Like most people, binge-watching Bridgerton this weekend pulled me into the unexpected subplot of Lady Violet Bridgerton’s slow-burn with Lord Marcus Anderson. It started with a meet-cute when he returned her dropped glove and built up through polite encounters. With Lady Vi’s radical declarations to him, to his sister Lady Danbury and most of all, to herself, Bridgerton once again did its Trojan Horse thing and brought to light another overlooked aspect of the female experience: the middle-aged sexual awakening. But the question it really raises is this: is it really an awakening if it has never actually died?
Because no matter how liberal we as a society portray ourselves to be, deep down, ageism is baked into the way we talk about women and sex. It’s not always overt. Sometimes it’s disguised as “concern”, sometimes as comedy, sometimes as silence. Just look at Badhaai Ho, which turned the seemingly “uncomfortable” fact of middle-aged people having sex into mainstream comedy, precisely because we’re conditioned to respond to later-life desire with awkwardness. Or Neena Gupta’s character in Lust Stories 2, a sex-positive grandma, that felt like a breath of fresh air because she gives voice to the family conversation we avoid, like telling her granddaughter that if you test-drive a car before buying it, why wouldn’t you do a “test drive” before marriage, too? Even Alankrita Shrivastava’s Lipstick Under My Burkha had a take on this through Ratna Pathak Shah’s Usha: an older neighbourhood “buaji” who privately reads erotica, buys a swimsuit and begins a sexually charged connection with a younger swimming instructor.
The underlying message is often the same: desire is a young woman’s game and after a certain age, you are expected to retire gracefully from wanting.
Seema Anand, Kama Sutra expert, storyteller and author of Speak Easy recently spoke to Scroll about running into this policing more often than not. She describes the way ‘concern’ gets weaponised, with men telling her, “Oh, well, you’re at this age now, you should be now praying. What the hell are you doing?” It’s the oldest cultural trick in the book according to her; turning discomfort into faux-protection so that women’s desire is positioned as something they must outgrow, instead of something they can work on.
When Gillian Anderson started collecting anonymous fantasies for her book Want, she did not expect how often menopause showed up as a turning point. In an interview with Stylist, Anderson describes perimenopause and menopause as “almost like a new frontier” where women feel “more curious and bolder” than before, pushing back against the fear that desire disappears with age. She also notes something that culture still struggles to say out loud without flinching: older women are on dating apps and many are getting interest from younger men.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: vogue.in
