What Babygirl Gets Wrong About Dating Younger Men

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. Like alone, alone. I had not spent lockdown on Zoom first dates. Or socially distancing in a pod. I was very by myself.

Now, here I was, solidly in my mid-40s, slowly reemerging back into the world of… I’m not sure dating would be the right world. Fraternizing, perhaps? But in a good way. In an enjoyable way. In an I would like to be naked way. 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. (It’s still difficult to think of myself as an older woman, or at least resembling what culture tells us that is, but birth certificates don’t lie.) I was just out there in the regular online dating world (if “regular” can even be applied to that world) and that world was full of young men who were, by all accounts, very into me.

It wasn’t until all this attention moved off my phone screen and into reality — first in the form of a night of sweaty impromptu dancing that led to an even longer night of… enjoyment, and then because I continued to summon it — that I realized oh, actually, this is something that’s available to me. And then after further, er, investigation, something I realized I very much enjoy.

If there’s one lesson I’ve taken from aging, it’s that the stories we tell about women and age consistently prove to be untrue.

What I quickly discovered, after I started relaying my experience to friends, is that I was far from alone. It seemed like every woman my age or older had similar stories. At cocktail parties, the single women in my life, some 20 years older than me, would nod and smile and then let me know that not only was this de rigeur for them as well, but that often years would go by and they’d continue to hear from the younger men they’d had sojourns with (“They always come back,” as one acquaintance put it).

So why was this such a shock?

If there’s one lesson I’ve taken from aging, it’s that the stories we tell about women and age consistently prove to be untrue — even if recently I have found myself doing that thing where you have to extend the menu away from your face to read it clearly.

I would go so far as to say: most of them are a lie.

A few years ago, during a doctor’s visit, I expressed anger and frustration over the fact that a variety of what is ailing my body questions seemed to always yield the same answer: “It might just be your age.” Why couldn’t someone tell me definitively whether it was, in fact, my age? My doctor then said something I’ve never forgotten: “Your generation is used to having the answers. You’ve grown up in a world that has always offered you solutions.” She then predicted Gen X would reach menopause and flip out at the lack of information, and that this flip-out would change what had for so long been the status quo for women and aging.

She was right, as anyone currently being inundated with Instagram ads for perimenopause products — patches, creams, gummies, capsules, sprays — can tell you.

This year, the demand for that shift has moved onto our screens, too. Sort of.

Recently, there’s been a small explosion of films featuring older women dating younger men: Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine in The Idea of You; Laura Dern and Liam Hemsworth in Lonely Planet; Nicole Kidman and Zac Efron in A Family Affair; Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson in Babygirl. (Get it, Nicole Kidman.)

Female stars may no longer be disappearing after age 40, but Hollywood is still incapable of giving us a fully developed woman over a certain age.

Taken together, it’s easy — perhaps reasonable — to view this as progress: a flipping of the age-old dynamic of an older man and a much younger woman. Yet, upon closer inspection, it’s frustratingly clear the stories themselves are still lurching through infancy. No pun intended.

Female stars may no longer be disappearing after age 40, but Hollywood is still incapable of giving us a fully developed woman over a certain age, with all the inherent complications and desires and compromises and, most notably, confidence.

Instead, what we are presented with is another sort of flipping. One that brings to mind the plot of a Freaky Friday film in which the mother and daughter switch bodies. (Whether the Lindsay Lohan version or the Jodi Foster version comes to your mind right now is another way to measure age. You’re unlikely to be surprised to hear that I’m squarely in the Foster camp.)

This shift was apparent in the film version of Idea of You. In the book, the main character, Solène, was confident and successful. Anne Hathaway’s Solène, however, was fragile by comparison, scathingly described by Michelle Ruiz in Vogue as “a gooier, lesser version of herself, presumably in a bid to make her more likeable and accessible.” The flip was even more glaring in Kidman’s first turn as the older woman this year. In the summer’s silly A Family Affair, her character Brooke’s acute insecurity better resembles a trait that one might associate with a teenage girl than a professionally accomplished parent.

In Kidman’s upcoming film, the sexual thriller Babygirl (in theaters on Christmas), a similar diminishing is ever-present. One of the challenges of having a limited scope of stories that demonstrate how women actually exist is the temptation to tell them all at once. Babygirl falls prey to this dynamic, attempting to weave together, and turn on their head, multiple “how women live now” threads. It’s the story of power dynamics in the post-#MeToo era, except with the woman on top (if only metaphorically). It’s the story of how we are often attracted to the very thing our entire lives have been set up to combat; in this case, a powerful woman attracted to submissive sex. It’s a tale of how you can have everything you’re told you should want and still want more or different or both. It’s the story of how women are just as capable of doing terrible things as men.

It’s not, however, the story of a woman exercising her agency, sexual and otherwise. Or the story of a woman who has earned over her years a healthy supply of self-knowledge she’s figuring out how to put into practice. That this could be a reality is perhaps too much for Hollywood to contemplate. It’s instead much safer to imbue her with youthful insecurity.

Kidman plays Romy, a powerful CEO of a robotics company in a seemingly happy marriage to theatre director Jacob (played by Antonio Banderas, who, I must say, has never looked better). They live in a Manhattan penthouse and have two teenage daughters. Romy and Jacob have a lot of seemingly excellent sex. Or so we’re led to believe from the onset, which opens with them having seemingly excellent sex.

One day at work, a new group of interns arrive, including Samuel (played by Harris Dickinson). There is an immediate connection. During an interview, Samuel lets slip (based on little to no evidence; the audience has been treated to a brief glimpse of Romy masturbating to run-of-the-mill daddy-dom porn, but that’s it) that he believes Romy is a woman who wants to be told what to do. Romy immediately perks up. You see where this is going. What will likely generate the most headlines are the scenes in which Romy, who does indeed want to be told what to do, crawls across the floor to lap up milk from a bowl. Or crawls across the floor to take candy from Samuel’s hand.

Broadly speaking, what ensues is a lot of questionable sex. And I don’t mean questionable because Romy is Samuel’s boss, though yes, this is very questionable and is barely explored except as a deeply problematice device to compel Kidman to consent to more domination (thereby belying the very meaning of the word of consent). (Indeed, if you’re looking for a film that does wade into the very messy, legal arena of assault where older women and younger men are concerned, I’d point you to the excellent French film Last Summer, which was released in America earlier this year.)

Nor is it questionable that a younger, hot man would want to be having it with Kidman. Purely according to the “can you believe it” metrics of Daily Mail headlines, Kidman has a body most 25-year-olds would kill for. Also not particularly questionable: that a highly successful woman might crave this sort of dynamic. What a relief for women, who shoulder the majority of the mental burden, to have some of the decision-making removed. (Certainly, this is one selling point of the trad-wife movement.)

Women looking to men to tell us who we are is the oldest story there is. Its presence in Babygirl is disappointing, if predictable, and it undercuts everything else this movie is striving for.

What is questionable is what we’re expected to believe a younger man brings to the table. The director, Halina Reijn, has said Babygirl is a fairy tale. Fine. Even so! I can’t help but note the absolute fiction of finding a 22-year-old who knows how to be a good dom; how to give instruction in a convincing manner. What 22-year-olds know is what they see in porn. Domination requires skill and confidence, self-knowledge, and empathy. That one might randomly encounter an intern who possesses this is as much of a fantasy as a 54-year-old woman possessing Nicole Kidman’s body. (Imagine, for a moment, how much more subversive this film might have been had it starred a woman who actually looked her age.)

One of the thrills of age is knowing what you want and arriving in a place of not being afraid to ask for it (though, ideally, not from your 22-year-old intern). Instead, Kidman’s Romy, a nervous, uncertain woman, whose enormous success we only understand through her possessions, not her behavior, senses she might want what Samuel offers, but needs him to tell her what that is. Who she is. Women looking to men to tell us who we are is the oldest, tiredest story there is. Its presence in Babygirl is disappointing, if predictable, and it undercuts everything else this movie is striving for.

One thing that is consistently clear to me in my youthful fraternizations is that what is attractive about me is my confidence. 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. It’s not hard to find, particularly in France, but you don’t find it in the under-30 set who largely understand dominating as some reenactment of 90% of the porn they’re watching. And if you do, it’s because you’ve articulated your needs.

I can’t help but think how much more interesting this tale would have been if Kidman had asked for it. If we’d been treated to a tale of a woman with agency discovering the rewards and punishments (so to speak) for knowing what she wants and getting it. Not a woman in need of someone to give her an identity. A demonstration that true submission is a choice, and the desire for it is an act of agency — and therefore its own power move. I can’t help but think how much more satisfying it would have been if Samuel — whom, I should mention, we learn exactly nothing about, was equally satisfied by her ability to ask for what she wanted. That would be a truly radical story for the screen.