Anyone for a toyboy? The hit of the season has been The Idea of You, the film adaptation of Robinne Lee’s bestseller in which a woman in her 40s (played by Anne Hathaway) falls mutually in something-or-other with a pop idol in his 20s (played by Nicholas Galitzine).
On the one hand, I bristle at the idea that being fortysomething is particularly old. Or that a rich, beautiful, successful, intelligent woman is making some sort of wild transgression in having a sexy love affair with an available male character who is equally blessed in every way, but for the fact that he’s younger.
At the same time, however, at 45, I know now that I will not have a love story. I won’t Hathaway my way to a Hollywood ending. Maybe the only way we exist in our full sensuality and romanticism these days is in our imaginations.
We sink into The Idea of You, on Amazon Prime, because we feel safer and happier streaming romcoms on our sofa rather than living them in reality. I would be terrified to go out with an actual young guy who may have been watching dehumanising and abusive porn on his phone.
Warning, side-effects
The Danish pharmaceutical company that sells weight-loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy is projected to scoop up more than £15bn in profits this year. It’s a gross win for big pharma, another kink in society’s twisted relationship between food, psychology and body image.
The whole thing is emetic. Obesity doesn’t require a get-around via a magic bullet or pill – or injection as in the case of Ozempic and Wegovy – marketed by a greedy corporation.
Fuelled by celebrity weight-loss “success” stories, demand for these drugs has surged over the past year, despite the fact that Ozempic was originally developed as a treatment for type 2 diabetes. Weight loss is a side effect – and there are many others, including nausea. Meanwhile, the bog-standard NHS advice on weight loss hasn’t changed in decades. Eat less, eat better, move more, move better. Because you know what makes for easier reading than an alarming list of side effects? The book of common sense.
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Private passions
Research produced by the Economist – for some reason – has shown that sex scenes are in sharp decline across mainstream films. I’m delighted to hear it. My raciest formative film experience was the kiss in A Room With a View, along with all the other simmering passions and fantastic costumes in Merchant-Ivory’s general oeuvre. We don’t need to see all the stuff to feel all the feels. That’s why the olden days were so sexy. The heat was rising and people’s cheeks were flushed, partly because of their repressed ardour and partly because they were wearing so many layers of muslin, poplin, silk damask, taffeta, voile and sprigged cotton.
Our jaded eyeballs and corrupted imaginations deserve a break from the relentless availability, via screens, of all graphic sex, all graphic violence, all exposure to everything everywhere all at once. Eroticism resides in the atmosphere, the interplay and the abeyance, not in the act. Sexual charisma and chemistry are actually rare. Go and watch Celine Song’s Past Lives, the sexiest film of the last few decades, where the central couple burn the air with barely a hug.
Bidisha Mamata is an Observer columnist
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