Yes! 60 is the new SEXY
As a racy magazine for midlife women hits the news-stands, its editor ROWAN PELLING says...
When I first became a so-called ‘sexpert’, I was 28 years old. Back then, I was editor of a journal called The erotic Review. Two decades later, I can see I was painfully young to claim much expertise about sex — let alone the vagaries of the human heart.
I had never been properly rejected. I didn’t know where the G-spot was (or what it was, for that matter), I had never seen a racy film, I had never experienced a loss of libido. I hadn’t made love in order to have a baby, and I hadn’t felt conflicted by my heart’s desires.
editing the magazine gave me some sort of education, but most of what I know now, aged 49, about love and desire, has been accumulated outside work, as with any woman’s natural passage through life.
Some of my experience is personal, some vicarious. Many friends are good sharers of intimate details. All of what I’ve learnt is illuminating. And I can safely say that middle-aged women are currently in the throes of a new sexual revolution.
The onset of menopause no longer means the abandoning of your inner sex kitten. There’s better understanding of the upsides of HRT (while some evidence suggests its link with an increased risk of breast cancer may have been overstated), and many women find their morale and va-va-voom is best maintained by taking hormones.
There’s a similarly permissive attitude to trying the latest beauty treatments. Whereas women of my mother’s generation would have felt vain and self-involved to the point of immorality if they’d made efforts to look youthful, today’s 50 and 60-something women feel they’ve earned the right to stay seductive — and don’t give a damn what the wider world thinks.
In similar vein, they’re more inclined to take up tango, hit the gym, wear trendy clothes and play modish music.
They tone and maintain their brains, as well as their bodies. They’re done with magazines that patronise them and suggest they should be cowed by 20something supermodels. They want some sort of recognition that their role model is helen Mirren, not Gigi hadid.
THIS demographic forms the natural audience for a quality magazine about sex and passion. So, when James Pembroke, the energetic publisher of The Oldie, asked me if I might consider editing an erotic magazine again, I replied I would,
the publication could be tilted towards older females: the sort of readers who’ve accumulated proper life experience and are shocked by very little.
I was thinking of my close friends and the extraordinary sexual epiphanies that have often accompanied the onset of menopause. Those who are divorced have inevitably ended up trying online dating. They say it’s like being a teenager again (both stages in life involve raging hormones) — only this time round they know exactly what to do in bed, and they don’t fear falling pregnant.
Meanwhile, married friends report a quest to recover mislaid passion now their children are older and ambitions fulfilled. At last they have time and space to give to one another. They say that the innovations don’t have to be drastic. Simply remembering how to flirt, or spruce up for one another, or watch sexy movies together (Park Chan-wook’s current release, The handmaiden, is spicing up some friends’ lovelives at the moment) can work wonders. They strengthen their pelvic floors with yoga and do Tantra courses.
The more I thought about this, the more I realised I wanted to launch a magazine for this bold new breed of erotic explorers — those who reject elasticated waistbands in favour of silk corsets.
As soon as I set out my mission statement, prospective contributors started sending me emails.
First off the blocks was a 50something author who sent me a draft article about dating a much younger man — he’d approached her after liking her photo on Facebook. She confessed she was repulsed by the idea at first, but ‘I was bored, so took him up on his offer.’ Then she found the young suitor made her laugh, and she was intrigued to have insight into his very different world.
She admits she knows that the relationship will fade, but she’s arrived at an age where she can handle a man leaving.
her extraordinarily personal article (to be run in the June issue of The Amorist) ends with the confession: ‘Why am I telling you this? Because, whatever I’m experiencing, others must be too.
‘If I’m taking knocks for being an older woman who wants sex, who isn’t ready to give up just yet, then I’m the herald for a generation who will do the same.’
It’s true today’s middle-aged women are pioneers, signalling a sea change to those who come after. Most of the older women I know aren’t scared to proclaim they’re still sexual beings. They’re not retiring from the workplace (many are returning to professional life after childrearing), so they’re certainly not prepared to retire from the bedroom.
And the fact they’re no longer of childbearing age makes them far more attractive to many a man. They’re not looking for domestic drudgery, but a playmate.
And if they’re married, they’re hoping their husbands will become more playful — more inclined to try new tricks in bed.
This openness to erotic exploration seemed to express the exact reasons why I was setting up The Amorist: to give voice to a wide range of midlife experience, some of it experimental or chaotic, while other stories concern the rewards of remaining steadfast.
I’m fascinated by partnerships that stay the course and get richer with longevity. My fashion columnist — or Style Siren, as we Amorists term it — the best-selling crime novelist Christobel Kent, has been with her husband since they were both students. Christobel is in her mid-50s, a mother of five, and has long been the most soignée woman I know. Other brilliant writers in the stable include author Clover Stroud, another happily-married mother-of-five (well, women with big families do tend to be provenly into sex).
Of course, hurly burly or happy marriages are all very well, but loneliness and the longing for a soulmate is also a topic close to many midlife hearts.
The most moving piece in the launch issue is probably elaine Kingett’s article, Sex And The Single 67-year-old. My female staff and I laughed and wept when we read it. She was with her spouse for more than 30 years and writes that they never went without sex for more than two weeks.
One can only begin to imagine the emotional and physical chasm in her life after he died. I may be a little younger than Kingett, but it’s all too easy to imagine myself in her shoes in a decade or so — wondering where all the decent, loving, young-at-heart men are.
When she asks the question, ‘What’s a 67-year-old widow with a lust for life, and a rediscovered self-respect, to do?,’ she asks it on behalf of womankind.
The Amorist may not provide all the answers — but it will dare to give a voice to unabashed female yearning.