Still sexy in your 60s
JAMIE OLIVER sent an adoring message to his wife Jools on their 18th anniversary. She sent one in return. Kissy kissy. My soul mate, etc. But why on Instagram for everyone to read? Isn’t anything private any more?
ACCORDING to a new sex survey women aged 24-35 are the least satisfied with their sex lives while those aged 55-64 are the most contented. At first glance this sounds as though it is the wrong way round. Aren’t millennials supposed to be enjoying hook-ups and swiping right (or is it left?). Aren’t they cool about gender fluid relationships, about lubes and sex toys and safe sex and about being “friends with benefits”?
Meanwhile older women are supposed to be moping and menopausal, plagued with feelings of insecurity and invisibility, lamenting their lost youth and waistlines. Older women are meant to be too tired for sex and terrified that their husbands are going to trade them in for a younger model.
Well if this survey from Public Health England is correct then everything you thought you knew is wrong. Sex, it seems, is wasted on the young.
Truthfully I’m not surprised. The young women I know seem less “liberated” than my generation in the sense that they are continually anxious about being judged. While wanting – as most women do – a relationship that is meaningful, lasting and loving they are forced to take part in a sort of endless sex olympics where they are rated on their appearance and their performance.
What’s more social media – as anyone who goes on Twitter will attest – is extraordinarily prissy and sanctimonious. Woe betide any girl who merely kisses a boy she shouldn’t be kissing and gets reported for it by her peers. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter, set in the 1640s, the fallen woman who has had a child out of wedlock must wear a letter A (for adulteress) on her dress when in public. It’s no different now in the digital age. But as ever, men can be studs but women who behave in a similar way are “sluts” – a word appropriated by millennials, removed from the mild meaning it has for an older generation: ie, someone who merely fails to do the washing-up. Pornography of all kinds is available everywhere whether it’s a fruity scene in a film to something altogether nastier on the internet. Every girl has her porn star selfie: head on one side, the gormless pout, cheeks sucked in.
Meanwhile what are older women up to? The menopause is not universally bad for every woman and I know of what I speak. Older women have more confidence, more time. Their biological clock is not ticking. It has already ticked. They may want to find a soulmate or they may already have one. Either way the pressure is off. They don’t have to perform in bed like a floosie in a movie – unless they feel like it. Which they might…
I know several women in their 60s who were single and are now having the best sex of their lives. On their terms. I think the survey has got it right.