Grown-ass women just want to have fun

I wrote a review of The Idea of You for Rolling Stone

Last weekend, I received an email from an editor at Rolling Stone asking me if I’d watch an Anne Hathaway movie and write about it.

Oh you want me to watch a horny movie and share my thoughts? And I’ll get paid? I love my life.

Also, because it was for Rolling Stone I figured I better do some drugs (THC) and get slightly deranged on the page. God bless the editor for keeping it all in.

Here is an excerpt from the review, which ended up being about exhaustion, desire, fun, and allowing women to be a fun, horny mess on the screen.

MIDDLE-AGED WOMEN DON’T have a lot of fun in movies. If we are depicted onscreen we are often shown as harried, hypercompetent mothers and wives. We are tragically divorcing or exhaustedly raising our children. Sometimes we do some (alleged) murder. Other times we walk into the sea.

But the horny, stylish romps onscreen are usually reserved for the younger, less encumbered women — women who are more tabula rasa than palimpsest. And I understand. I am a 40-year-old woman in America. It’s hard to have fun in life, much less in a movie. Every woman my age I know is exhausted from managing children, unequal partnerships, aging parents, the erosion of our rights, careers where pay gaps still exist and there is no girlbossing our way out of them. Over the past decade, we voted. Pantsuitted. Pussy hatted. #MeToo-ed. Shouted our abortions. All to end up here, in 2024, in this Temu-brand 2016 redux. It’s enough to make any woman commit an (alleged) murder or walk into the sea. Or hey, why not both? It’s 2024, women can have it all. But only when it comes to tragic endings.

And I think this sums it all up.

And it doesn’t matter if it’s feminist or subversive. (It is neither of those things, but good Christ it doesn’t have to be.) Maybe we are desperate for escape because we have been nailed to the cross of a country that would rather fight war after war than give us reproductive rights. Or because we’ve worked so hard and we deserve it. Or because the pay gap still exists and so does the laundry. And because women, grown women, are human fucking beings, who have sex, who get messy, who want to lose ourselves in a fantasy, who do not have it figured out, who are cringe, who are lost, who are very silly, who are very tired, and who just want to have some fun.

Read the entire thing over on Rolling Stone.