So now we know. Writing about sex and older women stirs up a hornet's nest of fear, resentments, and jealousy. But I'm glad I did it, because it's brought out of the closet the happy little secret of so many women over 50 -- they're having the time of their lives!
The reaction to my new book, Sex and the Seasoned Woman: Pursuing the Passionate Life is dependent on three factors: Attitude, attitude, attitude.
My book is a Rorschach test which reveals the underlying personality of the reader. Women who belong to the glass-half-empty crowd seem to find threatening my reportage on women 50 and over who refuse to accept that they're over -- but instead are finding it exciting to make another passage, from pleasing to mastery, enjoying a resurgence of desire for romance and sex, and actively pursuing new dreams and passions to enliven the many decades they have ahead.
The book is stirring up a healthy controversy. On one side are women who take comfort in Old Think -- that older women are doomed to invisibility, discarded by husbands looking for rejuvenation with fecund females carrying fresh eggs, and shunted aside in the corporate world in favor of coltish newbees. These women take consolation in seeing the cards as stacked against them and claiming permission to let themselves go, gather together, maybe drink a little too much, and swap their sour stories.
On the other side are women like those I've interviewed all over the country -- 400 of them. They belong to a new universe of lusty, liberated women who were thrilled to be asked about their love and sex lives. Nobody ever asked before!
In our intimate group interviews, they were thrilled to find out they weren't the only ones. So many other women are rediscovering who they started out to be, before they got wrapped up in the roles of their First Adulthood, rediscovering old passions, finding wholly new second careers, feeling frisky enough to date younger men, undergoing a spiritual transformation, or feeling their sensuality reawakened by a Pilot Light Lover.
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This process is not the same as moving through the stages and passages of adult development. That happens whether you like it or not. Pursuing the passionate life is an elective -- a conscious choice. It requires taking the risk of change. Not just aging -- but daring. Re-dreaming. Growing.
I was fortunate to be interviewed by Jane Ganahl , a popular columnist with the San Francisco Chronicle who has been writing a column about single women over 40, "Single Minded." She writes in support of the decision of an increasing number of women in early, middle, or late life to become unattached, or to remain unmarried. Her column has been called revolutionary.
Jane told me she had been quite a connoisseur of sexual relationships in her earlier life. "But after my divorce 10 yrs ago, I was not a happy single woman", she said. "I never envisioned being in that situation and then I began losing everything. My mother and sister both died and my daughter went off to college." She tossed her long red hair, "I'm so much stronger now. I think your book is revolutionary. It's coming along at the perfect time. There aren't really any good guide books for women -- especially single women in their middle years -- who want to grow older with a deepening of sensuality and passion."
Then Jane looked at me as directly as one journalist can to another, " I don't think your book is about sex. I think it's about passion -- passion for your work, for your relationships, for love -- for life!"
Jane had put into words exactly the way I see my book. When I ask at my speaking engagements "How many of you have found a good guide for how to live the seasoned years beyond 50?" maybe one hand goes up. Frankly, book titles are designed to get the reader into the tent. But "Sex and the Seasoned Woman" is about so much more. The subtitle says it -- it's about Pursuing the Passionate Life.
Many women of a certain age may be intimidated by what they see as a challenge to reawaken sex lives that may have gone dormant. Others, newly divorced or widowed, may not be ready. But it's never too soon to open one's heart and mind to the amazing array of choices before a woman as she enters her Second Adulthood. To become a seasoned woman, you don't have to have a Pilot Light Lover. What you do need to cultivate is the boldness to re-dream, the daring to get out there in the world to investigate your choices, and a commitment to find your passion and pursue it.
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It does require a major mind shift to embrace this new and bolder reality. It's a CLICK I see in the eyes of one interviewer after another.
For example, a genial host on the major San Francisco morning news show, Henry Tenenbaum at KRON TV, promo'd my segment by saying, "Gail Sheehy has been tracking our passages and stages of life for the last 30 years, and now she has turned her attention to Sex and Seniors."
During the break, before my interview, I asked Henry if he minded telling me how old he was.
"I'm 59, going on 60," he said smartly.
"Do you consider yourself a senior?" I asked innocently.
He recoiled, "NO WAY!"
I said, "Well, funnily enough, you introduced my book as being for seniors, when it's indeed for people like you."
CLICK!
It was an Aha! Moment for Henry: Oh yes, I'm part of this story and proud of it.
Bless his heart, Henry corrected himself on the air and we had a wonderful interview. It turned out that he's a seasoned man with a seasoned marriage. He told me his wife has become an Episcopal minister in her 50s. And as he waits for his television station to be sold, dubious that he will be kept on in his job, he said, "You know, I wouldn't mind terribly being a househusband at this stage." So he was right in the groove, but he had to be shaken out of an old social predisposition
I recently gave a speech about the seasoned woman to an audience of 120 members of Women's Exchange in the proper white-shoe Chicago suburb of Winnetka, Illinois. Women at the lunch tables could hardly wait for me to stop talking before they blurted out their own stories to one another. You could hear it happening all over the room.
CLICK!
In Berkeley, I called up Jane Juska, the luminous now-seventy-year-old author of the groundbreaking personal memoir, "A Round-Heeled Woman." Over coffee we discussed the curiously hostile reactions by some women to books like ours. Jane said women didn't tell her face to face, but sometimes came up to her at book signings and said, "My friend read your book and it really upset her."
She surmised they were usually talking about themselves.
CLICK!
Juska's take on where these women were coming from was, they had put sex behind them, and they didn't want it brought up again. They were afraid of being hurt or humiliated or rejected, and they had just turned off that channel. They might have been upset at having another older woman writing about her erotic adventures and felt they were being challenged to be part of this new attitude.
I agreed. I added that I thought that some married women, particularly those in the category I have called WMD's [Women Married, Dammit!], have become accustomed to sexually indolent marriages. Those I call LL's [Lowered Libido's] have totally given up on sex. It was bad enough to get past the Viagra craze, when their husbands suddenly became rabbit-like. And now they're hearing about women who are seasoned and looking for sexual revitalization.
So I am not surprised that there has already been some backlash in reviews of my book from these quarters.
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The New York Times Book Review chose as my reviewer Toni Bentley, an ex-ballerina who wrote a memoir about her efforts to renew herself through a sado-masochistic relationship and anal intercourse. The Washington Post Book Review called her book "the apotheosis of female self-loathing." Bentley brought her own dark lens to my thesis. While I propose that midlife women can enjoy a "Second Adulthood," Bentley's view is, "Must we do it twice?" Her alternative is to cultivate an appreciation of "the mostly unavoidable humiliation that is aging."
The psychological response to a fear of humiliation is to hide. For women who agree with the reviewer that their next 30, 40 or 50 years are about "the mostly unavoidable humiliation that is aging," then get back into the closet, girls, slip into your boxy overblouse and drawstring waist pants, and don't come out until you're ready for bingo or bedpan duty.
The cornucopia of stories of real-life midlife women in my book demonstrate that seeking a passionate life after 50 is not only possible, it's preferable to the alternative proposed by the reviewer. Bently wrote: "Can't we just get somewhere, put our feet up, have a martini and enjoy the view?"
Sure, we can get drunk and slowly decay and shuffle off into oblivion, as long as we go quietly. But the endgame is more likely to be dependence -- on our resentful adult children, or on younger American taxpayers.
The only thing this reviewer is right about is this: We are "no longer silent."
The New York Times Magazine (2-12-06) ran an essay attempting to debunk my reporting of the new trend toward boomers determined not to give up on sex just because they're moving into midlife. "What's So Hot About 50?" was the headline, with a subhed claiming "Sex and the female boomer is not booming."
The writer, Daphne Merkin, is memorable for her famous essay about the erotic pleasure of being spanked. She mocks my optimistic point of view that "it is never too late to make another, better choice." Her own view is "that menopause signals the end of a woman's gainful experience." She pays me a backhanded compliment as "a proved virtuoso" at "coming up with trends" and "adroitly replacing negative myths with positive ones -- menopause is a "second adulthood."
I hope I never have the hubris to believe I create trends or myths. As a seasoned cultural observer, I am merely bringing what has been covert out of the closet, and celebrating it. After thirty years of keeping my ear to the ground traveled by Boomers, I sometimes catch a trend ten minutes before the culture. The mainstream media picks up on the ideas and expands my reporting and disseminates the concepts in living color.
The CBS Sunday Morning tv show devoted its lead story on the Sunday before Valentine's Day to sex and Boomers ("Putting the Boom in Boomer)Susan Spencer, a seasoned correspondent, reported "The first baby boomers are hitting sixty this year and apparently still feeling pretty frisky. When it comes to the bedroom, it seems that the Boomers plan to keep on carrying on, right into the nursing home."
Steve Slon, editor in chief of AARP The Magazine, says, "The Baby Boomers believe that they invented sex, and they still think so."
Spencer: "And having done so, they're not about to give it up now. In the AARP Study called, "Sexuality in Mid-Life" researchers found that in fact the Baby Boomer generation really is different from generations before it, both in behaviors and in overall attitude."
Slon: "A strong majority [of Boomers] say sex is a critical ingredient in their lifestyle. Sixty-some percent of them say they are having sex once a week. And 2/3 of midlife couples say they are satisfied with their midlife sex lives."
Barbara Bartlich, a psychologist and sex therapist at New York Weill Cornell Medical Center, says, "People who have a lot of sex well into their golden years tend to have less heart disease, they live longer, they have less Alzheimer's, they sleep better, they have better moods, they have less pain. Sex does a lot of good things."
Newsweek devoted a cover story in the Feb 20 issue to "Sex and Love: The New World." Barbara Kantrowitz reported, "The 77, 702, 865 Americans born between 1946 and 1964 came of age in the era of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. And while the last two may have lost some appeal over the years, sex and relationships remain front and center as the oldest boomers turn 60 this year. That's largely because more boomers are single than any previous cohort of forty to sixtysomethings. According to the Census Bureau, 28.6 percent of adults age 45 to 59 were unattached in 2003, compared with only 18.8 percent in 1980ŠAnd many of these singles are on the prowl. In a recent AARP survey, up to 70 percent of single boomers said they dated regularly."
NBC's Today Show sent a producer and camera crew to follow me for two days in Santa Fe while I spoke to a sellout audience of 300 women, and filmed while I reconvened one of my most spirited group interviews. The producer shared with us the story of her own mother. Widowed around sixty, she had languished in solitary (and sexless) sadness for years until she was ready for a retirement home. There she met a man older than she who fell madly in love with her and wanted to marry her. She was dubious about the latter: "At our age?" He told her: "I can give you five great years." He gave her seven of the happiest years of her life.
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So why all the nasty commentary? The glass-half-empty crowd may be afraid that with so much proof of this demographic tsunami of boomer women crossing the threshold into their 50s and now their 60s -- refusing to submit to a sexless middle age, finding new dreams and new loves and revitalized sex lives -- they will be left high and dry on their island of Misery Loves Company. Survivors, yes. But even weeds survive. Our purpose as human beings is to live -- as fully and fruitfully as we are able until we draw our last breath.
I reject Merkin's view that I'm promoting "a myth -- that there is always the opportunity to make a different, better choice." That observation, which I wholeheartedly defend, is not only demonstrably true through the many stories of real life single, older women in my book. It is the only hope for women to escape empty marriages to chronic abusers, alcoholics, adulterers. And it is the well-trodden route out of hell for recovering alcoholics, addicts, overeaters, and narcissists. Thank God.
For more information, visit Gail Sheehy's website.