When Sex and The City first came out in 1998 it hit a sweet spot. A romantic comedy drama with stylish, likeable female characters we rarely saw on screen. Crucially it had the word 'sex' in the title. This was ahead of its time. You just didn’t see confident single women talking about how much they liked sex on telly. It was like looking in a mirror for the army of women (my army) waking up next to men they didn’t intend to see again but had enjoyed getting naked with. Hallelujah, we all cried.
Critics (men/baby Boomers) said it had gone too far - not far enough, Gen X (me) yelled. It was gloriously silly but groundbreaking too.
But ‘And Just Like That’ doesn’t have 'sex' in the title which, for me, is one of the reasons it hasn’t quite nailed it when it comes to holding up a flattering mirror to the life of women in their 50s. While SATC was ahead of the curve, AJLT is a little behind it.
I love it, really I do, despite the wobbly scripts and hit you over the head one-liners, but instead of shining a positive light into the corners of the lives of ‘the super middles” it wasn’t brave enough for me. It tiptoed cautiously around the truth about women in midlife.
I am not just another critic wading in with easy negativity about one of the few successful big budget shows to portray women over 50, I’m an actual expert on these women. I’m 53, I co-present a podcast calledPostcards from Midlifeand have interviewed almost every celebrity woman over 48 in the UK.
And I am a former glossy magazine editor. I spent 12 years at the helm of ELLE, often securing Sarah Jessica Parker as a cover girl (she was one of our biggest sellers) and when SATC came out I was editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan. So I know Gen X inside out which is why I feel a little let down by the gloomier parts of the portrayal of women in their fifties in AJLT (I wasn’t let down by the fashion though, that is joyous).
I wish Sex had stayed in the title because women in midlife love sex, it’s so important in this transitional stage of life. Everyone’s experience is different obviously but we’re the Jessica Rabbit generation, did the writers think we’d just put our sex toys in the loft with our vinyls?
Midlife can be a time of exciting sexual rebirth, but with the most sexually adventurous member of the foursome missing, Samantha, it felt like the creators chose to largely swerve this element of our lives, serving up a downbeat heterosexual storyline about married Miranda and Steve not doing it.
Many midlife women I know are having sex with much younger men. We barely see this on screen.
Many midlife women I know are having sex with much younger men. We barely see this on screen. Younger men tell them, and the women tell me, that they love the confidence and sexual experience of older women. Society tells us younger women are what men want, but it’s older men who want younger women - ‘not younger men, dumbo’, as one 55-year-old I know (with a 35-year-old lover) explained it to me.
And that’s a positive less tortured storyline I’d love to have seen. Miranda’s evolving sexuality was brilliantly portrayed but it wasn’t the plot twist it was billed to be, since many women in their fifties are sexually fluid. I know several who have left long-term marriages to live with women they have fallen in love with later in life.
The AJLT writers could have been much more courageous and devoted more positive screen time to the secret sex lives of midlife women and dropped Carrie’s illogical hip operation completely. This felt a cliche too far for me: hip operations are typically associated with much older women.
And crucially the writers made a huge omission on behalf of Gen X by neglecting to talk about HRT and the perimenopause (the 10 years of hormone fluctuations before the menopause). You can’t turn on breakfast telly without seeing it discussed today so why wasn’t it a part of a show celebrating women of this age? Were the AJLT team just too squeamish to tackle it?
Also HRT, as we now know from all this telly sofa talk, prevents osteoporosis, the cause of most of those hip ops in women in their seventh or eight decade. It’s as if they were too frightened to ‘go there' in case they put viewers off with factually accurate ageing talk, but to ignore it is to ignore the real-life experience of every woman over 45 which is mad, (Samantha would have ‘gone there’).
When I discuss AJLT with younger women they wonder why Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte hadn’t seen all this coming - but let me tell you, no one does.
Besides Gen X probably won’t be having hips replaced not just because we’re all on HRT but because most of us know the value of staying fit. I’ve interviewed 10 women over 50 this week from diverse backgrounds for a book I am writing and every single one of them had been in the gym at least twice by Thursday. To suggest a narrative of us hobbling around in our heels (or trainers, they’re cool too) was a little downbeat for me. And the focus on facelifts felt negative too, they’re the least of our worries because we don’t want to look younger at 50, we want to look and feel better; less tired, not twenty again.
When I discuss AJLT with younger women they wonder why Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte hadn’t seen all this coming - but let me tell you, no one does. Midlife is a complex time in a woman’s life and it does catch you by surprise, as the show conveys well in my opinion.
Maybe it’s nature’s way of protecting us from feeling all the feels as we age, after all our fifties can be peppered with a sort of living loss: empty nest emotions, careers ending, marriages petering out, close friends getting cancer, caring for aging parents and the continuous changes in appearance. You become someone else, a different woman. And illogically all this feels like it happens overnight, no one is prepared and I loved the reality of seeing that on telly. But this pause between young and old is also a giddy positive time of reinvention and possibilities (once you get through those living losses). It’s liberating. And I think Generation X is handling it better than those generations that came before them.
Perhaps we’re the Samantha of all the generations, louder, more outspoken, more positive and upbeat than the midlife women who came before us, who were made to feel invisible as they aged. Maybe that’s the shot of positivity that AJLT needed most, the one who once said; 'Hello My Name is Fabulous'.
READ MORE: What To Expect From The And Just Like That Finale
And Just Like That: Are There Vibes Between Carrie and Steve?