Gail Sheehy - Sex and the Seasoned Woman: Pursuing the Passionate Life

T he idea for this book came to me in a dreamful state the morning my husband and I awoke on a mountaintop in Italy. It was a few days after I had put to bed a wrenching book about the families of 9/11, but already we were transported by the sensuous landscape of Italys heartland, Umbria. Our window looked out on a mist-veiled gorge below the castle where a popes daughter, Lucrezia Borgia, had been confined in the fifteenth century, six months pregnant, because of her promiscuity. Her lover later rode up the mountain and joined her there in time for the birth of their child. It was an arresting thought: a beautiful and sexual being who was a popes daughter. Lucrezia was no longer young at the time of her imprisonment; and in fact, the pope soon after made her governor of one of the major territories of Italy, which she ruled ably from the castle fortress.

I know what my next book has to be about, I murmured. Sex and the seasoned woman.

Whats a seasoned woman? my husband asked.

Youre lying next to one.

Like any Aha! moment, it seemed obvious once I began thinking about it. Before there was a worldwide hit TV series called Sex and the City, there was the mother of all female sex guides, called Sex and the Single Girl. A best seller in 1962, it remains a cult classic. The author, Helen Gurley Brown, was a trailblazer in the media by declaring that women are sexual creatures too, with both desires and career ambitions. She reinvented Cosmopolitan, which is still publishing sex advice forty years later. Helen, who employed me as a contributor to Cosmo in my early twenties, is still striking, still wearing her skirts three inches above her knees to parties she attends with her handsome husband.

Sex and the Single Girl helped spark the incendiary debate about women as sex objects versus women as people with equal rights and equal claim to their sexuality. Many baby-boomer women who fought those battles with themselves and others are now what I would call seasoned women, and theyre still keen on sex. Significantly, 2004 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Alfred C. Kinseys ground-shaking second bookSexual Behavior in the Human Femaleand it was that book, not his first volume on human male sexuality, that produced a vicious backlash that suppressed, even to this day, much of what he had tried to reveal.

Sex and older women used to be considered an oxymoronrarely mentioned in the same breath. As late as 1996, the largest national sex survey since the Kinsey Report did not bother interviewing people over the age of 59. It was assumed that a womans sexual pilot light was extinguished by menopause and she was content to slip into the desexualized role of on-call grandma and caretaker for whatever members of the family got old and sick first or whined the loudest. Even now, although there are glimmers of awareness in popular culture that suggest something a little more provocative might be going on, most women are still socialized not to expect much after 45 or 50nothing much except dulling hair, corrugating skin, brittling bones, shriveling sex organs, and a social life centered around playing a little poker with the girls and maybe celebrating a birthday by tucking a dollar bill into the jockstrap of a male exotic dancer.

Do people really think we all trade the delights of touching and being touched for some hobby utilizing yarn?

Is there some inhibition ingrained in Americans that prevents us from imagining our parentsor, God forbid, our grandparentsbetween the sheets but not asleep? Whats amazing to me is not that older people fall in love and enjoy sex and feelings of attachment, says the anthropologist and author of Why We Love, Dr. Helen Fisher. Whats amazing to me is why Americans have never figured out that this is going on. Dr. Fisher, who has studied sex and love in more than fifty-eight cultures, sums up by saying that women today, having acquired economic power, have gained social and sexual power along with it. Theyre picking men from a wider range, she says and theyre doing it because they can.

Before starting the research for this book, I, like many married women, had no concept of what the singles scene was like these days for women in midlife and beyond. I got a hint one evening in New York. My husband was three thousand miles away, and I was hungry after seeing a play. At ten oclock on a rocking Saturday night, the caf across from the theater had no free tables. So I accepted a seat at the end of the bar, ordered supper, and pulled out my journal to make notes on the book just beginning to cook in my mind. I was deep in thought when the first young mans voice interrupted me.

What are you writing, a book?

Maybe, I said. I like to write.

Okay, I wont bother you. But after a while, a second young man approached. Why dont you write a book about me?

I looked around the bar. It was chockablock with pretty young women with plunging necklines and Wonderbras to showcase their waresyoung women apparently unattached. I asked the young men why they were wasting their time talking to me. They gave it some thought. I knew it wasnt my necklineI was wearing a high-necked black T-shirt. It wasnt my shoes; they were sexy little backless numbers with a tiny heel (so I could actually walk in them), but they were hidden under my stool.

Finally the taller and handsomer of the two replied, You lookinteresting.

I continued chatting with the two young men, because, as I told them, Id met my first husband in the White Horse Tavern.

Your first? they asked.

Im on my second.

They played along. Then theres time for one or two more.

Maybe, but it would be a close call. My current husband and I married after a whirlwind courtship of seventeen years.

They laughed. And then they told me all about themselves, which is what 25-year-old men always do. They tried to persuade me to write about them. But you havent told me anything interesting yet, I said. Then I listened, attentively, which is what 25-year-old women may forget to do. When I was ready to leave, they wrote their names and numbers in the back of my journal and asked me to call. Given the good fortune of a treasured marriage, I had no interest in following up. But I did walk thirty blocks in my backless shoes and never felt an ache in my arches.

I give you this anecdote not to brag (well, a little) but to point out one of the most welcome changes in American society. The ease with which these two younger men started up a conversation with me, and my own pleasure in engaging in repartee with them, began to open my eyes. The more I explored the concept of a seasoned woman, the more convinced I was that we are becoming freer of rigid age norms. At last, older women are shedding some of the stigma attached to age. And younger men, socialized in a postfeminist era, are more likely to appreciate a mature womans independent spirit.