Book on sex, older women stirs debate
LOS ANGELES -- In an age when Viagra has revolutionized the sex lives of older men, who would have thought anyone would take issue with Gail Sheehy's contention, in her new book, ''Sex and the Seasoned Woman," that aging women want lively sex lives too? After all, didn't women of a certain age grow up in the same swinging '60s and '70s? Don't baby boomers believe they invented modern sex?
And who are all the millions of Viagra-fueled 70-something men supposed to have sex with -- women in their 20s?
Essentially, yes, say Sheehy's critics, who happen to be maturing women themselves.
Daphne Merkin, who famously wrote in The New Yorker about how the erotic pleasures of a good spanking led to love, marriage, and motherhood, opined in The New York Times Magazine that Sheehy's dismissal of the idea that ''menopause signals the end of a woman's gainful experience" fails to deal with what Merkin views as male disinterest in older women.
''It would seem fairly self-evident that as women enjoy longer and more active lives in a culture that venerates youth, especially in women, something's gotta give -- and what gives, mostly, are men," she wrote. ''Men of 45 aren't looking for women of 45; men of 55 aren't looking for them, either. Nor, apparently, do you have to be Jack Nicholson playing a version of himself -- a rich, insanely charming Don Juan -- to think that you deserve a spring chicken on your arm."
As anecdotal evidence, she offered a 50-year-old friend of hers who was seeking a woman in her late 20s, noting that ''a woman this age would come with a guarantee that her eggs were fresh."
''My book is a Rorschach test," Sheehy retorted on the Huffington Post. ''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 . . . enjoying a resurgence of desire for romance and sex, and actively pursuing new dreams and passions to enliven the many decades they have ahead."
And in spite of the marketing-friendly title, it's not just about sex, Sheehy, herself a ''seasoned woman" of 68, explained as she relaxed recently on a leather sofa at a house in West Los Angeles.
For the tsunami of female baby boomers pushing past 50, it's also about power and options and pursuing life passions that sped by them on the runaway train of family, children, and jobs.
''I'm writing about the real engine of life force, which is passion," Sheehy said. ''That's why the subtitle is: 'Pursuing the Passionate Life.' "
Still, sex is right up there in her book. And that's what her critics have focused on.
Toni Bentley, the former ballerina best known as the author of ''The Surrender," an ''erotic" memoir about a long, emotionally arid affair (The
''What about that intangible component called dignity? How to have it, how to keep it, how to teach it," Bentley demanded. ''Because isn't life really, in the end, not so much about which passage you're in but how to behave, wherever you are?"
At this, Helen Gurley Brown, 84, rushed into the fray in Sheehy's defense, shooting off a letter published in the March 5 New York Times Book Review. She called Sheehy's book ''realistic and inspiring."
Erica Jong, the author of ''Fear of Flying," the best-selling 1970s novel that captured the sexual revolution from a female point of view, believes the mixed reactions to the book are rooted in American ambivalence about the sexuality of older women.
The idea that older women are as interested in sex as older men are ''would not be surprising in Italy or France or Europe," said Jong.
''There are Italian sexpot actresses who are much older. But somehow in our strangely puritanical yet sex-obsessed country, people are shocked," she said. ''That's uniquely American."
''For the first time in history," Sheehy said, ''we have a huge population who is sound of body, agile of mind, and with a maximum freedom of choice. What we can accomplish is unforeseen."
But to some women, that sounds threatening, one expert said.
The problem is that ''women as they get older, they're competitive not just against their own age group, but against younger women, and against their own younger selves," said Susan Shapiro Barash, a professor of critical thinking and gender studies at Marymount Manhattan College.
''There is a desire to be sexual, to not be dismissed by a culture that is so age-invested and favors the young and the beautiful," Barash said. ''They really do want to be just as much in the game.
''But there are women and men in the culture who question that," Barash continued. ''Society tells these women that they're washed up. But the truth is, older women don't stop wanting to have sex. It doesn't go away."
