1In May 2015, the American actress Maggie Gyllenhaal explained to the magazine The Wrap that she had just been turned down for a role, because at 37 she was judged too old to play the lover of a 55-yearold actor. [1] A number of studies have emphasized the ageism and sexism suffered by actresses, especially in Hollywood. [2] Gyllenhaal highlights a particular point which is more rarely touched upon, and might equally apply to another audio-visual genre, namely that the formula of a partnership between a young woman and an older man, with a considerable number of years between them, is a common feature of television series.

2Televised fiction is part of the social experience. Its stories do not reflect society nor are they simply works of the imagination, [3] but they have a place in the economy and in leisure activity; many of them appeal to millions of viewers and they occupy top place in the lists of programmes with the largest audiences. In the portrayal of gender relationships on screen, the age gap within the couple plays an important part; hence an asymmetrical system can be observed, featuring a marriage market organized according to the preferences of men of all ages, where the women’s youth is a decisive factor in their desirability.

3Working from a corpus of series broadcast in France (but with examples originating in other countries as well, including the UK and US), I shall first demonstrate the scarcity of women over 50 on screen, as against the frequent presence of men in this age group. The youth of the women in question is not only an absolute quality (their age) but also a relative one (the age gap between them and their male counterparts). In this contrasting age balance, what we see is a clear example of hegemonic masculinity and femininity. The age difference is a key element of gender inequality. Nevertheless, some characters played by women over 50 do have a love life which defies this general formula, and it will be interesting to explore how far such performances challenge gender norms.

Where are the women (of 50)?

4Quantitative studies reveal that actresses have been in the minority ever since the beginning of television. Joseph R. Dominick [4] shows that, during the period 1953-1977, female roles exceptionally reached 40% at the beginning of the period, to then oscillate around 30% with lows of 25% for leading roles. Women were not only in a minority, but were also concentrated in the youngest age groups.

Couples: a bigger age-gap

10It would be quite feasible for the roles of couples seen on television to be performed by actors who are close in age. But this is quite definitely not the case. In the corpus studied, 66 couples involve at least one leading or regular character. In only three cases were the performers born in the same year. In a few instances, the actress is the older one of the couple, by one year (three cases), two, three, six or seven years (one case each), or up to eight years (two cases). [11] But overall, the situation is extremely asymmetrical, since the general rule is that the man is older (54 times out of 66). In this latter scenario, the gaps in age are much wider – in 23 of these couples it is over eight years. In the four most extreme cases, the age gap is twenty years or more. In the off-screen world, such large gaps are relatively infrequent. Certainly, on average, men tend to be a little older than their partners, but only by just over two years. Wide gaps are rare, although they are more numerous in today’s society than in the past [12] and more frequent for men embarking on second relationships.

11Three features are characteristic of these heterosexual couples. First there is the ageist pressure upon women. Then there is the possibility for male heroes to be of any age. Finally, the age gap appears to be flagrantly unequal in favour of men. This is what Michel Bozon has called “domination by age”. [13] The asymmetrical age structures and the lower thresholds of ageing for women play a part in the differential valence of the sexes. [14] The youth of female partners is an element of their desirability in the sexual and marriage market. In my corpus, when the actors are of the same age, in two cases out of the three, another form of domination creeps in, in that the man occupies a higher social or occupational rank. These forms of domination may be combined in a couple. For example, in Un flic, Commissaire Schneider has a relationship with a lieutenant under his orders (we only know her first name, Alex), and the actor is 16 years older than his partner. Indeed, a man’s social and economic capital increases his ability to form a second partnership with a much younger woman. [15] The age difference is sometimes so great (26 years in Commissaire Brunetti) that it prompts us to enquire about the place of excess and exaggeration in the gender relationships depicted in the series.

The sexual expertise of an entire life

15The period of fertility in women comes to a close at about 45-50 years of age, rarely lasting beyond 50. [18] 50 is also the age when the presence of women in the cast list of TV series falls dramatically. The negative image of older women [19] is combined with disparaging judgments about post-menopausal women (as being “past it”) that have been noted on several occasions. These prejudices have been around for a long time in television. [20] As Paola Tabet has shown for many societies, sexuality is massively organized around women’s child-bearing potential. [21] The sexuality of older women is therefore given very little consideration, and still less depicted.

16The first example is drawn from Tell Me You Love Me, a single-season series on American cable television which was broadcast in France on TPS star. It is therefore a “niche” programme designed for series addicts. [22] In this series, several women of child-bearing age have very unsatisfactory love and sex lives. Faced with the difficulties of staying together, having a child, or rekindling a love relationship while immersed in the daily life of a large family, three women (played by actresses between the ages of 29 and 46) come to consult Dr May Foster, alias the actress Jane Alexander (aged 68). May Foster has lived with the same man for 43 years, having a love life which is publicly displayed right from the very first episode (passionate kissing, sexual foreplay).

17The contented sexuality of Dr Foster’s character provides a rare on-screen image which, furthermore, contrasts with the problematic sex lives of her younger patients. The end of the fertile period is no longer presented as the end of sexuality, but as the beginning of increased pleasure, freed from the constraints of fertility. As well as its approach to the menopause, which is not denigrated here, what is original about this programme is its view of female sexuality as a whole. When May Foster and her husband make love, we see these two older bodies completely naked (the actress is 68 and the actor 66), which is highly unusual.

Does humour help to sugar the bitter pill of age?

22I have stressed the rarity of roles offered to women of mature age. However, exceptions exist, such as Hot in Cleveland, a series which has never been released in France, and where, at the age of 88, Betty White adopts the role of a provocative landlady. The journalist Laura Bennett suggests that the comic force of the series lies in getting a near-ninety-year-old to utter a string of risqué jokes. [25] According to Beatriz Oria, [26] humour is closely linked to the televisual representation of female sexuality. Analysing the American series Sex and the City, she explains that it is comic treatment which makes it easier and even possible for women to talk openly about sex, and to make sex central to what they have to say. The series ended before any actress reached the age of 50 (three were under 40, while the eldest was 48). If humour is essential for women in their middle years to freely accept their sexuality, what is it like for older actresses?

Female masculinity or hegemonic masculinity?

25Raewyn Connell’s typology could be complemented by the addition of what Judith Halberstam calls the “female masculinities”. [29] She uses this concept to imagine situations of “masculinity without men”. For characters in detective stories, who have a manly function in an institution with a strong male ethos, the masculine angle becomes essential. But can a woman be an example of hegemonic masculinity? Or party to it?

26The British series Scott & Bailey, which up to now has not appeared in France, has two women police officers as its central characters. Their boss is also a woman, Detective Chief Inspector Gill Murray, played by the actress Amelia Bullmore, who was 47 when the series commenced. A divorced mother, Gill Murray is the embodiment of professional success and enjoys the sexual freedom of a single woman over 45. During a discussion with DC Scott, she lets slip that she is having an affair with a much younger, lower-rank colleague. Scott retorts in a jokey tone: “Oh, Gill Murray’s got a toy boy!” Subsequently, Murray and another colleague have a friendly verbal sparring match. She has the last word by coolly slipping in the words “I’ve got a toy boy”. Sleeping with a younger partner is therefore a positive achievement, a trophy, comparable to what a man in a hegemonic position might claim. It is exceptional, transgressive even, for women to speak of their “toy boy”, their “plaything”. Nevertheless, appropriation by a woman of the codes of male domination remains a way of reproducing it, which tends to replay the statutory inequalities at work in society, rather than presenting an alternative. In a gendered perspective, the apparent transgression therefore remains only relative. The episode related here is not representative of the series as a whole, nor of the gender relationships depicted in it, but it is worth thinking about, even though rare.

27These three characters correspond to a minority situation, as we have already said. None of the three consider themselves to be “too old” for sexual activity and, because of this, they introduce new “scripts” into televised fiction.

New sexual scripts?

28In a context of near-absence of depictions of mature women in televised fiction who are sexually active, the three examples presented are the exception. Given this rarity, it is difficult to talk of a stereotype for women over 50 in television series. If it exists, it offers an image of women who are devoid of a love or sex life. This is why concepts forged with reference to stereotypes, like those of Eric Macé, make them awkward to handle in the examples studied here. He has proposed the notion of the “counter-stereotype”, when a character does exactly the opposite of a stereotype (ethno-racial in the context of his research), while a subversive re-appropriation of identity markers is labelled an “anti-stereotype”. [30] The “sexual scripts” [31] approach, on the other hand, appears to be applicable to these case studies.

29In off-screen society, sexuality has no maximum age: in 2006, 90% of French women over 50 who were living with a partner stated that they were sexually active – a proportion which has regularly increased since the 1970s. [32] But as we have noted, televisual depictions are not a true reflection of society. So commonplace in front of the screen, but so rare on the screen… The gap between the two, where it exists, says something about the social acceptability of a situation, at least in the eyes of the creative powers in the media (heads of channels, producers). Given the power of portrayals associated with youth, showing the sexuality of women aged 50 or 70 is not a simple variation, in an older version, on the majority of images and scenarios. These characters are offering rare, if not unprecedented, sexual scripts.

30*

31Televised series remain marked by features observed since the 1950s: in them, the women are younger and fewer in number than men. The age difference plays a pivotal role in the asymmetry of gender relationships depicted on television. The reinforcing role of excess in gender inequalities is expressed in particular by extreme age differences between partners.

32On the other hand, the depiction of sexuality in women over 50 is more ambivalent. Innovative and, in some respects, transgressive, it portrays non-reproductive sexuality and gives an important place to women who are usually excluded from the sex market in these stories. However, whether it is because of the humour which limits its influence, the hierarchy maintained for acceptable nudity, or the appropriation of hegemonic masculinity, even these series never succeed in making a clean break with gender inequalities. However rare they may be, to the extent that some have to be sought outside the most popular channels, the examples presented here demonstrate that marginal situations can shed light on the norm, [33] in a way that complements the quantitative data.