I t’s Christmas in New York City, and a woman is meeting a man in a hotel room for sex. She is tall, blonde, dressed in all black. He is young, also tall, and dressed like an extra from 8 Mile. They know each other but not well. Their power dynamics are muddy: she is older, rich, and his boss. He is physically stronger, practically a stranger, a man. At first, they play in this muddiness, testing the bounds of their encounter. Then, in a moment of calm, the man asks the woman to get down on all fours. She hesitates for a beat, then willingly complies. It’s Christmas, after all, and she is getting exactly what she wants.
Desire, historically a common theme in Hollywood, has been on uncertain ground in recent years. Allegations of sexual misconduct against powerful men in Hollywood helped fuel the #MeToo movement, prompting the entertainment industry to reconsider what it was doing on and offscreen. Behind the scenes, many of the accused were fired and replaced, in some cases by women. On set, the adoption of intimacy coordinators—mediators between actors and production staff during scenes involving nudity, sexuality, or intimate contact—became increasingly widespread.
Hollywood turned its focus from sexual desire to the harms committed in its name. Films like She Said, Bombshell, Women Talking, Promising Young Woman, The Assistant, and Tár told stories—some fictional, some taken from real life—about the harm inflicted by people who could not be bothered to control their sexual desires. Though the stories were different, the films had a few key things in common: the perpetrators were always in positions of power; they were almost always older; and save for Tár, the fictional conductor played by Cate Blanchett, they were always men.
Now, more than half a decade later, a new trend is emerging. A series of recent projects featuring relationships between older women and younger men are reconsidering desire, specifically female desire, in a post-#MeToo world. And though subjects like power and consent are in the mix, the films have other ideas in mind.
T ake the couple we left in their New York hotel room. The woman on all fours is Romy Mathis (Nicole Kidman), a high-powered CEO for an Amazon-esque robotics company called Tensile. The man is Samuel (Harris Dickinson), a manic pixie dream hunk turned intern, who is both Romy’s mentee and sexual playmate. The film is Babygirl, an erotic thriller of sorts—at least that’s how it was marketed—about a kinky affair between the older Romy and the young Samuel.
The story’s catalyzing force, we’re led to believe, is Romy’s unfulfilled desire to be dominated in the bedroom. She has sex with her husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas), but she is unable to reach an orgasm with him. Instead, she resorts to faking it, only to sneak out of bed once he’s asleep to masturbate to what might best be described as “daddy porn.” She’s so ashamed of her fantasies that when she finally hints at them to her husband, she has to first cover her head in a sheet, mumbling her desires like a bashful ghost.
When Samuel appears in Romy’s life with an uncanny ability to sense exactly what she wants, she finds herself unable to resist him. Before long, Romy is experiencing a kind of pleasure she has been longing for. And though she struggles to vocalize that longing, Samuel articulates it quite plainly. “I think you like being told what to do,” he says early in the film, and then quickly accommodates that desire.
The irony is that Romy’s life is filled with small acts of servility. She works before she is at work; she diffidently accepts a critique from her husband about the apron she wears at breakfast; she absorbs insults her elder daughter bats her way. Even at Tensile, where Romy is the CEO, she is often depicted as amenable, responding to the wants and needs of others, adapting her emotional facade as directed. Romy is constantly doing what she’s been told, just not in the ways she wants. These burdens—which resemble those so often placed on women—begin to form a cage, separating Romy from her own desires.
This is despite the fact that Romy has exactly what women have been told they should want: she’s married the perfect man, played by Antonio fucking Banderas, with whom she has seemingly loving, idyllic sex; she’s raised and provided for a family; she’s achieved the pinnacle of success at work; and she looks like, well, Nicole Kidman. But it turns out some of her wants don’t fit inside that neat little life. And she isn’t alone.
I n 2022’s Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, Nancy Stokes (Emma Thompson), a retired school teacher who has only had one sexual partner (her husband, now deceased), meets a young male escort, the titular Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack), for sex. Nancy has never had an orgasm and hired Leo to help her feel all the things she’s missed out on.
But for much of the film—most of which takes place in the same hotel room—Leo serves not as a sex worker but as a therapist. He listens while Nancy confesses the dissatisfactions of her marriage, how disappointed she is by her adult children, whose calls she admits she always answers, and how badly she still wants to feel the things she’s missed out on.
Tethered to all of these confessions are feelings of shame. Like Romy, Nancy has a life that is often idealized: a loving husband, a stable career, and successful children. Still, she wants more. She wants things she’s been taught to believe she shouldn’t want. “Oh god, I’m just a seedy old pervert,” she says during her first encounter with Grande, perhaps seeing herself through the eyes of her dead husband. Then moments later, when she admits that she’s never had oral sex and that she desperately wanted it, she starts to cry.
Through all of this, Grande serves as the voice of a younger generation, countering longstanding cultural narratives about desire, older women, and motherhood that Nancy has been taught to believe. Like Samuel, he seems to have an extraordinary ability to know what Nancy needs.
Though it’s lighter fare—a low-stakes romantic comedy from Netflix—A Family Affair, too, tells the story of an older woman, Brooke (Kidman again), navigating a relationship with a younger man (Zac Efron). The film has all the classic romantic comedy beats, and in a different era, the age gap between Kidman and Efron would be the hurdle in the story, the obstacle the couple needs—or perhaps fails—to overcome.
But A Family Affair makes little of the couple’s age difference. Instead, it’s interested in who Kidman’s character, a widowed single mother, gets to be now that her daughter Zara (Joey King) is grown. In one of the film’s more literal moments, Brooke’s mother-in-law (Kathy Bates) tells her, “You get to ask yourself, ‘Who was I before I was everything to everybody else?’”
The film tries to create tension by giving Zara the tedious job of objecting to her mother’s relationship, but the story feels remarkably frictionless, which is perhaps the most radical thing about it. It wants us to see Brooke’s desires and her relationship as commonplace, just as it would be if the gender roles were reversed.
The Idea of You, another romantic comedy, this time from Amazon MGM Studios, has a strikingly similar plot. The film, based on the popular book by Robinne Lee, stars Anne Hathaway as Solène, the older woman to Nicholas Galitzine’s Hayes, a pop star in a One Direction–style boy band. Solène has a daughter whom she shares with her ex-husband, who left her for a younger woman. For a montage and a half, Solène and Hayes enjoy a picture-perfect romance across countries and hotel rooms.
When the pair finally have their obligatory first fight, Hayes asks Solène if anyone in her life knows about him. She says nothing, prompting Hayes to ask if she is ashamed of him. In reply, Solène makes one amendment: she is just ashamed. The source of that shame, it turns out, is not the age gap itself but how it mirrors her ex-husband’s clichéd tastes. The film inverts that cliché, suggesting that the desire for a young lover—as superficial and socially constructed as it might be—may transcend the limits of gender. But the most interesting part of The Idea of You is not the object of Solène’s desire; it’s the fact that her desires are conveyed at all.
I n an essay for Boston Review, critic Becca Rothfeld writes, “There are vanishingly few contemporary contexts in which women are taught or encouraged to demand electrification, or indeed, to want actively at all.” The women in these films have active wants, but they are constrained in one way or another: by motherhood, by social expectation, by gender norms, by self-criticism, or by shame. It’s their young lovers who listen, console, and satisfy, ultimately breaking their respective Mrs. Robinsons (Nancy’s real name, it’s later revealed, is Mrs. Susan Robinson) out of their social and sexual straitjackets. Nancy/Susan does eventually have an orgasm—by her own hand, not Grande’s. Brooke and Solène both overcome social and familial hurdles and go off into the sunset with their younger men. Even Romy’s story, the most complicated of the bunch, comes to a relatively tidy resolution.
As Babygirl reaches its climax, Romy, Jacob, and Samuel finally have a chance to talk about their love triangle. Jacob, hurt by the affair and high on his version of the world, tells Samuel that he has been abused. “Female masochism is nothing but a male fantasy. It’s a male construct,” he says, moments after the two have exchanged brief but physical blows. But Samuel, wearing the confidence of youth, disagrees. He tells Jacob that his idea of sexuality is dated, that he doesn’t understand—the subtext becoming text.
Jacob’s response might be the film’s most transgressive moment. Rather than challenging Samuel’s assertion, Jacob starts to hyperventilate, as if the shattering of his world view has literally taken his breath away. Romy and Samuel move to help, and through a nice bit of blocking, all three end up down on their knees. (Ideology, it seems, is the ultimate dom.) Jacob then presses his forehead into Samuel’s. The two stay there for a moment, breathing heavily, and for a second, it seems as if they may fight—or kiss. Instead, Jacob starts to cry. Samuel apologizes, and then the young lover walks out of their house and their lives.
The waning moments of the film suggest that Romy has overcome some of her shame, even if she still carries some of the stigma related to her desire. Jacob, similarly, seems open to her fantasies—though to what degree is unclear. What is certain is that Samuel, the deus ex dominator, prompted these changes, helping Romy realize her desires and recognize them as normal, not shameful.
In all of these films, the generational gap is, in part, an ideological one. The young male lovers—each in their own way a bit too good to be true—act as counter-narratives to the various impositions placed on female roles and female desire. That these messages are delivered through male vessels feels a touch antiquated—men appearing to save the day. But the men in these stories are also objects of desire, a gender reversal that gives form to a kind of female longing that has been absent from our screens for too long.
In the wake of #MeToo, consent became an essential and long overdue part of cultural conversations about sex. But only in a culture where abuse, assault, and rape had been so grossly permitted could consent be mistaken for good sex, never mind the possibility of women having an appetite for what Rothfeld calls “delicious sex.” She writes, “It is telling that #MeToo has focused not on women asserting but on women assenting (or failing to assent).”
Babygirl, like all of these films, feels like it is pushing beyond mere assent, beyond the baseline of consent. Romy is a woman with complex desires, seeking satisfaction beyond what she’s been told she should want. The existence of that desire is nothing new; it is as old as desire itself. What is so thrillingly contemporary is that it has been made visible; female desire sits at the centre of the story, and we are invited to watch.
