“I just don’t wanna see her get hurt. She’s my mom”, says Zara (Joey King) to her grandmother in Netflix’s A Family Affair, which follows her 50-something-year-old mother, played by Nicole Kidman, falling in love with Zara’s boss, 30-something-year-old Chris Cole, played by Zac Efron. In response to her granddaughter’s concerns, Lelia Ford, played by Kathy Bates, reminds Zara that her mother is more than just her mom: “She might also be a woman. It’s her life.”

This is the subtle messaging behind so many of the New MILF films that have come out in 2024. From The Idea of You, A Family Affair, Babygirl, Lonely Planet, I Want Your Sex and more, New MILF cinema follows older women (often mothers, but not always) who fall in love or have torrid affairs with younger men. These romantic comedies and explicit thrillers put middle-aged and older women back in romantic storylines, a genre of film where they are massively underrepresented.

On paper, this is a positive development. It’s no secret that ageism is a significant issue in Hollywood. The list of actresses who have spoken out about the ageism they faced in the film industry is long and endless – even being in your late twenties is sometimes enough to brand you “too sophisticated,” AKA too “old”, as Olivia Wilde discovered when she auditioned for Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street aged 28. It’s a barrier that very few male actors, if any, have suffered from. As Susan Sontag wrote in her groundbreaking essay, “The Double Standard of Ageing”, ageing is rarely viewed as a threat to masculinity. “Masculinity is identified with competence, autonomy, and self-control. Qualities which the disappearance of youth does not threaten,” she wrote. On the other hand, femininity “is identified with beauty, incompetence, helplessness, passivity, noncompetitiveness, and being nice. Age does not improve these qualities.” As ageing provides one with more wisdom and self-assuredness, women lose some of these “feminine-coded” attributes, and through this, in the eyes of society, they lose their womanhood. As a result, they have historically been erased from our screens.

However, over the last few years, we have entered what Oxford Research Fellow Melina Malli has characterised as a “new era of visibility for ageing femininities”. From the hit show Grace and Frankie, starring Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin and Jennifer Coolidge’s Emmy award-winning performance in The White Lotus to And Just Like That and Sheryl Lee Ralph and Lisa Ann Walter’s scene-stealing performances in ABC’s Abbott Elementary, representation of older women on screen has slowly been increasing. One of the reasons for the increase in middle-age representation is the new “silver tsunami”, a term first coined in a report conducted by Pew Research Center in 2001 to describe the increasing number of older adults in society, as a result the media industry has been attempting to target older people for the last few years.

Movies such as The Idea of You, featuring Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine, and A Family Affair, have salient messages – amid the often cringe acting – stressing that mothers and other middle-aged individuals are still people who crave sex and connection, and who are equally desired by others. However, the type of ageing femininities we are shown on screen is often a narrow and very specific one. What kind of ageing femininity is acceptable and desired, and what isn’t?

While the ongoing rise of ageing people in our world has been called the “silver tsunami”, we rarely see any actual older women with silver hair on our screens. However, there are exceptions to this: For example, after 17 years off the air, Miranda Hobbes (played by Cynthia Nixon), now a 50-something-year-old, was reintroduced to us in And Just Like That, not with her infamous red hair, but with a fuck-ass-grey bob. When asked why she won’t go back to red in the show, Miranda proudly asserted that there are “more important issues in the world than trying to look young”. But by the end of the season, Miranda dyed her hair back to red, explaining her decision with the throwaway line: “I just felt like changing it up again.”

Miranda’s hair storyline perfectly captures how middle-aged women are allowed to age on screen today. As Malli writes in her article, “Youthfulness is still the ideal, and ageing remains widely feared. Women are still expected to get old without signs of ageing.” Or, as demonstrated in Miranda’s case, visible signs of ageing are allowed to be shown to make a point but then aren’t allowed to persist.

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Psychologists John Rowe and Robert Louis Kahn call the ageing that we most commonly see on screen “successful ageing”. The concept is defined as being free from disability or disease, having high physical and cognitive functioning, and having an active social (or professional) life. In other words, individuals have no physical signs of ageing. In their article “Smoothing the Wrinkles: Hollywood, Old Age Femininity and the Pathological Gaze”, Josephine Dolan asserts that because of celebrities’ ability to normalise ideas, they “offer an especially efficient mechanism through which to secure “successful ageing” as the status quo.

This is one of the reasons why Kidman is cast in absolutely everything right now. With her immovable forehead, constantly dyed hair and lean physique, the 57-year-old is the perfect example of what it looks like to age “successfully”. While this type of representation may seem harmless, it’s not entirely. As Dolan stressed above, celebrities make “successful ageing” appear like the norm, placing the onus of ageing “well” on the individual rather than, for example, our government, which has over two million older people living in housing utterly unsuitable for their needs. In the UK today, we have a growing number of homeless people over the age of 55 who, due to poverty and stress, are more likely to have clear signs of ageing present on their faces and bodies.

While media about middle-aged women attempts to combat ageism, it often leaves behind the subtle message that ageing and disability are still problems, particularly personal ones. When speaking with cultural critic, podcaster and writer Maia Wyman, known more commonly on the internet as Broey Deschanel, about this topic, she importantly reminds me that celebrities aren’t just vehicles for discourse or ideology but individuals who internalise fears around ageing themselves. “So much of this conversation is wrapped up in actresses’ own willingness to age on screen. With And Just Like That, for example, I wonder how much say Sarah Jessica Parker, Nixon, and Kristen Davis have in how their characters look. It must be terrifying for the actresses to leave and then return, having aged about 20 years and looking so different to the same audience.”

As Wyman highlights, actresses’ own fears around ageing impact the way middle-aged femininities are represented on screen. So while we are seeing more middle-aged representation in film and TV – that are mostly white – but attempt to have meaningful discussions around motherhood and the erotics of middle age, these narratives never fully embrace ageing in its totality.

Middle age doesn’t look one particular way. You can be thin, fat, disabled, wrinkled or, as we are seeing more and more, filled with Botox. But we see more of the latter than the former. As we enter this era of New MILF cinema and middle-age representation, hopefully, we will see more diverse depictions of ageing people that disrupt our understanding of attractiveness, desire and old age rather than run from it.