Best Life magazine: “a lot of kissing and touching and maybe a sex toy”
I’m quoted/mentioned extensively in “She Hunts by Night,” an article by Colin McEnroe in Best Life magazine, April 2007, about “How to handle the (new) sexually empowered over-40 woman.” McEnroe, a midlife man, says,
Many of us men spent the first half of our lives trying to talk women into having sex with us. Now we occasionally try to talk them out of it … We live in a new culture of sexually empowered older women… The last two years have seen a rockslide of books both documenting and encouraging the sexual reblossoming of women age 40 and up.
… Joan Price told me she wrote [Better Than I Ever Expected: Straight Talk about Sex After Sixty] partly because she couldn’t find any books for people like her. Price is a fitness instructor from Northern California who found herself “in a new relationship and having the best sex of my life, but not without challenges.”She went looking for information and found “doom and gloom…you’re gonna wither and dry up…give it up…sex is for the young.”Price wrote a book that is solution oriented. By that, I mean there’s information about actual solutions you can rub on parts of you that aren’t as damp as they used to be, and there’s a chapter about sex toys, because Price believes that female orgasm, post-50, is “much more subtle and takes longer to get there … a lot of kissing and touching and maybe a sex toy.”
… “What we want from men is not what they think we want,” agrees Price. “Men think we want a raging erection and the Energizer bunny. We have always wanted foreplay. Now we want even more, so much that we don’t even want to call it foreplay. I actually recommend that older couples schedule lovemaking. Schedule it at a time of day when you both have a lot of energy, which is usually not when you’re falling asleep at night. There’s a reason they call it ‘afternoon delight.’ And schedule at least two hours.”
I want to point out here that my “two hours” recommendation isn’t meant to intimidate anyone or suggest marathon, two-hour intercourse. Rather, the two hours includes all the “surroundings” of good sex that make it great: a long warmup; lots of kissing, touching, talking and laughing; leisurely sex; and time for cuddling and maybe even napping afterwards. It’s a total experience of intimacy, not just the “go for the goal” part.
(Don’t worry, Anonymous — I didn’t delete your comment. I deleted a duplicate that somehow hiccuped into appearing. — Joan)
Yeah, thank you Goddess or giving men such lousy sex organs. Mark Twain wrote that a penis after age 50 is of no use to him or his partner. (Yes, my 40-something wife has all types of orgasms and up to 30 minutes in a row but it is all clitoral so the “intimacy” is me going down on her.
I’d add that it is not of much use before 50 — one strong orgasm when a teenager, followed by the “let down” — “le petit mort” (the little death) for men while women are purring in their pillows and want to be hugged.
I’ve only had one female-like full-body orgasm in my life — when I was 29 (I am 44). My wife used an anal vibrator on my prostate at the time of orgasm, which shook my body for a full minute. Of course, this happens to her ALL the time and even more.
I’m actually thinking that chemical castration might be a good idea since a man’s desire — even in 40s, 50s is still so strong but the experience is . . . yaaaawn.
PS: The other down side of male sex: Always having to hold back so we don’t go over. What a drag.
I have to disagree that orgasms for women past the age of 50 are “much more subtle and it takes longer to get there.” Maybe this it true for the majority of us, but I would describe my pre 50 orgasms that way, not post 50. Most of the orgasms I have since menopause are the most intense of my life so far, they last longer, and there’s more variety to them. Sometimes it does take a while to get there, but that was often true when I was younger as well. Nowadays I sometimes start to orgasm almost immediately. Also for the first time in my life I sometimes have multiples.
A girlfriend of mine reports similar experiences so maybe this is not so unusual.
The difference I do notice between pre and post 50 is that I don’t always want or need to have them as often.
I don’t want people to be jealous, so maybe if I said that I had a lot of bad sex with men who were not good to me when I was younger it would put this in perspective. I feel like I missed out on lots of goodies as a younger woman and now I’m making up for this. I spend a lot of time nurturing my sexual self. I guess sex is different for each individual woman, and any orgasm at any age is a good one.
My aunt once told me that sex was better when you were older, but what’s happening now is really amazing to me. I had no idea my body could do these things. Thank you Goddess!