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. (For people watched television on TV sets back in those days, during fixed time slots, in groups.)
I confess, 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 (one fabulously SaTC New York import). 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. Her whinging irritated me, her thing for Mikhail Baryshnikov’s Russian finishing me off. 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 Thursday 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?”
Sexist tradition long had it that women did vanish off the scene after their salad days of sexual – understood as reproductive – availability. We saw it in popular culture, with female newsreaders employed as beguiling handmaidens to twinkling silver foxes, then banished as they headed towards 40. We saw it in television and film, where male midlifers would be married to nubile 20somethings, women of their own age relegated to brief appearances as their mothers.
In this, 21st century society reflected 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, but nothing in between.
If this attitude is still in evidence, then it is suddenly and surely on the decline. Where blue-jeaned 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.”
