Q&A: Sex and Aging Solo Sex Follow Up
If culture lacks a script for you, write your own.
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Today's Q&A is a follow up to a post about sex and aging from last winter. You can read that post first, but this one stands on its own.
OK, here we go!
Q: I read with interest the blog post on sex and aging, but I kept waiting for something other than discussion of partnered sex. While I know this is by no means exclusive to the older crowd, many of us as we get older don't have a regular partner and can't/don't participate in casual sex. Do you folks know of any resources out there about hot to get the benefits and sheer enjoyment of a healthy sex life when your only partner is yourself?
For context -- I'm 52, divorced for 10 years, and really lonely in the pandemic. I'm assuming thanks to perimenopause, it's hard to even get interested in masturbation, but I don't want to lose the path to sexuality for all sorts of reasons. Suggestions for those in similar situations???
A: I love this question so much, not least because without it I would have assumed that all the books and stuff on masturbation are just as relevant to folks who are menopausal as to people who aren’t, but I’ve got three ideas:
To begin, there’s actually no compelling evidence that the hormonal changes of aging and menopause have any specific effect on sexual desire, though it may on vaginal tissues and lubrication, but people don’t get interested in masturbation because lubrication is happening.
Lots of other things about aging can affect sexual interest, including body changes and the impact those have on body image, increasing stress from life overall (including pandemic loneliness—ironically, loneliness can hit the brakes) and from the increased stress of new experiences of discrimination based on age, plus a complete lack of a social script for older people about how to be erotic in their aging skins.
The aforementioned warm socks post.
Maybe there’s not much you can do about the stress (maybe there are some things), but the script thing? You can definitely do something about that.
The cultural script is all about young people and their young bodies. In fact, the script is all about able-bodied people and their able bodies, conventionally beautiful and thin people and their conventionally beautiful, thin bodies, and, even now, about cisgender, straight people and the their cisgender, heterosexual bodies. Very, very gradually, the cultural narratives are opening up to create space for BLGTQIA2+ folks, to people of size, and, maybe most gradually of all, people on the other side of 50, but it is still very, very, very, very slow. I don’t think you should have to wait until the culture has a pre-written script available to you about how to be erotic in your own body as it is today, each day, as it changes. But you’re going to have to write it yourself.
So my first idea is: start from scratch; blaze your own trail. Write down all the bullshit messages you can think of, all the assumptions people make (for example, the assumption that the hormones of perimenopause reduce interest in masturbation), the story you were told your whole life about how aging affects sex—sexual arousal, desire, and pleasure. And then write counter narratives to each. Ask yourself some important questions:
When I imagine someone like me who is alive to the eroticism in her body, what do I imagine she’s like?
How does she behave?
How does she feel inside her own body?
How do other people feel about her?
If there’s a difference between me and her, are there steps I’m interested in taking to create change, so that I’m more like her?
Is there anything I feel she could learn from me?
One thing I want you to bear in mind as you write or imagine or talk through these questions, is that sexual desire is rarely going to “spontaneous,” that out-of-the-blue horniness that so many of us are told is the “normal” way to experience desire. It’s going to be responsive. That is, where spontaneous desire emerges in anticipation of pleasure, responsive desire emerges in response to pleasure. That means the desire will begin after the pleasurable touching begins. Your imaginary person who’s alive to the eroticism in her body is unlikely to be someone who constantly feel horny and like “Wow, I really want some sexytimes right now!” They’re more likely to be someone who’s like, “Yay, it’s Saturday afternoon, the time I have cordoned off for sensual me time!”
My second idea is to seek out the stories that do definitely, for sure, exist, to help guide your awareness of the bullshit messages and the alternatives people are creating for themselves and the world. A place to start are the books in this menopause resources post, which have chapters or posts or episodes on sex and sexuality.
Another resource is… well there actually two resources called “Still Doing It.”
The first Still Doing It is a collection from the late, great Joani Blank, published a bit over 20 years ago. It includes essays by both men and women.
The second, more recent Still Doing It is all about women.
Sidenote: for both these resources, “still” refers to people over 60, which you aren’t, but when people write about sex and aging, they go to 60 as a threshold for “aging,” apparently. I think this might be just because people like the alliteration of “sex over sixty.”
Third idea: set aside a regular time for connecting with your body. I don’t just mean masturbation and I definitely don’t mean just genitals. I mean getting alone and naked and touching your whole skin, touching it in different ways (light touch, deep touch, vibration, stretching tendons and muscles, etc), and exploring what it feels like to experience different sensations in a context of curious exploration.
You could be alone in the dark in your bedroom, but you could also be alone in the middle of the day in your kitchen, naked, mindfully eating strawberries you just picked from your backyard, dripping from their rinse under the faucet. You could be in the tub or the shower. You could lie on the couch in the living room watching great ethical feminist porn on the big TV rather than hiding it on your phone.
Set aside that time, intentionally, deliberately. Turn off your phone and leave it in another room. You are not available during this time; the world can live without you for an hour.
Again, this practice may not, probably won’t, come from “horniness;” it may not even be a sexy experience. It will be an erotic experience, in Audre Lorde’s sense of “the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way.” In her tour-de-force essay, Uses of the Erotic, she writes:
"The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves. […] Once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can then observe which of our various life endeavors bring us closest to that fullness."
So this practice of rejecting the existing scripts, learning about others’ experiences, and exploring the power of our own full depth of feeling—both emotion and sensation—doesn’t just grant you access to your sexual self. It teach you how alive you can feel. And that, in turn, will reduce your willingness to tolerate the people and experiences and diminish your aliveness.
Which—fair warning—could maybe totally change your life.
Five stars, highly recommend.
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Stay safe and see you next time.
