Posts by Joan Price
Senior Sex: Solo Style
Candida Royalle, known for pioneering the genre of woman-friendly erotic films and the Natural Contours line of intimate massagers, is the author of How to Tell a Naked Man What to Do. Candida wrote a marvelous piece for my new book, Naked at Our Age: Talking Out Loud about Senior Sex (coming this June — finally!) about the importance of keeping ourselves sexually heathy when we’re not in a relationship.
At age 59, Candida says she’s not in a hurry to find a new partner, but “I am committed to having a date with myself at least once a week to exercise my PC muscle, which runs along the pelvic floor and surrounds the entire vagina. Then I reward myself with a nice little session of self-pleasuring.”
Erica Manfred, divorced at sixty, is the author of He’s History You’re Not: Surviving Divorce After Forty. Erica contributed helpful tips to Naked at Our Age for getting through the devastating emotion- and ego-slamming period of a later-life divorce. 
In a recent Huffington Post article, Erica writes that at age 68, she has decided to give up on dating and sex. “It takes a hell of a lot of energy to date at my age,” the former sexual enthusiast writes. She’s not closing off the possibility of “getting my mojo back” in case Mr. Senior Right shows up at the supermarket, but she’s abandoning the online dating sites and cuddling her chihuahua.
Rachel Kramer Bussel is, at 35, the youngest of our sex-positive celibates. Rachel is an erotica author, sex columnist, and editor of 38 anthologies, including my favorite series: Best Sex Writing 2008, 2009 and 2010.
Is it hard to write about sex all day and not go after it at night? “Am I missing out on what’s supposed to be my sexual peak?” Rachel wonders. “Maybe friends with benefits is the best life can offer me and I’m being foolish or stupid to hold out for something more fulfilling. Or maybe I’ll find that I like being on my own so much I don’t ever want to actually join forces with someone else.”
I’ve divulged my own celibacy since losing Robert — on this blog in a shy way, and with more candor in Naked at Our Age (you’ll see!). I’ve started to date again, which so far means a series of sexless first dates. I’ve had some excitement (again, you’ll have to wait for Naked at Our Age!) but without the culmination of inviting a partner into my body.
Senior sex is still my intellectual, emotional, and career passion. My mission to normalize later-life sexuality in the eyes of society is as important to me now as when Robert and I were curling each other’s toes. I know I’m getting somewhere when seniors are seen as oddities when they’re not having sex!
As always, I welcome your comments!
Size My Sex Toys, Please!
Women have their choice of sizes for bras and shoes, which is a good thing, because obviously our breasts and feet are all different shapes and sizes. So why haven’t sex toy designers/ manufacturers realized that our genitals are all different shapes and sizes, too?
Okay, it’s obvious that we are, and it’s also obvious that good sex toys would cost even more than they do now if they either came in a variety of sizes or were made to be adjustable.
But let’s say we’re buying a “rabbit” vibrator — a.k.a. “dual action” — which means that one vibrator has an innie for vaginal/g-spot stimulation and an outie for clitoral stimulation. Since I review sex toys, I get to try many different varieties, and I’ve sampled at least a dozen rabbits that don’t work for me at all. If they hit the spot internally, the clitoral-stimulator doesn’t land where I want it, and vice versa.
Unfortunately, the information details on the retailers’ sites generally include only length and circumference or diameter of the insertable part, but no way to gauge how close the two parts are, or anything else that might impact our enjoyment of a particular toy.
Besides, how many of us know our own measurements? Can we ask our gynecologist, “Hey, could you measure the distance from vaginal opening to clitoris?” And since I can’t bear a cervix battering toy, I’d also ask, “While you’re in there, how deep is my vagina from entrance to cervix?” (Readers: don’t tell me to insert a ruler, please, and yes, I know we’re expandable, but still….)
This rant started out as the prelude to a review of an absolutely gorgeous and expensive vibrator that fits all wrong, but I think I’ll stop here and see what you have to say.
Your comments are welcome. (Please don’t use this as an opportunity to promote vibrator retail sites other than the ones I endorse on this blog, though. I delete comments that try to hijack my readers to sites I haven’t checked out and endorsed.)
Enjoy my other sex toy posts here.
I first posted this in November 2010 and am posting again, hoping to get more comments from you. Any sex toy designers who want to work with me, please let me know!
Bonk by Mary Roach: book review
Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roachis the most entertaining — and, in a madcap way, the most informative — book I’ve read in years. Filled with the weirdness of both the procedures and findings of sex research, Bonk combines arcane details with amazing facts and research tools (e.g. the “penis-camera).
Regale your friends with anecdotes from this book, and you’ll be the life of the party – as long as the party is filled with open-minded friends who enjoy zany details about sex.
Mary Roach writes in a clever, often hilarious style, which makes her books a pleasure to read, whether she’s writing about cadavers (Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers ), the afterlife (Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife), or, in this case, sex. My copy quickly became spotted with Post-Its as I read, marking passages I simply had to tell you about, but numbering an impossible 45 markers by the time I finished.
Here’s just a small sampling of the facts I learned:
Princess Marie Bonaparte (great-grand-niece of Napoleon) blamed her inability to orgasm during intercourse on the fact that her clitoris was three centimeters away from her vagina. She did her own research in 1924 with a ruler and interviews and discovered that “téléclitoridiennes,” women with more than 2.5 centimeters between clitoris and vagina, were incapable of orgasm during intercourse. So she employed a surgeon to relocate her clitoris. (No, sorry, it didn’t work for her.)
Women don’t like men’s cologne, according to their rate of vaginal blood flow. The scent of men’s cologne actually reduced vaginal blood flow, as did the smell of charcoal-barbecue meat. Oddly, what increased vaginal blood flow the most (by 13%) was a mixture of cucumber and Good’n’ Plenty candy. Hmmm.
[describing one of many sex machine inventions:] “The motor housing is the size of a lunchbox and is raised on one end, like a slide projector. A flesh-colored phallus on a stick slides quietly in and out. The erotic appeal seems limited. It would be like dating a corn dog.”
[describing another sex machine invention, called “Therapeutic Apparatus for Relieving Sexual Frustrations in Women Without Sex Partners”:] “At the base of the penial assembly was a wide, black, wiry cuff of fur-like or hair-like material. For the partnerless woman who wants not only the ultimate climax or orgasm, but also the feeling that she is having sex with a shoe buffer.”
You’ll learn about “uterine upsuck” in pigs and how Danish farmers increased their pigs’ fertility by sexually stimulating their sows to “upsuck” the semen better. Why it rarely worked to use an MRI to study couples having sex. How porn stars make extra money by having their orifices replicated into plaster casts which are then used for sex dolls. And what Mary Roach and her husband did in full view of scientists to further sex research.
Some of the most intriguing diversions are found in the footnotes. Did you know that Victorian gynecologists and urologists wouldn’t look at the nether parts of the women they were examining? Can you guess why men land in emergency rooms when they can’t remove their improvised cock rings? Or the strangest foreign objects that have been removed from rectums? (I can’t decide whether to vote for the frozen pig tail or the spectacles.)
I highly recommend Bonk for your own delight and as gifts for your sex-minded friends.
[Read my interview with Mary Roach here.]
Dear John, I Love Jane: book review
Dear John, I Love Jane — isn’t the title perfect? — is a 2011 anthology edited by Candace Walsh and Laura André (who happen to be a couple) and written by women who left their straight life/ relationships/ husbands because they fell in love with women.
Some always knew they were attracted to women, but bowed to society’s norm and married men anyway. Others had no idea they could or would fall in love with a woman.
The stories are engrossing, well-crafted, intimate, and dramatic. I felt I was sitting in a room hearing these women’s personal stories — their conflicts, thrills, misgivings (sometimes), and declarations.
When Seal Press offered me this book to review, I emailed back, “I hope some of the stories highlight women over 50.” I was surprised and pleased to learn that several of these authors are over 50, and in case you want to read their stories first–as I did–here are their names: Leigh Stuart, Sheila Smith, Susan Grier, Meredith Maran, Kami Day, Micki Grimland, and Katherine Briccetti.
I loved many of the stories, including “Memoirs of a Wanton Prude” by Sheila Smith, who first fell in love with a woman at age 69. As a teen, she was taught that gays and lesbians were “Sick! Immoral! Perverted!” and she fought back her feelings until age 50. Still, she stayed with her husband, “reading lesbian books and [keeping] my feelings about women under wraps. A divorce and a few years of solitude readied her to meet Diana, who taught her that “Lesbians are about intimacy”: “It wasn’t so much she wanted to go to bed with me; it was that she wanted to wake up with me.”
One of the most moving stories to me was “The Right Fit” by Kami Day (also over 50), who was raised Mormon and was taught that “Heavenly Father had made one man whose penis would fit just perfectly inside my vagina,” and that perfect fit would be revealed on her wedding night. It wasn’t. But 15 years later, the perfect fit arrived: Michele. And 15 after that, they are still together, “using only about half the mattress in our double bed.”
The writing is terrific — often lyrical, sometimes funny, and full of surprises. For example:
- “I have always been far more turned on by our magical, slippery little orchid than by their — what is that? A puppet? Some sort of sea creature?” (Veronica Masen)
- “My body has a need that’s burning a hole through the mattress. My brain is hanging on for dear life to what remains of my heterosexuality.” (Meredith Maran)
- “I had never imagined kissing another woman, but now I did, wanting to know the gentleness of soft skin, the taste of female, this female.” (Susan Grier)
- “I had recurrent dreams of making out with Ellen DeGeneres in a rustic Spanish house in Santa Barbara.” (Leigh Stuart)
Dear John, I Love Jane is an important book. It is more than a lesbian anthology — it’s about women making choices at first that go counter to what they really want or need (and isn’t that especially true of our age group?), then facing and accepting — and being thrilled by! — their true natures. It shows women’s sexual fluidity in a way we seldom see or acknowledge.
When I was writing Naked at Our Age, several women over 50 sent me their stories about marrying men (some quite contently, others battling their nature) and in later life discovering love with another woman — or wanting to experience sex with another woman and not yet putting it into action. If this book had been out then, I would have recommended it. I recommend it now!
Purchase the Dear John, I Love Jane on Amazon or order from your independent bookseller.
As always, I welcome your comments.