Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Older women are hot right now. In the buzzy romcom The Idea of You, Anne Hathaway plays a 40-year-old divorcee in a relationship with the 24-year-old frontman of a popular boy band. The soon-to-be-released A Family Affair features Nicole Kidman as a widow involved with her daughter’s movie star boss, 20 years her junior. Even Bridget Jones, the romantic franchise of a generation, has killed off its leading man Mark Darcy in favour of a dating-app dalliance with a 30-year-old for the fourth film.This generation of actresses is looking younger than ever, and a proliferation of “tweakments” and hours of reformer Pilates serve to make the age difference between them and their leading men less physically obvious. Compare and contrast the 56-year-old Nicole Kidman or the cast of And Just Like That to the similarly aged ladies of The Golden Girls with their bouffant helmets. Indeed, style site The Cut deemed Hathaway “too hot” for the role as portrayed in the book from which the film was adapted, Robinne Lee’s 2017 bestselling novel of the same name. While that criticism has a whiff of damned if you do, damned if you don’t, it’s true that Lee aimed to explore “how women of a certain age cease to be seen” — hardly a risk for Hathaway.The optics notwithstanding, the plot lines of The Idea of You and A Family Affair suggest an evolution in attitudes towards the older woman/younger man dynamic. These relationships are portrayed as romances rather than predatory seductions or exploitations of toyboys. And the films address lingering stigmas head-on: the Hathaway character is eviscerated by the tabloids as a “cougar”, a term connoting predatory threat, although the younger man is the pursuer; the daughter in A Family Affair, played by Joey King, considers her mother’s fling a “gross sexcapade thing”. These reactions speak to the visceral response that flipping gender stereotypes can still provoke — although by making their younger male characters celebrities, both films bypass any true power differential.These onscreen May to December romances reflect a shift in the culture at large. My group chat of single divorcees is awash with profile pics of men in their twenties. The dating app Bumble predicted “gen(erational)-blend” relationships as a trend in 2024, citing more than a third of women surveyed saying they’d become less judgmental towards age-gap couples during the past year. This may be down to increasing acceptance of non-traditional relationships more broadly, the “man deficit” for educated women spurring them to cast a wider net, and dating apps making these matches easier to find. Attitudes may be more open towards older women with younger men than the inverseSienna Miller, 42, whose partner is 15 years her junior, has said that a younger generation of men have “grown up with a slightly more level playing field” and, as such, are more respectful of women. If anything, attitudes may be more open towards older women with younger men than the inverse, which is considered more fraught since #MeToo.Changing perspectives may also have to do with a handful of women taking more control behind the camera. The Idea of You was produced by Cathy Schulman (Crash, The Woman King) and actor Gabrielle Union, along with Hathaway herself. Schulman, a former president of advocacy group Women in Film, is dedicated to getting more “female-facing” projects developed for both film and TV, joining other industry heavy-hitters such as Reese Witherspoon and Bruna Papandrea in the mission. Giving women what they want turns out to be commercially savvy: according to Amazon MGM, The Idea of You attracted nearly 50mn viewers worldwide in its first two weeks on Prime Video, making it the studio’s biggest romcom ever. A Family Affair will also be released direct to streaming on Netflix. In their data-driven way, streamers seem more willing and able to cater to “niche” audiences, including older women. We have a way to go yet in our cultural representations of older women. And while middle-aged women are the biggest buyers of fiction, their experiences remain woefully undercovered on the page as well. The filmmaker and writer Miranda July’s recent novel All Fours recounts the sexual exploration of a woman in her mid-forties, both with a younger man and older women. July has spoken of overcoming the fear of “outing [herself] as being not young any more” — a testament to just how invested women are in the sexual capital of youth. Her cult word-of-mouth hit joins a clutch of titles about open relationships and divorce in which women are re-evaluating standard sexual scripts. But that its themes are so rare amid the hundreds of novels I read a year suggest that there is room for far more of these stories. Still, it’s a start. If nothing else, the cinematic trend offers young men an easy opener with older women. I’ll take “have you seen the Anne Hathaway film?” over “hey” any day. There’s much to discuss.Mia Levitin is a critic and author of ‘The Future of Seduction’Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life & Art wherever you listen
