With I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself, MacNicol, a veteran writer for The New York Times and many other publications, artfully indicts the ageist industrial complex through her own lived experience. “I have found most of what we’re told about getting older to be a lie,” she says. “As you age, you are told you become less attractive or won’t enjoy sex, or so many women say, ‘Are you invisible yet?’ And I’m like, really? I feel like I’m a 14-year-old boy.”
To end her pandemic-induced celibacy, in Paris MacNicol turned to Fruitz—an app “like Tinder, but less serious, if that’s possible,” she quotes a friend saying in the book. Users self-identify by produce: “Cherry is ‘to find your other half.’ Grape is ‘for a glass of wine with no trouble.’ Watermelon is ‘no seeds attached,’” while peach, known to elicit the dirtiest messages, is for “straight hookups,” she writes.
As a watermelon, MacNicol discovered that the societal male gaze she’d been warned would see her as undesirable did not align with the many real-life men—including at least one 27-year-old—who gazed adoringly at her naked body. It was a revelation to discover that she was “attractive to literally everyone,” MacNicol says, sipping her rosé and reaching for a fry. “Why would I ever second-guess this about myself?”
Not only was her age not a detriment, but she suspects it was the draw: “I think part of their attraction is the confidence that you have in your 40s,” MacNicol tells me. “My body does not look like what it looked like at 25, but I am less concerned with it. I know what I enjoy. I know how to enjoy myself, which, at 25, I didn’t.”
Still, some friends—even enlightened ones—expressed trepidation about her casual Parisian sex, warning MacNicol that men were only interested in her because they didn’t have to commit. “And I said, ‘Yes, exactly,’” she recalls with a contented smile. She wasn’t—and isn’t—dating in pursuit of marriage, babies, or a financial contract, but, as radical as it may still be, for her own enjoyment.
“We desexualize older women, and I think one of the reasons for that is when there’s no fertility tied to sex, you really are focused on the pleasure,” MacNicol notes. It’s a threatening concept in an American political landscape that still systematically penalizes women’s sexual freedom, even if it shouldn’t be. But, then again, the idea that MacNicol does not follow societal scripts—and dares to be happy about it—has long made a particular kind of woman (usually white and married) bristle.
