Cougar Fatigue: Desire Isn’t the Problem—Hollywood’s Lens Is

Middle-Aged Women Get Their Young Lovers on Screen, But They Deserve So Much More In Amazon Prime’s The Idea of You, a 40-year-old single mom falls for a 24-year-old boy-band idol. And the internet loses its mind. She’s called a cougar, a stalker, the “sleaziest mom of the year.” He’s questioned about the relationship, while […]

Cinderella’s Got an OnlyFans—and the Other Princesses Aren’t Far Behind

From MLMs to Menopause, the Disney Princesses are Back—and Way More Relatable At this point in my life, I don’t want the Disney princess dream of a tiara and fairytale romance. I want the version where I sleep for eight uninterrupted hours and a woodland creature scrubs my toilets. Because let’s be real here. How […]

Why Midlife Women Still Love Bridget Jones

  I didn’t want to see a sad Bridget Jones. I wasn’t ready to watch my fave frazzled fictional friend become a grieving widow with two kids and a stack of unopened sympathy cards, which is where she’s at when Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy—now streaming on Peacock—opens. Despite all her diary confessions and […]

Pretty Woman at 35: Unpacking the Myth of the Girlfriend Experience

The last line of Pretty Woman is that “Some dreams come true, some don’t; but keep on dreamin’.” It’s quintessentially Hollywood, the place where dreams are made and sold. The girlfriend experience (GFE), a niche brand of sex work, is a fantasy, and the Hollywood version is the fantasy of that. It’s a reflection of […]

Why the New Snow White Misses the Magic of True Love

Snow White, starring Rachel Zegler in the title role and Gal Gadot as the Evil Queen, has generated controversies that have been covered extensively elsewhere over Zegler’s statements trashing the original film and saying the prince “literally stalks” Snow White; about the portrayal of the dwarfs, who were rendered in CGI and who may or […]