Entertainment
Hollywood loves an age-gap romance.
If only they understood what would make them actually hot.
The first time a much younger man responded to my profile on a dating app, I was amazed.
I thought it was a fluke.
A glitch in the algorithm.
I was in Paris, at the tail end of the pandemic, which I had spent largely alone.
I had not spent lockdown on Zoom first dates.
Or socially distancing in a pod.
I was very by myself.
But in a good way.
In an enjoyable way.
In anI would like to be nakedway.
Or so I hoped.
Eventually it became clear these messages were not, in fact, a glitch.
Nor was I on a site that catered to young men who preferred older women.
And then after further, er, investigation, something I realized I very much enjoy.
It seemed like every woman my age or older had similar stories.
So why was this such a shock?
I would go so far as to say: most of them are a lie.
Why couldnt someone tell me definitively whether it was, in fact, my age?
My doctor then said something Ive never forgotten: Your generation is used to having the answers.
Youve grown up in a world that has always offered you solutions.
This year, the demand for that shift has moved onto our screens, too.
(Get it, Nicole Kidman.)
Yet, upon closer inspection, its frustratingly flush the stories themselves are still lurching through infancy.
Instead, what we are presented with is another sort of flipping.
One that brings to mind the plot of aFreaky Fridayfilm in which the mother and daughter switch bodies.
Youre unlikely to be surprised to hear that Im squarely in the Foster camp.)
This shift was apparent in the film version ofIdea of You.
In the book, the main character, Solene, was confident and successful.
The flip was even more glaring in Kidmans first turn as the older woman this year.
Its the story of how women are just as capable of doing terrible things as men.
Its not, however, the story of a woman exercising her agency, sexual and otherwise.
That this could be a reality is perhaps too much for Hollywood to contemplate.
Its instead much safer to imbue her with youthful insecurity.
They live in a Manhattan penthouse and have two teenage daughters.
Romy and Jacob have a lot of seemingly excellent sex.
Or so were led to believe from the onset, which opens with them having seemingly excellent sex.
There is an immediate connection.
Romy immediately perks up.
You see where this is going.
Or crawls across the floor to take candy from Samuels hand.
Broadly speaking, what ensues is a lot of questionable sex.
Nor is it questionable that a younger, hot man would want to be having it with Kidman.
Also not particularly questionable: that a highly successful woman might crave this sort of dynamic.
(Certainly, this is one selling point of the trad-wife movement.)
Whatisquestionable is what were expected to believe a younger man brings to the table.
The director, Halina Reijn, has saidBabygirlis a fairy tale.
What 22-year-olds know is what they see in porn.
Domination requires skill and confidence, self-knowledge, and empathy.
Women looking to men to tell us who we are is the oldest, tiredest story there is.
Its presence inBabygirlis disappointing, if predictable, and it undercuts everything else this movie is striving for.
I know what I want.
That I am able to convey that clearly and without shame.
What a thrill to be rewarded for all the self-knowledge I have worked hard to attain.
If what I wanted was to crawl, I would have found that.
And if you do, its because youve articulated your needs.
Not a woman in need of someone to give her an identity.
