huge theme in the new story of women in midlife. A lot of it is sex between 40+ women and much younger partners. This is becoming a mainstay in pop culture. Last year’s All Fours by Miranda July gave readers a mid-40s, sexually hungry, self-indulgent protagonist who lusted after a man 20 years younger. The threesome in Mrs. Fletcher was between a 19-year-old, a 30-ish woman, and her boss (Mrs. Fletcher) who’s old enough to have a son in college. In the movie Babygirl, the lead character played by Nicole Kidman gets her kicks from the riskiness of an affair with an intern who assumes the role of a dominant sexual partner.
“Many older women are just coming into their sexual power,” said Applewhite. It doesn’t stop at knowing and asking for what they want. Women are also exploring and experimenting. “The rise of more people being queer, gender fluidity — there’s much more,” Applewhite said.
Women in midlife today are claiming the sexual freedom that they’re entitled to, and which the Baby Boomers before them worked so hard to get in the first place in the 1960s and 70s. Steckenrider here again sees the cultural and generational relevance. “What was important was individualism of doing what they wanted and putting their own needs and desires first,” she said of Gen X women. The “pleasure-seeking, sexual exploration, and sexual risks” women are embracing today are related to the freedom they exercised in their youth.
When Gwendolyn Bounds was 46, she fell off a 17-foot rope. Despite the fall, she stood up, did some penalty burpees, and continued running her first obstacle course race. She finished in the middle of the pack for her age group. She had never been athletic before in her life. A few years later, after rigorous training that included hauling buckets of rocks around her property and practicing the monkey bars at a local playground, she took home a medal. She describes the journey in her book Not Too Late.
I asked Bounds what she found compelling about taking new risks. “For me, becoming a competitive athlete for the first time in midlife…is less about taking risks and more about harnessing all my existing attributes to do something new and powerful that makes me feel acutely alive,” she said. She first learned about obstacle course racing on a whim through an online search of “What are the hardest things you can do?” She thought about it for almost two years before trying it.
“I was approaching 45 and stuck in a ‘cycle of sameness’—same friends, same restaurants, same work problems, same sitting and staring at screens. That ‘sameness’ probably is what led me to seek something hard,” she said.
Bounds’s passion for racing has also led her to see that identities are not fixed regardless of age. She described her younger self as “a weak, gawky kid,” whereas now she’s a competitive athlete and well-known in the obstacle racing community.
Likewise, Sue Shellenbarger found herself in midlife becoming a new person. She quite suddenly thrived on risks, chasing one adrenaline rush after another. In her book Breaking Point, she wrote of herself at 51, “I have become somebody no one else knows, a wild woman with gray hair under a full-face helmet, a hand too heavy on the throttle and an adventure lust so consuming that I lie awake nights.” Two years and one broken collarbone later, she finally realizes what the attraction to risk was all about: “finding and understanding my limits.”
Pushing her limits makes Bounds feel present, she said, “more in the ‘now’ than any act of meditation ever has. That is what is so enticing. Plus, growing stronger at a time when our bodies are supposed to be on the decline has felt like a superpower.”
A midlife reckoning doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The youngest Gen Xers (myself included) had only just turned 40 at the onset of the pandemic. My own mixed feelings about aging began emerging at the same time of a larger cultural shift. People were more likely to point to Covid-19 than a midlife crisis as the impetus for personal transformation, whether they were launching a new business, getting fit, having an affair, or picking up a new hobby.
Applewhite pointed to another important bit of context for women in the U.S., the “horrendous rollback of fundamental women’s rights.” Women don’t take bodily autonomy for granted. She wonders if women rebelling in midlife is related. She said, “Perhaps it’s saying, ‘Fuck that shit. I’m not going to curl up and dry up.'”