In 2025 I’m embracing ‘sexy forties’, my style mantra for the year
Call it the All Fours effect
Hello and Happy New Year!
Like many women, Miranda July’s horny novel All Fours, which I read in December, left a huge impression on me. Last month, The Guardian ran a piece about the women who blew up their lives after reading it, variously leaving their partners, quitting their jobs or exploring non-monogamy. I haven’t done anything so extreme, but there was one paragraph that completely spooked me. So much so that it is the unlikely inspiration behind my style resolution for 2025.
This book has received so much airtime I barely feel the need to fill you in but, in short, a married 45-year-old mother plans a road trip from LA to New York but only makes it as far as a motel near her LA home where she begins a lusty relationship with a much younger man.
Soon after the narrator first encounters Davey, a 31-year-old dancer, she spends an evening fantasising about him. Afterwards she straight up decides:
“(and this came like a blow to the head in the middle of the night) I was too old for him… This was my first experience of being too old. I had not always gotten exactly what I had wanted—men had been unwilling to leave their wives for me or to do more than flirt—but even in these humbling cases I hadn’t questioned my right to feel desire. Now suddenly my lust was uncouth, inappropriate… Just a few years earlier, at forty or forty-two, I would have been a contender, but now it was too late. And he was just the first one. From now on this would be the norm”.
Now, I’m happily married and not looking to turn other men’s heads (much, lol), but I am 42. Were my days of being properly desirable, of being a “contender”, almost over? From the narrator’s point of view, things are winding down for me. Of course, this is fiction and, indeed, the narrator is obviously sexy and attractive, even if she can’t see it herself at first (without spoiling anything she definitely has a change of mindset as the book goes on). And I can list off dozens of famous sexy older women: Monica Belluci, Halle Berry, Isabelle Huppert, I could go on all day. There are also older women who I know personally who are undoubtedly sexy. But, as is the way with this book, it did make me look at my own life. And it made me think about how I present myself.
Obviously ‘sexy’ or ‘desirable’ is completely subjective. For some it’s an attitude, for others it’s a body. In this case I was thinking about my clothes.