On the 27th October, 2016, I finished a novel. It was a book I had been struggling with for a very long time. So many years in the making and finally I pressed the return key and wrote the end and watched the words standing strong and fierce out on their own, centred and following a double line break. I was near the end of a retreat with three other writers. We spent the days in comfortable silence, each of us bunkered down in our own temporary workspace. The house was near a wild beach, a strand full of broken branches, waves thundering down over rip-tides and deep gouges in the sandy bottom big enough to trip into. Our silent days were punctuated by walks on the beach, watching mother whales teach their daughters to leap and turn.
I watched the two words the end for a long while before quietly getting up from my desk, slipping a swimming costume on and walking down to the ocean. I didn’t swim. It was impossible to do so. Instead I stood with the ocean pulling great swathes of sand out from under my feet, wondering if I had the courage to duck my head under the next ferocious wave. Of course I had the courage. I had just finished a very hard book. I could now do anything.
Back at the house I stepped out of my bathers and into the shower. It was only after my shower that I noticed the tiny rust-coloured drop in the crotch of my swimming costume. I had just got my period, timed perfectly with the finishing of a book. It was as if I had been holding on to the stress of everything whilst I finished the work. Those two words, the end, had released something inside me and I began to bleed.
What I didn’t know at the time was that it would be my last menstrual cycle. It was the end of blood, the end of a long arduous stage of my life; the end of my book marked the end of my days as a fertile woman.
In my book An Uncertain Grace, we follow my main character, Liv, from her university days to her death at 130 years old and her consciousness beyond a life of the body. As you can imagine, it is a book set in the future, engaging with technologies that have not yet been invented. It is a book about sexuality and about the interdependence between sex and the body we live in. It was very important to me that my character Liv remained a sexual being right up until and beyond death. It was important to me because I am getting older. The older I get the more I see that the signifiers of sex are inextricably linked to youth. We say young, sexy bodies. We say sexy young things. We do not say sexy old woman.
Yesterday I stood next to my husband who was holding the tickets to a movie we were about to see. My husband is very fit, gently greying hair, well dressed, fine of feature. He is just six months younger than me. I am fat, unfit, scruffy, short, menopausal. The young girl took his tickets, saw that there were two of them, looked at him confused.
‘Is your friend already in there?’ she asked.
‘No. This is my wife,’ he said. She looked at me for the first time. I had been standing right next to him. She hadn’t noticed me at all. Her eyes widened and she apologised. Embarrassed, she let us both go by.
What part of that list of descriptive words made me invisible to her? Fat, unfit, scruffy, short, menopausal? Maybe it was all of the above, but anecdotal evidence suggests that being old is enough to shield a woman from visibility.
In my day job I run book launches at Avid Reader Bookshop. I recently hosted an event with Helen Razer. She had written about dating as a middle-aged, recently single woman. She joked about how men of her age, mid-fifties, were joining online dating sites looking for women in their twenties and thirties. Newly single fifty-year-old heterosexual men rarely want to date fifty-year-old women.
In my book, Liv has sex with a young ungendered person when she is 129 years old. I read about telomeres in a Scientific American. Telomeres exist at the ends of chromosomes and as we age they wear down and become shorter. Gene therapy to extend and strengthen telomeres may mean extended and more active lives. One hundred years in the future, an active 129-year-old may not be such an odd sight. With this in mind, it was my job as a writer to describe the potential interaction. I needed to see Liv, to really see her in the act of sex, to make her body feel real for a reader, older than the oldest living woman in 2017 and also sexual. I looked to the great writers for help with this. Gabriel García Márquez wrote about an old man fantasising about a sexual encounter with a young virgin girl in Memories of My Melancholy Whores. Philip Roth hurled old man after old man onto the page, an annual literary parade of old men and their much younger female lovers. Diary of a Mad Old Man by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, The House of the Sleeping Beauties by Yasunari Kawabata, Houellebecq, Carey, Nabokov. We have literary examples of sexual old men, but finding a model for a sexual older woman in literature proved to be a little harder.
Another anecdote: I was greeted at the front door of the Apple Store in Brisbane City by a young hipster guy with a big beard and facial piercings. He told me where to wait for a salesperson to help me pick the cable that I needed. I went to the wall of cables and waited. Other people were waiting. Sales people with hand-held tablets worked the area. They served the young girls in crop tops and high heels. They served the middle-aged man in a business suit. They served the young boy still in school uniform. They served the male hipsters and the nerdy female hipsters but they did not serve me. A girl raced past me with her tablet and I was forced to call out to her. ‘Hey! I’ve been waiting over half an hour here.’ She apologised but said she was busy. She would send someone to look after me. After another half an hour I left the shop empty-handed. I complained about it on my Facebook page and 125 women commented on my post. No, it wasn’t just me. When you are a woman of a certain age you become invisible. Flirtation is half of sales work and who wants to flirt with a woman of our age?
I wake in the middle of the night. I am drenched in sweat. My heart is racing. What if I am pregnant? What if I don’t have menopause? What if I left a tampon inside myself and that is why I haven’t bled for three months? When I was in my twenties I once forgot my diaphragm inside my vulva. I felt like I had the flu. I had a fever, I felt terrible, and then I remembered that I had left the contraceptive device inside me. You need to leave it in for twenty-four hours after sex and I hadn’t had a break in sexual activity all week and then I just forgot. It was a horrible experience and one that floods back to me now. I am hot, clammy, I don’t feel right, my joints ache, my back aches, my lower abdomen feels crampy. I creep out of bed so as not to wake my husband and spend fifteen minutes feeling around inside me, wondering if there is a tampon in there somewhere just beyond my fingers.
No. Probably not. But I spend the rest of the night wondering about a late-life pregnancy, a geriatric pregnancy they call it. A geriatric pregnancy is a term used to describe pregnancy in women over thirty-five. I am nearing fifty. What would I do? It would be my last chance to have a baby. I have never wanted to have a baby. I don’t want to be a parent, especially not now. These days when the sun comes up I am exhausted. I get up, bleary-eyed, fumbling around to find some clothes to wear to work. When I was thirty I used to be the first out of bed, sitting on the step with a hot coffee watching the sun rise, buzzing with the possibilities of a new day.
Mario Vargas Llosa wrote an erotic novel called In Praise of the Stepmother. In it Lucrecia is a happily married woman who begins a sexual relationship with her pre-teen stepson. This transgression almost brings down her happy marriage. In The Graduate by Charles Webb, which was made into a very popular film, a young man, Benjamin, has an affair with an older woman. The book ends with Mrs Robinson becoming jealous of Benjamin’s relationship with her daughter. She becomes enraged and tries to destroy their lives. The cautionary message is unavoidable. In fairytales as in real life, the stepmothers, crones and older women are best avoided. They are dangerous, manipulating, clever enough to cause a man’s downfall.
Sexual desire for the old is so unusual in our culture that sex researcher Krafft-Ebing invented a term for it in his book Psychopathia Sexualis – gerontophilia, which means a sexual attraction to the old. There is another term for young men who have a sexual attraction to older women, anililagnia. These are ‘paraphilias’, atypical sexual interests, anomalies, perversions of what is right and normal.
When I was young, I was at a queer film festival and they were screening the documentary Nitrate Kisses about the history of LGBQTI in the USA. In the film there is a scene where two very old lesbians engage in sex. There is a quite graphic fisting scene. I remember being shocked and surprised by the audience reaction as everyone squirmed and a loud synchronised ‘ewwww’ echoed through the theatre. It was such a strong and unified reaction from the audience. I couldn’t understand why. Sure the women were wrinkled and old but their love was gentle, caring and quite frankly, beautiful. I was still young enough to think about my old age as something in the mythic distance but I hoped that as an old woman I would be equally sexually bold. I walked out of the cinema and saw the audience in the light of day and was disturbed by how young we all were. Young and queer and equally closed-minded as all those heteros who marginalised us on a daily basis. I walked through the Queen Street Mall in the bright light of day and looked at all the older people. All the beautiful older people. I wondered about their secret sex lives. I hoped they were all still having wonderful, transgressive sex.
My character, M, who is transitioning away from gender, falls into sexual love with 129-year-old Liv. M is an outlier in their own way. Sex with ungendered M is a perversion of a different kind. When I began to write this scene I had to imagine my experiences with the older women in my life. I thought of my grandmother in the months before she died. I thought of the women in a nursing home I once did an arts project with. I thought of myself, of the changes that are already beginning to happen in my body, of my skin which is folding over on itself, drying out, becoming like parchment, of my back which hurts every day when I get out of bed and which continues to hurt even when I am lying down. Of the wakeful nights where I am enervated, sleepless, wondering how my childlessness will impact on my life when I am on my deathbed. Knowing that despite the frequent diets and worry about my weight, I will probably die fat, and knowing I have wasted years of emotional energy beating myself up about my appearance. I am also in a body outside the norm. I am moving further into this uncharted territory as I age, as is my character M who is transitioning to the centre between male and female. In this space outside the norm, M, the character, and I, the writer, watch Liv disrobe.
She is standing in her bra and pants. It is a push-up bra, I notice, and she unsnaps it at the front and when she takes it off her breasts gentle down and flat against the bones of her chest. The nipples are pulled tight like two little pebbles, hard and dark on the paper thin skin … I know what I want now. I gently push her hands away and I hug her to me. Her nipples rub against mine as I walk her back against the bank. I carefully hold the cheeks of her arse in my hands. Jellyfish skin. It ripples against my fingers. I lift her and she is light as a piece of tissue billowing up with the movement of the water. I rest her down against me, shift my hips from side to side and her thighs float upward, exposing her to the press of me. I gently ease her down and my eyes close as her cunt closes around me. In her and out of her and in her again. Warm and cold. Alive and dead. Alive.
I check my reflection in the mirror. I never look at myself in the mirror anymore. I no longer take ‘selfies’, I don’t share pictures of myself on Facebook. I try not to turn my head towards windows as I am walking by. If I refuse to look I can still pretend I am the person that I once was, thin enough to fit into regular dress sizes, young enough for shop assistants to flirt with. After writing the sex scene between Liv and M, I force myself to look. I disrobe. I unclip the bra and let my breasts gentle down onto my stomach. It is hard to look at myself this way. Every day I walk past billboards and see magazines and watch television programs and read novels with characters that do not represent me. This is me. Here. Now. A fat, scruffy, menopausal woman. This is my body, all the dry folds of me, edged in skin that is beginning to wrinkle. I move my hands to my crotch and make small circles with my finger on my clitoris. I have been reading about menopause. My orgasms may diminish in intensity. My vagina will be dry. I resist the urge to close my eyes, to fantasise. In my fantasies I am always thinner, always younger. I keep my eyes steady and wide.
My breasts sway with my hand. I sit on the carpet and continue to watch the mirror. The swell of my flesh almost completely hides the tucks and folds between my legs. It is like a basket of bread rolls down there, swollen warm brown rounds of flesh. I find my mouth watering. I am not the same as I was. I will never be the sharp-edged, impetuous young girl again. But what I see has a different appeal: earthy, sensuous, slow. My body as a landscape has areas of interest, and it trembles as I rub it. It rises, it reddens, it swells. My body quakes like a fault line and then my eyes are shut or turned up to the sky but I don’t see the moment of orgasm. I just feel it. I still feel it. Maybe it is gentler. Maybe it is quicker. It is hard to tell. I sit in the aftermath and know that I will be okay. Like Liv, the character I have just created, it is possible to be aroused by what my body is still capable of. I am older. But even in my social invisibility, even if the world refuses to know what I see, I am still a sexy old woman for all that.