This article contains spoilers for Season 1 of Interesting Age.
No label existed to describe my mother in 1965, at the age of 27, when she met the man who would become my father, a baby-faced boy who had just turned 18. But there were many unusual comments. In The Second Sexfirst published in France in 1949, Simone de Beauvoir had written about an old woman who pursues a “pure body” because young men are the “only” she can hope to desire a “maternal mistress.” The woman does so, too, to combat the anxiety of aging, de Beauvoir wrote, felt by “one whose life is already over, even though death is not near.” Wow.
Subtle stereotypes about older women attracted to younger men have certainly continued into the 21st century. In 2003, after Demi Moore began dating Ashton Kutcher, who was 15 years her junior, it wasn’t just the celebrity weeklies that had field day and the love of the couple; the national media circulated phrases such as “The ‘Graduate’ Style Relationship” and a derogatory term cougar. This month of February only, the New York Post he announced that “cougar relationships are hotter than ever.” The Post it the article can be read as celebrating the empowerment of women; in evaluating recent films depicting an older woman, a strong young man, it described them as “far from the pictures of the hunting cougars of the past.” But his violation of cougar the brand—lazy with the male gaze, signifying something oppressive, reducing women to figures of curiosity (at best) or despair (at worst)—nevertheless implied judgment.
Still, a new wave of film and television suggests a shift in how some people think about May-December romances involving older women: movies like A female child (with Nicole Kidman) and Lonely Planet (starring Laura Dern) and, most recently, a Netflix reality series Interesting Agewhich leaves a few dozen members of different sexes of different ages on a resort basis in British Columbia and sit down to see what happens.
(Read: An old woman comes of age)
Interesting Agecreators Rebecca Quinn and Jennifer O’Connell, he told it Deadline last month where they clearly wanted to create a show that would “tell a story” from a “female point of view.” “There have been a lot of shows out there where they write, especially women, as cougars or MILFs,” they said, “and we didn’t want this show to be like that.”
You can see that effort in the series’ respectful treatment of one of his most interesting early relationships, between Theresa DeMaria—a 54-year-old yoga instructor, model, and mother of three—and John Merrill, a 27-year-old software salesman. Their pairing is not without its dramas; DeMaria, for example, struggles with the potential failure of revealing the relationship to her children, the oldest of whom is two years older than Merrill. But refreshingly, the show doesn’t just emphasize DeMaria’s sex appeal. It also allows viewers to see his strengths, his openness, and his weaknesses—in other words, his humanity. “There’s a lot that older women bring to the table,” Quinn told me in an interview this week, “which is more than just whether they like sex.”
A romantic scene involving an older woman does not mean that sex should be left out of the picture. Quite the opposite: Eroticism was in the middle of A female childwhich tells the story of a successful CEO who falls in love (and lust) with the youngest male student in his company. The difference between A female child and Interesting Ageon the one hand, and old film and TV cartoons, on the other, is that in these newer works, women are presented as perfect subjects, architects and protagonists of their own desires. In Interesting Age—where, as on other dating shows, the suspense comes in anticipation of who will fall in love and what will happen as they learn more about each other—DeMaria radiates warmth not as a rambunctious old woman but as a woman whose anger at meeting her match is so endearing and infectious.
Credit, I think, should be given to the women of Gen X, who recently have been dispelling stereotypes about older women’s sexuality. (The creators of Interesting Age all are Gen Xers.) More women have been discuss openly the effects of perimenopause and menopause on their sexual health. Last year, a The New York Times Magazine the headline did allegations of incitement that “Gen X Women Have Better Sex.” “In many memoirs and movies and TV shows, older women are found in relationships with younger men,” the article’s author, cultural critic Mireille Silcoff, wrote. “It doesn’t come across as cougar-ism; it feels more like relaxation.” He went on to describe the many threads of this serendipity. In addition to the fact that many Gen X women have reached the Age of Divorce, she wrote:
You have women who are more educated and earning more than ever before. You have women who are aggressive and who can be light and easy in sex because they went through very difficult sex when they were young. And you have women who, in a way, are not immune to the neutering forces of the 21st century – because, sexually and socially, they were created before it.
As an “older” woman (I’m also Gen X) who has dated younger men, all of this resonates with me.
With this growing interest in the lives of older women, I wonder if we’re in the midst of a cultural renaissance—and perhaps a subtle rebellion, led by female writers and directors. A female child was directed by Dutch film producer Halina Reijn, also Gen The Idea of Youstarring Anne Hathaway as a 40-year-old single mother who enters into a relationship with a 24-year-old boy band star, it was based on a novel by Gen X author and actress Robinne Lee, and the screenplay was written by Gen X actress turned writer and director Jennifer Westfeldt. Miranda July—also Gen X!—gave us a bestselling menopause novel All Fourwhere a disgruntled wife and mother falls in love (and becomes obsessed) with an available, younger man she meets at a car rental office.
Now Interesting AgeMore focus on DeMaria and Merrill’s courtship has included more of an older woman, younger man. At the end of March, DeMaria he told it Beauty that he had not faced much stigma about the relationship. “If I were to put a percentage on it, I would say 95% of the people out there are totally supporting me, encouraging me, and wanting us to be together,” he said. “That’s very encouraging. It just means that our world isn’t working the way I hoped it would and that women’s empowerment is on the rise.” (She might be on to something: In 2023, dating app Bumble surveyed more than 25,000 users and information (that respondents were “open to relationships with older and younger people,” and that 59 percent of women surveyed were willing to date someone younger.)
As for whether things changed between DeMaria and Merrill: well, no. O’Connell told me that even though the two are now just friends, “I think they both had an amazing experience together.” Is their division a failure, a cause of regret? I don’t think so. DeMaria and Merrill may have broken up, but Interesting AgeRepairing their relationship, and DeMaria’s romantic significance as an older woman, was its kind of success.
