Posts by Joan Price
Vaginal atrophy? Tight pelvic floor muscles? FeMani®Vibrating Massage Wand can help.
4/1/2025: Updated with current links.
5/15/2016: I have updated a previous 2010 review of vaginal dilators, now that the FeMani®Vibrating Massage Wand is available. I’ve also added some wonderful wisdom from Ellen Barnard. Women write to me that after a long period of celibacy, they find someone they want to have sex with again. Often they didn’t think they would discover love/lust again after so many years. Their elation dims when they attempt penetration and discover that their vaginas feel too dry and fragile for comfort if they try to accept a penis (or sometimes even fingers).
There are several reasons that vaginal fragility, tightness, discomfort, or pain can happen (which I discuss in my books, Naked at Our Age and The Ultimate Guide to Sex after 50). With age, especially if you’re sexually inactive, the vaginal tissues thin and there’s less blood flow to the genitals, causing dryness and fragility, known as vaginal atrophy. A separate but related problem is that the pelvic floor can lose its ability to relax, and in its contracted state, the vaginal opening feels too tight to admit a penis or a larger-than-slim sex toy.
Here’s how Ellen Barnard, co-owner of A Woman’s Touch sexuality resource center, helps women distinguish between menopause-related vaginal dryness and atrophy and “high tone pelvic floor dysfunction” that can be caused by the lack of blood flow to the genitals after menopause:
If you feel like your skin is very dry, fragile and tears easily then you have vaginal dryness and atrophy. You may experience tearing during penetrative sex and find a little bit of pink discharge after sex. If you feel like the skin is stretching or tearing at the opening of the vagina that is another sign of vaginal atrophy. A good quality, long lasting lubricant relieves your symptoms, and the Vaginal Renewal program will provide further relief and comfort both during daily activities and during sex.
If you engage in penetrative sex and your partner feels like they “hit a wall” either at the opening of the vagina or about 1-1/2 inches inside, or you feel pain deep inside the vagina with deeper penetration you may have an over-tight pelvic floor. The pelvic floor is made up of 3 layers of muscles. After menopause, those muscles can tighten up and not relax because there is not enough blood going to them once estrogen is no longer present.
If this happens to you then your first step is to see a pelvic floor therapist and get an evaluation of your pelvic floor muscles. If you have over-tight muscles the therapist can work with you to get them relaxed and learn appropriate exercises so you can consciously relax them once the therapy is over.
The Vaginal Renewal program may or may not help your pelvic floor muscles, so it is important to get additional help if the description above sounds like what happens to you.
Please download the Vaginal Renewal program from the wonderful folks at A Woman’s Touch sexuality resource center, and put it into action for the sake of your sexual health and future joy.
Part of this program is at least one orgasm a week (you don’t need a partner for that!) and internal massage using vibration. Yes, really. Internal massage with vibration brings blood flow to the vagina and helps strengthen the tissues. If you’re so tight that insertion hurts, slim wands (a.k.a. dilators) will help. These start very slim and progress in graduated sizes as your body adapts and is able to accept more. Barnard adds,
A set of dilators may be used to treat the involuntary tightening of the outermost layer of the pelvic floor that happens with a condition called vaginismus, or when you have high tone pelvic floor dysfunction (over tightening of the pelvic floor muscles that surround the vagina) in the outermost, middle and/or deep layers of the pelvic floor. You would work with a pelvic floor therapist to use the dilators to help you learn how to relax with progressively larger dilators inside the vagina. This work may be accompanied by other work such as psychotherapy when the tightening is caused by pain or trauma; meditation; and relaxation breathing in the case of high tone pelvic floor dysfunction.
It used to be a hassle to even find vaginal dilators, but A Woman’s Touch has done the research and development and created FDA-registered, therapeutic vibrating wands that are ideal for the Vaginal Renewal program:
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| Sizes 2 and 1 |
The FeMani Vibrating Massage Wand is made of smooth, durable, medical-grade ABS plastic and comes in three graduated widths: Size 1 (3/4″ diameter), Size 2 (1″ diameter), and Size 3 (1-3/8″ diameter).
Order two sizes in a kit with one silicone controller (detachable handle that controls the vibrations). These vibrating wands use AAA or AA batteries (included), depending on the size.
To figure out the size that’s right for you, A Woman’s Touch recommends this:
Determine how many lubricated fingers you can insert into your vagina when you are not aroused. For one finger, choose the 1 & 2 set, for two fingers choose the 2 & 3 set. If you are unsure or between sizes, we recommend choosing the smaller choice, which will still provide the beneficial massage without the potential strain or discomfort of being too big.
Using vibrating wands is a process for your own sexual health and the health of a relationship you might have now or in the future–and it can be extremely pleasurable, besides!
How to Put a Condom on a Soft Penis — With Your Mouth
Those of us in our 50-80+-year-old age group who are dating or in non-exclusive relationships need to take safer sex seriously. Yet how often do we face the challenge that the penis owner in our bed loses his erection (or thinks that he will, or doesn’t have one in the first place) when we want him to don a condom? We can have plenty of sexy fun with or without his erection, but what do we do about barrier protection?In honor of STD Awareness Month, I’d like to share with you an easy and sexy way to put a condom on a soft penis — using your mouth. With the help of the delightful Kendra Holliday (who told me, “I’ve never done this before!), the perfectly flaccid Sailor Soft Pack from Good Vibrations, and an expired condom (don’t we all have those?), I presented this demo during my “25 Tips for Sexy Aging” presentation at CatalystCon Midwest. Here are the step-by-step instructions. (Practice on a dildo, soft packer, or consenting vegetable first.)
1. Start to unroll the condom, just enough so that you’re sure of the direction it unrolls. Squeeze out any air in the tip. (That doesn’t matter for the demo, but it’s important when you do it in real life.)
2. Perch the condom on top of the head of the penis and roll it down just a little, keeping it in place with your fingers. If the penis is soft, the condom won’t go down much — that doesn’t matter. You’re just getting it in position
3. Put your mouth over the tip of the condom-clad penis head, leaving the rim of the condom outside your mouth. Use your fingers to keep the rim in place. Start to suck.
4. Keep sucking gently. Use your fingers to assist the condom to roll down over the penis, which is disappearing into your mouth, much to the enjoyment of its owner. As you continue to suck and the penis gets pulled into your mouth, the condom will continue to unroll over it — magic!
5. Keep going until the condom is fully unrolled. Keep it in place with your hand as you remove your mouth — if indeed you want to remove your mouth — from the well-clad penis.
Doesn’t that sound like fun? Oh, it is! Thank you to the lover whom I will not name who first introduced me to this trick.
Many thanks to Kendra Holliday for her willingness to learn this method in front of an audience. Kendra is a sex surrogate in St. Louis and co-leader of SEX+STL (Sex Positive St. Louis). She blogs as The Beautiful Kind.
Thanks also to Randy Austin-Cardona for photographing this process, and to CatalystCon for inviting me to give my “25 Tips for Sexy Aging” at this conference.
Note to meeting planners who were considering hiring me to speak until they read this — don’t worry, this demo is optional! As always, my talks are personalized for your audience and your needs and preferences.
Scary Old Sex by Arlene Heyman: book review
I was prepared to love this book even before I opened it. Scary Old Sex — what a title! — and it was written by Arlene Heyman, who had been a classmate of mine at Bennington College in the 1960s. We didn’t know each other well, but her reputation as a brilliant writer, certain to succeed, was well-known even then. Now Heyman, a therapist/psychoanalyst in New York City, has written a stunning collection of stories, some (not all) of which feature people our age. What I love most is that her characters, whether old or younger, have bodies and sex drives and sometimes quirky ways of living with both.
This collection is not erotica, and many of the stories are not directly about sex at all. Some of the characters are old; others are not. But overall, the characters’ sexual behavior and longings; their feelings about sex, their own bodies and their partners’ bodies; the effects of the passing of years on sexual expression and desire; and how relationships work (or not) — all of this provides both chaos and clarity about how we age as sexual beings.
For example, in “The Loves of Her Life,” 65-year-old Marianne needs both Vagifem and a progression of explicit fantasies in order to make love with her second husband, 70-year-old Stu. “For them, making love was like running a war: plans had to be drawn up, equipment in tiptop condition, troops deployed and coordinated meticulously, there was no room for maverick actions lest the country end up defeated and at each other’s throats.”
In “Dancing,” Matt, who is hospitalized for cancer treatment, must devise constant work-arounds for the pain when he tries to eat. Yet he is absorbed by how to make love to his wife, Ann, despite the fear that their tongues touching might kill him, as immunosuppressed as he is. Their resolution: he triple-gloves his hand, they both wear masks (she also wears a hospital gown, hairnet and booties, taking no chances), and he brings her to orgasm manually. “And he wept. Because she came and because it was over so fast and they were back to themselves with her underpants down around her ankles, the pad beneath her, and leukemia.”
Sometimes the bodies Heyman describes sound quite alien — except that we (who have lived this long) know them to be ours: “Aged flesh is so fertile, grows excrescences: papules, papillomas, skin tags, moles that have to be checked yearly; yet the hair thins out, underarm and pubic, as if the soil had changed to one that no longer supports that verdant shrubbery, but instead nourishes an astonishing variety of wild mushrooms — beautiful, if you have an eye.”
I highly recommend Scary Old Sex if you’re fond of literary short stories and you’re willing to look at aging, bodies, relationships, and sex with a magnifying glass.
I invited Arlene Heyman to answer a few questions:
| Arlene Heyman |
JP: Kudos for this collection of beautifully crafted short stories that portray our age group with compassion and insight. Your scenes of older-age sex are powerful because they are realistic and fully human – no caricatures, no derision, no skipping the joys and challenges of sex in older bodies. What went into your decision to write about “old sex” this way?
AH: I didn’t decide to write about old sex. Scary Old Sex contains two stories about old people and their sexuality; five other stories are about people of different ages. There is sexuality and the body in almost all of the stories, because the body is with us throughout life and we live to a great extent through it.
JP: Were the sex scenes difficult to write?
AH: I think it is hard to write about sex at any age. The Guardian ran 3 articles about writing about sex, one by a guy in his twenties, one by a woman in her forties, one by me in my seventies) and we were all scared to death of what others would think of us. Frankly, I think it’s hard to write about anything. I find writing very difficult. Some great writer said, “Oh, writing is easy. You just sit down at the typewriter and open a vein.” (Note from Joan: this quote has been attributed to Red Smith, Paul Gallico, and Ernest Hemingway.)
JP: Why do you think it’s so rare to find books that treat older people as sexual beings?
AH: I think it’s because of oedipal taboos that it’s rare to find books that deal with old adults having sex. The little girl loves her mother, then her father; the boy loves his mother, and then again his mother until the age of 5 or 6. Everyone who has had children and was open-minded saw that the boy wants to marry mommy and the girl daddy.
Then the passionate intensity goes underground and in adolescence the main job is breaking the passionate attachment to parents and turning the passion towards one’s peers. It is a period of mourning, of giving up the parents, and it is hard.(It is also a time of great excitement because one is entering the larger world.).
Part of the way one turns away from the parents is by finding them disgusting as sexual objects. One tries not to think of them as sexual. That barrier one has to set up to start out on one’s own life remains firmly in place. And it extends throughout life: one views one’s parents as asexual throughout life. Old people are people’s parents. They must be asexual.
And then old people do it to themselves; they neuter themselves as they had to neuter their parents. Hence, books about sex in old age–disgusting. And no one writes them.
JP: What else would you like my readers to know?
AH: A fiction writer doesn’t have an ax to grind. I’m not a politician. I didn’t write that book to propagandize anyone. As a person, I do hope to stay alive until I’m dead, and part of being alive is having a body. I wish for myself (and so I suppose for your readers) to think freely, know what I think, and to try to act on it so long as it doesn’t hurt myself or another person. Life, more life!
Womanizer W500: Outstanding Clitoral Suction Vibrator!
2/12/22: This Womanizer model is no longer available. Please check out my reviews of newer models. I deleted the dead links but didn’t delete the review because, hey, Jeffrey Dean Morgan.
How could this happen? A sex toy that gives fast orgasms to this aging woman? As if I didn’t love the earlier version of the Womanizer enough, the new Womanizer W500 is better. It’s exceptional.
If you read my review of the original Womanizer, you may remember that the clitoral suction made my world rock and roll, but I had to keep my eyes closed to keep from being distracted by the tacky design. This new version is better than the original for all these reasons:
2. There are two sizes of clitoral cup to envelope clitorises of different sizes and varied states of protrusion or retraction. |
| controls on back |
5. It comes with a classy, black satin storage bag instead of a bright, bubblegum pink case.
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| Jeffrey Dean Morgan |
FYI, yes, I dislike the name “Womanizer.” So I renamed mine Jeffrey Dean Morgan. You’re welcome!
