Beyond Visibility: Sexuality, Agency, and Midlife
What aging, feminism, and pop culture reveal about the difference between being seen and being whole
The Cultural Moment of Loudness
There’s a cultural moment I’ve been paying attention to—particularly among women in their early to mid-forties—where sexuality suddenly becomes louder, more visible, more declared.
Before anything else, it’s important to say what this is not: it is not sex-shaming.
A woman’s sexuality is her own.
Always.
She can use it, express it, sell it, withhold it, explore it, or transform it in whatever way she chooses.
But ownership and performance are not the same thing.
What I’m interested in isn’t whether sexuality is being expressed, but where it’s being sourced.
Whether it emerges from embodiment or from pressure.
Whether it reflects desire—or negotiates fear.
Ownership Is Not Performance
In my Women’s Studies class in college, I was once asked to write a paper advocating for pornography from a feminist perspective. I entered that assignment convinced porn was the demise of women.
And to be honest, I still believe it can be exploitative, coercive, and deeply harmful when power is uneven or consent is compromised. That belief hasn’t disappeared.
My reaction wasn’t directed at my professor—I wasn’t offended or chastised. I was angered by the task itself.
It felt like a betrayal of women, of feminism, of what I had believed the movement was meant to safeguard.
Not because sexuality was being examined, but because it was being reduced—treated as proof of liberation rather than something that required discernment, context, and internal authority.
I wasn’t ready to separate sexuality from exploitation, or desire from harm. My anger came from that collision: moral clarity slamming into intellectual complexity.
And yet, that anger is what made me stay.
Learning to Hold Two Truths
Staying forced me to sit inside discomfort rather than exit it.
To hold opposing truths at once.
To resist the urge to flatten complexity into certainty.
In hindsight, I can see how that moment trained something in me—an ability to trace parallels between ideas that appear unrelated on the surface but belong to the same underlying current.
It may be why my writing lately moves the way it does, threading together feminism, food, film, lineage, embodiment, and identity without forcing tidy resolution.
The cohesion doesn’t come from sameness; it comes from attention.
That exercise didn’t erase my concerns, but it dismantled my rigidity. It pushed me to think in terms of agency rather than optics, authorship rather than outcome.
I had to acknowledge that the same act—sexual display, performance, even commodification—can mean radically different things depending on who is choosing it, who controls it, and who ultimately benefits.
This distinction, articulated with clarity and rigor by thinkers like bell hooks, stayed with me. (And yes—she insisted on lower-casing her name, a quiet refusal of ego and hierarchy, which somehow feels inseparable from her work itself.)
Midlife, Ego, and the Cost of Being Seen
It’s why, now, when I circle back to performative sexuality—especially in this early-to-mid-forties cultural moment—I’m not reacting from prudishness or judgment. I’m asking a deeper question: What is a woman trying to do with it?
Because performative sexuality communicates.
Sometimes it says, I am reclaiming my body.
Sometimes it says, I refuse to disappear.
Sometimes it says, I was never allowed to want before.
And sometimes—more quietly, more uncomfortably—it says, I need to be seen in order to feel real.
This is where it begins to resemble what we casually call a midlife crisis.
In psychological frameworks influenced by Carl Jung, life unfolds in two broad movements.
The first half of life is devoted to building the ego: establishing identity, securing belonging, achieving visibility, constructing a self that can function in the world.
Performance matters here.
Recognition matters.
Desire reflected back matters.
In that sense, performative sexuality fits squarely within ego development. It answers the question: Do I exist in the eyes of others?
The second half of life asks something very different.
Rather than Who am I to the world? it asks, Who am I when the world is no longer watching?
The task shifts from construction to dismantling, from accumulation to integration.
The ego that once protected us must loosen if we’re to become whole. If a woman enters this threshold still needing visibility to feel real, the instinct may be to amplify performance rather than release it.
What looks like confidence can sometimes be the ego’s last stand.
Perhaps that’s why this period feels destabilizing. It isn’t collapse that hurts—it’s resistance to collapse.
A Cultural Case Study: All Fours
This is also why Miranda July’s All Fours has felt so resonant—and yet so incomplete—to me.
Many women read the book and felt immediate recognition: finally, a voice for sexuality in your forties.
That response makes sense.
The hunger is real.
The silence around midlife desire has been real.
But recognition alone isn’t resolution.
The novel’s desire is urgent, reactive, almost breathless. It isn’t so much inhabited as discharged.
Action becomes proof of aliveness.
Desire must be enacted immediately or risk disappearing.
The body becomes a site of evidence:
I still exist.
I am still wanted.
I am still real.
I’ve noticed echoes of this same urgency not just in literature, but across pop culture more broadly—even among some of my favorite female artists.
I struggle most with the contradiction. Two of my favorite female musicians openly claim the language of strength, feminism, and autonomy—values I respect and, in many ways, share.
And yet lately, what follows those declarations often feels less like embodiment and more like insistence.
In the wake of rupture—career reinvention, divorce, public re-positioning—sexual display intensifies until it becomes the dominant signal. At that point, I have to ask what work the sexuality is doing.
Because sex, culturally speaking, is not neutral terrain. It has long been shaped by male desire, male consumption, male approval.
To use it is not inherently disempowering—but to rely on it, especially as proof of strength or relevance, risks reinforcing the very structures feminism claims to resist.
When sexuality becomes performative rather than integrated—when it asks to be witnessed, affirmed, rewarded—it can begin to feel less like self-possession and more like negotiation.
This is the tension I can’t ignore: what does it mean to claim liberation while speaking in the most familiar language of patriarchy?
When desire is foregrounded without containment, without discernment, without an interior counterweight, it can read less as expression and more as compliance disguised as choice.
That doesn’t make it immoral.
But it does make it worth questioning.
Women whose intelligence and creativity are undeniable sometimes lean more heavily on sexual performance at precisely the moment when their interior lives appear to be deepening.
That tension isn’t disappointing—it’s revealing.
Expression Without Integration
What keeps surfacing for me is that without integration, all of this—desire, expression, disruption, visibility—can start to feel messy rather than meaningful.
Not morally messy, but psychically so.
Expression multiplies, but nothing is being metabolized.
Motion increases without direction.
What’s missing isn’t permission—it’s coherence.
Part of the fragmentation, I think—and this is simply my own view—comes from the fact that midlife sexuality is still so often treated as something outside of women rather than something that unfolds within them.
For generations, women have had to take a stand around sexuality because it was never allowed to integrate internally in the first place.
Desire was regulated, moralized, exploited, or extracted long before it could be inhabited.
Expression became a defense before it could become a language.
Seen this way, the current moment isn’t really a war or a battlefield at all—it’s a developmental gap.
What’s being asked for now isn’t louder permission or sharper rebellion, but understanding: of process, of timing, of how sexuality integrates into a woman’s interior life rather than being performed against the world.
From Girl Power to Objectification
This cultural moment also can’t be separated from body image, the youth ideal, and structural ageism. Women are taught—explicitly and implicitly—that desirability peaks early and declines rapidly.
Youth becomes currency. Aging becomes erosion. As women move further from the cultural ideal, the pressure to compensate intensifies. Sexual visibility becomes a way to resist disappearance. Performance becomes proof of relevance.
An article I read in The Atlantic sharpened this further, tracing how a strain of feminism collapsed under its own slogans.
What began as empowerment language—Girl Power, autonomy, choice—slowly morphed into something flatter and more marketable once absorbed into reality-TV aesthetics, influencer culture, and algorithmic visibility.
Sophie Gilbert’s book Girl on Girl develops this argument more fully, showing how pop culture trained women to monitor, brand, compare, and commodify themselves while calling it empowerment. The gaze didn’t disappear—it was internalized.
Sexuality became something to manage rather than inhabit.
This helps explain the growing disconnect many women feel between what they genuinely want—emotional closeness, communication, safety, depth—and what they feel pressured to project. Performance steps in where intimacy feels uncertain.
Attention is sought because closeness isn’t guaranteed.
The body is offered because connection feels risky.
This doesn’t make women shallow.
It makes them human in a culture still organized around the male gaze.
When Visibility Becomes a Template
This is where the conversation stops being abstract.
When my 13-year-old daughter starts trying to dress provocatively because that’s how her 20-year-old sister dresses, the ambiguity I’ve been wrestling with suddenly matters in real time. Not as a feminist debate, but as a developmental one.
At thirteen, a girl doesn’t yet have the interior scaffolding to distinguish owning sexuality from performing it.
Her relationship to sexuality is observational and mimetic. She learns by watching what seems to grant status, belonging, or attention.
My twenty-year-old and I have circled this conversation more times than I can count.
What does embodied sexuality actually look like if it isn’t borrowed from performance—if it doesn’t rely on dressing like a caricature of desire? What does it mean to feel sensual, confident, alive in your body without turning that feeling into a public announcement?
That’s where the word modesty enters the room, trailing so much misunderstanding behind it that it’s almost unusable. Modesty has been compressed into repression, shame, or fear—something imposed rather than chosen.
But at its root, modesty isn’t about hiding the body.
It’s about containment (a word I’ve used a lot lately).
About deciding that not everything needs to be made available, that intimacy has a rhythm, that desire deepens when it isn’t constantly externalized.
Embodied sexuality doesn’t ask, How do I look?
It asks, How do I feel inside myself?
It’s not loud. It doesn’t need to persuade or provoke. It doesn’t borrow its cues from porn, from algorithms, from male approval, or from competition with other women.
It moves differently.
You feel it in posture, in eye contact, in ease.
In the way someone inhabits their space without apology or performance.
It’s the difference between offering yourself as an image and standing as a presence.
So maybe the question isn’t whether modesty is a dirty word. Maybe the question is whether we’ve lost the language for sexuality that belongs to the self before it belongs to the world.
A sexuality that isn’t afraid of boundaries because it isn’t trying to prove anything. One that understands that mystery isn’t weakness, and that withholding can be a form of power.
That’s the conversation I keep trying to have—not about what not to wear, but about what it feels like to live in your body without turning it into a billboard.
When what’s being modeled is sexuality as display, the lesson absorbed isn’t confidence—it’s that visibility equals value.
That’s where the harm enters. Not through sexuality itself, but through premature performance.
A grown woman experimenting with sexual display may be negotiating aging or identity.
A teenage girl doing the same is often negotiating belonging.
And belonging is a far more dangerous motivator than desire.
Returning Desire to Its Source
If this writing—and my writing lately in general—feels as though it moves in many directions at once, it’s because it’s not trying to resolve into a single thesis.
The New Year’s post, the reflections on the women in my lineage, the sutta, this meditation on sexuality and midlife—and even the way films like Tampopo and Eat Drink Man Woman have quietly surfaced these questions for me—are all doing the same work.
What looks scattered is actually attentive. (Side note: I’ll be writing more directly about Eat Drink, Man Woman in the next post.) It’s listening for patterns rather than forcing conclusions.
At the end of the day, what I’m really saying is simple. Sexuality—like meaning—doesn’t begin with visibility. It begins with inhabitation. It’s something you feel before you see it, something others sense long before it’s announced.
When sexuality is owned, it doesn’t need to perform. It doesn’t scatter itself or ask to be confirmed. It’s quiet, contained, and selective—not because it’s hidden, but because it’s integrated.
From this place, being seen becomes incidental rather than essential. And that distinction matters, especially in a culture that confuses exposure with power.
What midlife offers—if we’re willing to accept it—is the chance to let performance fall away and return desire to its source.
Not as something to prove, but as something to live inside.
At some point, the conversation stops being about clothes or trends and becomes a question of where sexuality lives. Is it something we perform outwardly in order to be legible, or something we cultivate inwardly and reveal selectively?
Embodied sexuality doesn’t need spectacle to exist. It announces itself through presence, through ease, through a body that is inhabited rather than displayed.
Maybe modesty isn’t a retreat or a punishment after all, but a choice to hold something precious with care. Not everything that is powerful needs to be visible, and not everything that is visible is powerful.
What endures—across generations, across cultures, across time—is the kind of sexuality that doesn’t ask to be seen, because it already knows itself.