THE SECOND ACT
It’s taken her 50 years to discover, but you don’t have to be a sexpot to have great sex, writes Deborah Hill Cone
It’s taken her 50 years to discover, but you don’t have to be a sexpot to have great sex, writes Deborah Hill Cone
I’m having the best sex of my life at 50. Truly. But it’s not because of lube, lingerie, sex toys or any other reasons in those articles illustrated with stock photos of twinkly silver foxes seducing Helen Mirren lookalikes in white nighties. If you’re around my age you probably know the kind. Picture a heteronormative, white couple with grey hair, fake-laughing together on arcticwhite sheets like an aspirational cruise ship ad. They are raving about how their sex life is raunchier, rampant, rocking and other randy “R” words.
I am nothing like these people. I bet they also go for sprightly morning walks in matching bermuda shorts and eat a lot of salad.
But it is a heartening development that it has become more acceptable to acknowledge that women — yay! — can be sexy in the second half of their life. Attitudes have changed gratifyingly fast about this.
Seventeen years ago, the famous journalist Lynn Barber interviewed singer Marianne Faithfull and wrote something that still haunts me, especially when I put on my saucy Lonely bustier or any other potentially age-inappropriate garment (and then take it straight off).
“[David] Bailey is at the camera; Marianne in a black mac and fishnet tights, is sprawling with her legs wide apart, her black satin crotch glinting between her scrawny 55-year-old thighs, doing sex-kitten moues at the camera. Oh please, stop! I want to cry — this is sadism, this is misogyny, this is cruelty to grandmothers.”
Would Barber still write it like this today? I’m not sure she would. Maybe Faithfull would be applauded as a role model for middle-aged women. (I met Barber about then, actually. She was in her 50s and was very nice, but certainly wasn’t glammily trussed up.)
And less than two decades later, women aged 50 and over seem to be coming into our own. We no longer have to go directly from glamazon to frumpy meatball-stirring mama when we get a hair on our chin. There are certain women who are held up — unhelpfully, often — as exemplars of this trend of hotness: Nicole Kidman! Michelle Pfeiffer! Some freakishly preserved supermodel! Blinking Helen Mirren, of course.
Ladies, be my guest, of course you can be a sexbomb after 50. Knock yourselves out with your va-va-voom any old time. But if, as Lady Gaga says, sex is a kind of riddle — half poison, half liberation — I’m not sure trying to be a vixen with a concession Gold Card is the answer to it.
Instead of offering freedom, it can feel like we’re still suffering with the pressure to look hot, hotter, hottest, whatever our age. Sometimes you just want to wear flat shoes (and still get a f***).
Kingsley Amis, a heroic rooter, described his libido like “being chained to an idiot for 50 years”. He was relieved when he lost his sex drive. And if it means still being obsessed with marketing yourself every single bloody day as a must-have-sexual-product, I can see his point. A sex symbol becomes an object. And who wants to be a thing?
American writer David Foster Wallace warned: “If you worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you.”
Still, DFW was a bloke. Whereas Gail Sheehy, in her book Sex and the Seasoned
Woman (I know, icky title) offered this: “The middle years, between 50 and 65, constitute the apex of adult life ... for women, the passage to be made is from pleasing to mastery.”
Whoa! Hold up there, Gail. Surely sex is not something you have to get right, like stand-up paddleboarding? And mastery? Isn’t that for chess players and entrepreneurs and other patriarchal constructs?
But then, what would I know? I have been mostly wrong about sex for most of my life.
It’s not surprising, really. No one ever talked about sex in our family. No, scratch that. We more than “not talked about it”. By its very absence (“Don’t mention the war!”) it was more present than if it had been able to be acknowledged in a matter-of-fact way. This is pathologised as a syndrome called sexual anorexia, although I’m not sure it is unusual enough for a special name. I was probably just like any other kid, growing up with the discomforting awareness of the disconnect between how adults presented themselves in the day-to-day real world and their much darker, secret, interior lives. Like everyone, I was living in a dual reality where there were always two things going on at the same time. Were adults walking around reading the airmailed
Guardian and talking rationally about Reagan and Thatcher or were they really brutish and animalistic sex beasts? It was so puzzling. How does one learn to hold these different realities together? (No wonder a friend of mine’s 10-year-old asked: “Are you going to have sex to have another baby? When you’re going to do it, do you mind if I watch?” Smart kid.)
IN THE absence of any show-and-tell in my own life, I gleaned my random knowledge from a combination of television shows like Kenny Everett and a clandestine copy of a book, Down
Under the Plum Trees, published by Alister Taylor. With no real role models or chance to talk about it, the concepts of femininity and sexuality appeared to be drawn perilously narrow. Sexuality was apparently something you were not entitled to have and enjoy unless you had a thigh gap and looked like a Solid Gold dancer or Demelza on Poldark.
I thought sex was primarily about one’s body. Great sex was an athletic feat involving piston-like thrusts and acrobatic changes of position, like a sort of naked Crossfit. Since I was awkward and sunken-chested and unsporty, this was a terrifying prospect to me.
In team sports I just prayed the ball would never come anywhere near me. I recognise this as the identical feeling I experienced in 1982 at the derelict Hamilton Lake roller rink, when Marco Baggins (can’t remember his actual name) produced his gigantic erect penis, the first I’d ever seen. (Was it really that whopping? It certainly seemed that way.) What was I supposed to do with it? I had no idea. I probably seemed prudish or repelled but I was just petrified of getting it wrong and no one had ever told me what to do. (No porn back then — at least Picture a heteronormative, white couple with grey hair fake-laughing together on arctic-white sheets like an aspirational cruise ship ad.