7

The Second Sexual Revolution

If he makes a sudden move in bed, his back creaks and he feels a stab of pain and has to lie still and breathe. They’ve been seeing each other for a month, and all afternoon they’ve been lounging on the couch, drinking mimosas, talking, reading the Sunday Times, and feeling the electricity. They slide to the floor and are matched up, chest to toe, kissing, and they agree it would be more comfortable in the bedroom, but it’s tricky getting up off the floor and they help each other. They both have to use the bathroom. He’s in bed with his glasses off when she comes in wearing only a T-shirt, but she’s not self-conscious because without his glasses he can’t see anything but a blur. Perfect! He hasn’t had sex in a year, since his wife died, and for her it’s been longer, so when he touches her she’s dry. I need to be woken up, she says playfully, and you’re the man for the job. He brightens as she stands to go find lubricant. She can’t remember where she put it, and when she returns, of course, he’s lost his erection and didn’t bring the Cialis because he hadn’t anticipated this would be the day.

The next time, he pops the pill and it not only works, it’s wondrous. He laughs, she cries. “We did it.” A few months later, they sign up for a tantric sex workshop, which takes them to a realm where they can’t tell where one body ends and the other begins and there’s not just physical ecstasy but a transfer of energy between them that fills their dry cells and makes them whole. “I never had sex like this, even in my twenties!” he says.

Six months later, he learns he has prostate cancer and if he has surgery and radiation, he’ll most likely be impotent. No! Not now, when I’ve discovered the best sex of my entire life? They make the rounds of doctors and alternative healers, do research, and select a treatment plan that offers good prospects for survival and reasonably good prospects for retaining potency. But nothing is certain. Welcome to sex in the master years.

How can sex feel more intense and expansive at this time than when we had raging hormones and could climax without effort? I would assert that we’ve become more complex, richened with sorrow and joy, and that there’s more to us—we bring more, release more, savor more.

We’ve had a sexual destiny: We were the advance guard in the first revolution, and now there’s a second in attitudes about sex and aging, both movements driven in large part by chemicals—the birth control pill and drugs like Viagra. As Tom Pollock, former chairman of Universal Pictures, put it, “Boomers have always taken care of our own.”

From the time I moved into the freshman dorm at college, the most important relationships I’ve had began as sexual. That seems to be the access point, the way I’ve let down the bridges across the moat to the fortress. When the body lets down, love can enter.

My fear, as years ticked by, was that I would lose my appeal, desire, and capacity to make love. I’d read in medical and popular literature that women dry up, vaginas atrophy, men can’t stay hard, and lust vanishes. When I turned fifty, I was afraid the best sex was behind me. I’d been at Berkeley in the sixties—an embedded reporter, smack in the epicenter of the sexual revolution—but shortly after my fiftieth, I met Zack, and our affair remains, to this day, the gold standard. I was startled by the newness of our lovemaking and how besotted I was with lust. Was I mad, depraved? Or was I lucky? The consensus among the literary lionesses—Simone de Beauvoir, Colette, and Germaine Greer—was that the third stage of a woman’s life is “triumphantly postsexual.” Colette had viewed carnal love as a virus she’d barely survived, and Francine du Plessix Gray wrote, “The more fortunate among us serenely accept that we may never again be seen as objects of erotic desire.” Not me, I was not going gentle down that road.

What began with Zack as a one-night stand became a long-distance romance and then a partnership. Sex was the glue that kept us tight, and as he put it, “It’s a hellacious bond”—when your rhythms are the same, your fantasies, tastes, and levels of desire mesh and blend because you know this is not to be found on any corner just ahead. The affair brought other riches, which I wrote about in Cowboy. But when it ended, I was fifty-seven. Would I ever have sex like that again? I wasn’t ready to let it go; I didn’t want to be “triumphantly postsexual.” Given my pattern, though, what would I do during the intervals when I was alone, and what if the interval went on and on? After Zack, casual sex was bumbling and one-dimensional and it wasn’t safe, not just because of AIDS and STDs, but the emotional wear and tear. How would I avoid becoming touch-deprived? I remember being frightened when I read an interview with Hanif Kureishi, who wrote My Beautiful Laundrette. He described taking his mother to a restaurant, “and she fancied the waiter’s hands. She said to me, ‘I worry that I will never be touched again, except by the undertaker.’”

I began to do research on sexuality and age, and what I found was both reassuring and troubling. It’s possible for people to have exciting and fulfilling sex as long as they’re healthy, but a large number are not because they lack a partner or interest. Due to illness, stress, or other factors, they have a diminished capacity for pleasure.

In 2004, the AARP commissioned a nationwide survey of sexual behavior among people forty-five and older, a group not well studied in previous sex research. Betty Friedan, writing in The Fountain of Age, says she was shocked to find that in the 1,700 pages of the Kinsey reports on men and women, there were only two pages on men over sixty and half a page on women. In the Masters and Johnson studies conducted in the sixties and seventies, less than 5 percent of the subjects were over sixty-five.

The most recent AARP survey reveals the shifting landscape. A glut of sexual information—on the Internet, TV, and other media—has led men to be more savvy about female anatomy and women to be more responsive and adventurous. The majority of women questioned say they masturbate, often with a vibrator. Of the men questioned, 22 percent say they’ve tried erectile enhancement drugs, and the percentage is growing exponentially. But the drugs don’t affect one’s emotions and cannot create desire. Repeated surveys show that a third of American women of all ages report having low libido, and gynecologists I’ve interviewed say that based on what they hear from patients, the true number is higher. A third of the nearly 1,700 people surveyed by AARP—one in three—rate their sex life as “yawn” or “bloody awful,” while the rest report being “somewhat” to “extremely satisfied.”

After interviewing more than a hundred people myself, I found that, as in other areas, there’s a phenomenal diversity of behavior in the bedroom, from the long-married couple who sleep in separate rooms and never have sex to the woman who’s enjoying it with a man so much younger that people assume he’s her grandson. But the idea that older people don’t make love or, if they do, it’s embarrassing or distasteful to contemplate no longer applies. Jack Rosenberg, the therapist in Los Angeles who’s married to a fellow therapist, suffered a heart attack and complications from a sextuple bypass operation, but after recovering, he says, “we have good sex, and I’m seventy-two.” His wife, Beverly Kitaen-Morse, adds that after the surgery “every time we’d get to the point of orgasm he’d start to say good-bye, telling me he’d watch over me. There was always the chance…but he took the risk every time.”

Joan Hotchkis

When I heard from friends that the actress Joan Hotchkis was doing a hilarious performance piece about sex as we get older, I immediately called for a ticket. In the ad for the show, Elements of Flesh, or Screwing Saved My Ass, Joan is shown lying nude on her side, with a piece of flowered silk draped over her torso but baring a round, pink buttock. She’s willowy and beautiful by any standard, but the ad, when it ran in the L.A. Times, triggered a rash of phone calls and hate mail. What infuriated people was not that Joan was naked or using words like “screwing,” but that she was doing it at sixty-eight. “You are ugly, old, and through—a whore which no man wants,” one letter said. When I saw the ad and read how old she was, I thought: This woman is sixty-eight? There’s hope.

In the show, Joan acts out scenes from her own sexual history and, like Anna Deveare Smith, takes on the voices and mannerisms of people she’s observed. To prepare for the piece, Joan sought out men and women in their sixties, seventies, and eighties, many of whom refused to talk about sex. I told her that Eve Ensler had no trouble getting women to talk about vaginas. Joan says, “It’s easier to talk about your vagina than about having sex after you’re sixty.”

One of the men she spoke with, whom she calls “Chuck” in the show, was married at seventy-five to a woman nearing eighty. They did it in the shower, at friends’ homes, on the airplane, everywhere at any hour, and she had orgasms for the first time. Chuck told Joan that most older people don’t have sex because the culture makes fun of them. “But the later years are the golden age of sexuality because no one bothers you and life is not so rushed.” Joan believes that humans are “made to be touched, to snuggle together like puppies, to smell each other’s smells and feel each other’s fluids, yet many older people haven’t been held or touched in decades.”

When I visit Joan in her condo in Santa Monica, which has four flights of stairs to keep her agile, I ask if she thinks boomers will stand for not being touched.

She laughs. “Not if they stay in character.”

Slender and gaminlike—she could play Peter Pan—Joan wears a stylish red shirt and cowboy belt, with her ash blond hair cut smartly. “The physical body is holding up,” she says, but she struggles with short-term memory loss and has Post-its on the TV, VCR, and DVD about which buttons to push. She’s been acting since she was nineteen, trained in New York with Lee Strasberg, and was a member of the Actors Studio, but TV viewers know her as Jack Klugman’s girlfriend in The Odd Couple.

“The male gaze was on me from the time I was fourteen,” she says. “Apparently I was very beautiful,” but in her family—the Bixby dynasty, which owned a twenty-six-thousand-acre cattle ranch in California—the word beautiful was used only for horses and yachts. “Look how she comes about—beautiful!” Joan says, mimicking her grandfather. Joan married at thirty, had a daughter, was divorced, and never wanted to marry again, “but I always wanted to screw,” which was not a problem, she says. “I never had to flirt, never lacked a date.” Then, in her early sixties, she lost the male gaze.

Joan says she hasn’t had a “full-blown passionate affair for ten years. I don’t have the stamina to go through the hurt and pain, the arguing and rejection—everything you go through when you fall in love.” But she misses screwing and still has a drawer full of sex toys and silk lingerie. “When I did the performance, I was hit on by men,” she says.

While she was rehearsing, a friend who teaches psychology told her, “Joanie, if you’re willing to be a dominatrix, you could have all the lovers you wanted.” Her friend said that because men are conditioned to be aggressive, “they get really turned on being a submissive.” Her friend posted an ad on the Internet describing Joan as a “beautiful, very special older woman who’s a dominatrix” and received more than a hundred responses. Her friend screened the applicants, and her first questions were: “Do you know where the clitoris is? Do you know what to do with it?” She narrowed the field down to five, whom Joan then spoke with on the phone. “Voice is important to me,” Joan says. “I’ve learned not to question my instincts. We’re animals, and no animal is attracted to every other animal. I like voices that are deep, but I don’t care about grammar or anything like that.”

The man she selected was a computer engineer, married, in his forties, who said this was his first foray into “getting my needs met.”

“You didn’t care that he was married?” I ask.

“I didn’t want love, I wanted sex.”

Her friend coached her—“she gave me the lines. I commanded this man to write me erotic letters every day, and he did pretty well.” Joan went to Frederick’s of Hollywood and bought the costume and props: “a black bustier that was easily unhookable, a black garter belt, a mean-looking necklace—black leather with stainless-steel prongs—a whip and dog collar.” First she had the man take a walk with her in the Santa Monica Mountains. They went behind a thicket to a clearing, she put the collar on him and said, “You’re my dog. Heel, dog!” As he was on all fours, preparing to lick the soles of her feet, a group of Brentwood ladies with jingling gold bracelets “went jabbering by. We were afraid they’d see us, and that got the guy really hot.” Next she rented a hotel suite on the ocean and ordered him to meet her there. “I made him strip for me—he had a gorgeous chest—then lie on the bed, and I stood above him in my high heels, cracking the whip. But I ruined my own act because after each stroke I’d say, “Oh! Did I hurt you?” She laughs. “I broke character.” They both had orgasms, but she decided “he wasn’t interesting enough or talented enough about touching. You know how some people are tone-deaf? He was touch-deaf. And it’s hard being responsible for everything: making plans, calling for reservations, deciding what we’ll eat and what games to play. Orders, orders, orders! How do men do it?”

The episode found its way into her performance piece and was a show stopper. The audience howled and cheered as Joan, slight as a pixie, planted her feet apart and said, raising her arms in victory: “I refuse to go unfucked to my grave!”

Two to Tango

Right on, sister. But when sex is not available, I’ve found that a safe way to be sensual, to feel the contours, warmth, and softness or firmness of another’s body, is dancing. Eve Babitz, who wrote Two by Two: Tango, Two-Step, and the L.A. Night, once told me dancing is “better than sex because it lasts longer.” And there’s no risk of disease or emotional entanglement. You don’t care what your partner does in the world, what he looks like, what he reads, or if he votes red or blue, if you have a great time dancing you go home elated.

It’s the zipless fuck or, more accurately, the fuckless fuck. In the eighties, when AIDS brought casual sex to a screeching halt, it’s no coincidence that there was a resurgence of dances where couples hold each other, like swing, salsa, and two-step. Joan Hotchkis does competitive ballroom dancing. “At least three times a week I get held against the body of a man,” she says, “who’s usually much younger and has a girlfriend.” Robert and Judith Gass do Contact Improv, and shortly after moving to Colorado I took up Argentine tango. This is not the head-snapping, rose-in-the-teeth, Rudolph Valentino–style tango, but a social walking dance that flourished in Buenos Aires and Paris in the 1940s, fell out of favor, and was revived in the 1980s and 1990s, so that today every major city in America and Europe has a booming tango community. In Argentine tango, people dance in “close embrace.” One of my teachers, Tom Stermitz, says there are two modes: “close and closer.”

Tom looks nondescript: a short man of fifty who teaches wearing a T-shirt, cargo shorts, and Birkenstocks with socks. His movements look understated, and he comes just to the top of my chest, but he holds me in a strong embrace and I don’t have to think because I have no choice but to swivel and glide as he wants me to.

Tom says most men in postfeminist America are politically correct. “Tango is not.” He urges men to “put the masculine chest in play. Unleash that macho energy!” He tells them to cast off the persona of the nice guy slumped at his computer, slaving around the clock. “Touch, flirt, and be bold!” The greatest challenge, he says, is “to convince men it’s okay to hold a woman close. We’re dancing in a hug.” He demonstrates with me, then says, “Women take less convincing.”

What’s hard for women is to surrender to being led. The very notion of “following” makes me tense. “Women have been indoctrinated that to succeed in the world, they have to be assertive and take the first step,” Tom says. “Tango asks them to do the opposite—wait and receive.” The roles are strict: The leader indicates and the follower responds—in Spanish it’s marcar and responder. The instructors tell women: Lift your chest and connect with your partner’s heart. What they mean is lift your breasts, move in close, and press them to his torso, inviting him to lead you. One of my favorite dance partners, Joe Reling, a real estate salesman with a tattoo on his bicep, says the first time a woman with enormous breasts placed them on his chest as if on a shelf, he had to sit down and compose himself.

In the beginning, tango is not fun and I don’t think it’s for me. I find the music schmaltzy—remember “Hernando’s Hideaway”? With other dances like salsa or swing, there’s a basic step you learn and repeat no matter what you’re asked to do. After a few lessons, you can get up and have a good time. Not with tango. There’s no basic step, but a “vocabulary” of possible moves—walk, cross, pivot. Each step is unpredictable because it’s improvised by the leader. When he “indicates,” the follower must move first, “opening the door” by extending her leg back, and then they go.

In my first group class, I stand, nervous and worried that I won’t be able to tell what the leader wants. You have to sink into a kind of trance and listen to what he’s saying with his chest. You can’t talk or look in your partner’s eyes or you’ll be distracted and miss his cues, so you stare at his shoulder or keep your eyes closed. (This appeals to inarticulate guys.) Every five minutes we change partners, and one man I dance with raises his hand and asks for help. “She’s doing the steps before I lead them,” he says.

The teacher cuts in to fix the problem. “You’re trying to lead,” he says. “You need to wait for the signal.” I’m mortified. I feel as if my worst fear is being announced in neon lights: “This woman is domineering. SHE CANNOT FOLLOW!”

Tango requires you to be spontaneous and pay attention, which seems good training for life: to not anticipate what might happen and how you’ll respond, but wait and see what the indications are and act. This is not simple. I’m told that it takes women a year and men several years, practicing at least twice a week, before they feel comfortable at a dance. Women progress faster than men because most have had dance lessons growing up and it’s easier to follow than to lead. So they say.

After two months of classes, I shore up my nerve and drive to Denver for a dance, or milonga, at the Mercury Café. I’m not prepared for what I see: someone’s vision of a psychedelic Hispanic fantasy ballroom with loud violin music and over-the-top sentimentality. There’s a wooden floor, and in a ring around it are tiny tables, each with a winking candle and bud vase containing a dusty artificial rose. Strings of plastic flowers, iridescent stars, and planets hang from the ceiling, and the dancers look like apparitions in the dim light. The crowd of more than a hundred seems evenly split between men and women. Most are single or couples who met at tango class or took up dancing because their therapist recommended it. Unlike swing clubs, which attract people in their twenties and thirties, the Mercury skews older, perhaps because tango is slow and doesn’t require strenuous exertion. A former ballerina in New York who’s in her fifties tells me, “At this age you can’t do ballet or modern anymore, but you can tango. The dance is intricate and challenging, so lots of former dancers become obsessed with it.”

Joe, the real estate salesman, asks me to dance. He leads me into back ochos, or figure-eights, but I don’t pick up the signal and just walk backward. Joe stops and looks up at the ceiling. “What?” I ask.

“Never mind,” he says. “People get intimidated here because there are so many good dancers. But they were all beginners once.” I start to relax, and for the first time it actually feels like dancing, not an exercise I’m bumbling through. Joe says, “Now that people see you can dance, you’ll be fine.” He goes off, and another man, Tom Frost, beckons to me. He’s tall and slim—our bodies line up perfectly—and he makes it easy and fun, twisting his torso, which makes mine twist, and when he lengthens his stride, so do I. There are loops of time where it seems the music is moving us and it’s thrilling.

School for Sex

Dance, chocolate, skiing, and toys from Babeland, the online pleasure store, can keep the juices flowing, but there ain’t nothing like the real thing.

While I was immersed in tango, I received an ad for a workshop in tantric sex given by Charles and Caroline Muir of the Source School of Tantra in Hawaii. I’d taken the seminar with Zack and was still on the mailing list. I couldn’t imagine going to such a weekend by myself, but I wanted to revisit the experience we’d had—and relate it in detail—because it offers evidence that sex is a lush mystery and there’s no age at which we can’t enjoy it. Some of the people taking the course with us were in their seventies, some were not conventionally attractive, and a good number were unpaired. Transcendent sex, it was revealed, is not about how thin or fat or youthful you are, it’s not about staying hard for hours, and you don’t need a steady partner. It’s not about the body, yet the body is the instrument. It’s about union, which happens on the interior.

In 1997, when Zack and I had signed up, we already were having what we considered the best sex of our lives. My sister had urged me to take the course but I’d declined, thinking it was unnecessary. Then I heard it recommended by others, including Jill Eikenberry and Michael Tucker, the actors on L.A. Law, who were down-to-earth and not easily gulled. “It transformed the way we think about sex,” Tucker said. “It took us to states we’d never imagined, and I realized, This is what we’re here for, to love like this.”

What do they teach you? I asked.

“You know, the G spot? Vaginal orgasms.”

“Oh, come on,” I said, “vaginal orgasms don’t exist. We settled that twenty-five years ago.” Tucker smiled, suggesting he knew otherwise.

In 1997, the assertion that massaging the G-spot could lead women to ejaculate and have vaginal orgasms was bizarre, and tantric sex was the fringe. Now the Internet is filled with sites like seehersquirt.com and diagrams of the G-spot and how to find it. Even the conservative Right has discovered spiritual sex. Robert Irwin, who describes himself as “an average, middle-aged Christian man” who married “a lovely Christian woman,” hosts a website where he sells an e-book that promises to show the Christian husband how to find his wife’s G-spot, make her squirt, find his own G-spot, be able to come three times in an hour—at any age—and be able to have an orgasm without ejaculating, which he claims is the most glorious and spiritually satisfying big bang of all.

A great deal of nonsense poses as tantra, and no one knows how it was practiced when it arose in India about 3000 BC. Scholars believe it was a system for consecrating life that included exercise, breathing, meditation, music, and sexual rites designed to bring the participants into union with the divine. The Source School of Tantra still seems one of the more serious and responsible groups for exploring “conscious loving.” In 1997, when I showed their brochure to Zack, he was intrigued. “How can you ever know too much about sex?” he asked.

On a Friday night, we walked into the Wilshire Room of the Sheraton Miramar in Santa Monica, pinned on name tags, and sat down in a row of chairs. Others had removed their shoes, but Zack would not take off his black boots with red lightning bolts.

“Why are we doing this?” he asked.

“You wanted to,” I said.

“That was before.”

“We can always leave.”

There were more than a hundred participants, and the majority, to my surprise, were in their forties and older. They were accountants, doctors, sales people, and filmmakers, and twenty-three were single. Charles and Caroline made their entrance wearing turquoise shirts and black slacks. Charles, forty-nine at the time, was tall and slim with dark curly hair, and Caroline, fifty-three, was blond, big-breasted, and earthy.

Charles said the subject of the weekend was conscious sex. When he’d begun giving this workshop in the eighties, he’d asked people to name all the words they knew for the penis. Charles picked up a list. “We collected more than a hundred and fifty: cock, pecker, prick, dick, stick, dong, shlong, big bong, weeny, wiener, hot dog, sausage…” He paused. “That was the meat section.” In tantra, he said, “we use the Sanskrit word lingam, or ‘wand of light.’” He took out a puppet—actually a child’s toy, a magic wand that lit up with orange sparks when he pressed a switch. “We’re going to ask you to trade in your dick or prick for a wand of light.”

Zack rolled his eyes.

Caroline said, in a voice that was surprisingly deep and smoky, that most names for the vagina are “so demeaning they’re not worth repeating. The Sanskrit word is yoni, which means ‘sacred space,’ and through this space comes life itself.” She picked up her puppet, a foot-high yoni made of purple velvet with red lips and a gold clitoris. Then Charles put his lingam puppet in her yoni puppet to demonstrate some of the “thousand and one varieties of movement. Keep her surprised,” Charles said. “You don’t always want to go straight down the fairway.” By this time, people who’d been sitting tensely were laughing and lounging on the floor as if the puppets were from Sesame Street and it was perfectly normal to be talking about lingams and yonis in the Sheraton Miramar.

Zack and I went home and tried some of the techniques they’d taught, including “Climbing the Himalayas,” which was pleasant but, as Zack put it, “underwhelming.” We talked about quitting but that was impossible; we had to see how far this would go.

On Saturday morning, Charles and Caroline began setting the stage for the “initiation” we’d do that evening—sacred spot massage. Charles talked about the area in the yoni called the sacred spot, or G-spot after the gynecologist Ernst Gräfenberg, who’s credited with discovering it in 1955. It struck me as significant that this spot, which supposedly has been in women’s bodies for millennia, was “discovered” by a man who named it after himself. “Every woman needs healing and awakening there,” Charles said. Caroline nodded. “Most women have had traumas—infections or abortions, cancer, sexual abuse, sex you didn’t want, sex that hurt.” She said the traumas are stored in the yoni and cause it to shut down.

Charles said the G-spot is located on the upper inside wall of the vagina, midway between the opening and the cervix. “It’s the south pole of the clitoris, the internal pole.” I shook my head. I’d always thought the G-spot was hokum and that searching for it would be as much of a snipe hunt as chasing the vaginal orgasm. Zack, whispering, told me a joke he’d heard: “What’s the difference between a golf ball and a G-spot?”

“What?”

“A man will spend twenty minutes searching for a golf ball.”

Charles stressed that this night was for the women. “Guys, it’s not about you getting off. We’ll do that tomorrow. Tonight is your chance to serve.” He said the sacred spot massage should last at least an hour, and during it, the woman might experience numbness, pain, strong emotions, or exquisite pleasure. “It may take a year of practice before this area is awakened.”

Charles said that continued stimulation could bring on vaginal orgasms. I raised my hand. “I have a problem with this.” I asked Caroline if she could describe the vaginal orgasm.

“For me, it’s like night and day, the difference between clitoral and vaginal orgasms,” she said. “A clitoral orgasm is like a male orgasm, a big bang. A vaginal orgasm feels like waves of pleasure through my whole body. And it’s easy. You don’t have to work and strain.”

What bothered me about Caroline’s description was its vagueness. A clitoral orgasm or, I would say, an orgasm, is a clear event. Meg Ryan could simulate one perfectly—recognizable to all—in When Harry Met Sally. Could she sit in the deli and simulate the other kind?

Despite the skepticism in the room, Charles went further: He said that sacred spot massage could cause the woman to ejaculate. What she ejaculates is a clear, sweet-smelling liquid called amrita, or “divine nectar.” “It comes out of the urethra, but it’s not urine,” Charles said. “And it’s not just moisture or lubrication. It’s voluminous. We measure it in cups, sometimes quarts. It takes three or four towels to absorb it, and I’ve seen it shoot eight feet in the air and hit the wall.”

“No!” someone cried.

I looked at Zack. “I don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.”

During the lunch break, I went to a bookstore and browsed through the section on health and sex. Is it possible, I thought—is it conceivable that I’ve reached my fifties, had two kids, and don’t know my body? Sure, I’d heard of vaginal orgasms before. The prevailing wisdom from Victorian times until the late sixties was that immature women have clitoral orgasms and mature women have vaginal orgasms. Freud had written, in “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” that if girls fail to “change their leading erotogenic zone” from the clitoris to the vagina, they’ll be prone to neurosis and hysteria. At Berkeley, my friends and I had read Freud’s essays and were mystified. All the orgasms we’d felt were in the clitoris, no matter how they’d been achieved. But we had secret doubts: Perhaps we weren’t real women, experiencing all that a woman could.

Then came the first women’s liberation groups, which circulated pamphlets like Anne Koedt’s “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm” and Susan Lydon’s brilliant essay “The Politics of Orgasm.” Lydon stated that the clitoris was the center of all orgasms and that men had trumped up the notion of a superior vaginal orgasm to keep women dependent on them. Lydon’s assertion was backed by scientific evidence. Masters and Johnson had hooked up women to electric sensors and monitored them during orgasm, and found: “The dichotomy of vaginal and clitoral orgasms is entirely false. Anatomically, all orgasms are centered in the clitoris.”

This ushered in the reign of the clitoris supreme. We were liberated from Freud, our experiences were validated, and we buried the vaginal orgasm under cement. While the clitoris ruled, the vagina was made an inferior place. It lacked the nerves and exquisite sensitivity of its cousin, and gradually this changed the way men made love. The new attitude was conveyed in the movie Coming Home, in which Jon Voight, paralyzed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair, was able to give Jane Fonda such pleasure it made her breathless and ready to leave her dick-proud husband.

Around this time, college students reading The Sun Also Rises questioned why Jake’s impotence meant he couldn’t have a life with Lady Brett. A young man at the University of Oregon, where I was lecturing, asked, “Why couldn’t he just go down on her?” Because, I said, in 1926, to Hemingway and the community, this was unquestioned: It takes a penis. By the late seventies, the penis was nice but expendable.

In “The Politics of Orgasm,” Lydon had written that “women defer to whatever model of their sexuality is offered them by men.” During the tantra workshop, though, I began to consider the possibility that for three decades we’d been deferring to the women’s line. Was the vagina more potent and responsive than we’d believed? Or were we now being taken in by a New Age shill?

After lunch, the Muirs showed a clip from a video they’d made, Secrets of Female Sexual Ecstasy, in which they were nude as he massaged her sacred spot with his fingers, looking in her eyes, and then clear liquid squirted out of her and drenched her legs. When the lights came on, people looked stunned. Zack broke the silence: “There’s gonna be a hot time in the ol’ bunkhouse tonight!” I wanted to sink into the floor. Charles said, “Remember, the only goal tonight is to try the technique and report on what you find. Women, I’ve warned the men not to let you start a fight. Our experience is that one out of four of you will try.”

He sent the couples home and invited the singles—again, the majority were over forty—to stay for a “ritual” in preparation for sacred spot massage. Charles said the women would choose their partners. “For the men, this means taking the risk you won’t be chosen. If you are chosen, you’re making a commitment to serve the Goddess in whatever form She comes to you.”

Eight people stood up and left the room, and those remaining were praised for their bravery by Mair Simone, who’d been introduced as a “certified dakhini”—a sexual priestess who could be called on to help couples during the “holy act.” I wondered what her certification process had involved. Mair asked the six men to sit in a circle on the floor with their eyes closed. Then she asked the nine women to form a circle within the circle, facing the men. They joined hands and walked around and around. “Look for guidance,” Caroline said. “Whom should I choose?”

The women were told to walk to a partner and take his hands. All the men were immediately chosen except Ralph, a divorce lawyer in his fifties who had thirty extra pounds on him and friendly, impish eyes. When Mair saw he wasn’t being chosen, she sat down in front of him but, before taking his hands, looked back at the four women who hadn’t picked a partner. She beckoned to them, seeing if one had felt shy and might change her mind. Julie, a redhead who had pocked skin and a large nose, walked forward and took Ralph’s hands.

“Open your eyes, guys,” Charles said, “and behold the gift.”

Later, Ralph would tell me that when he opened his eyes, he thought: This is the gift?!

Mair came up and asked Julie if she was okay. “I’m a little uneasy. I’d feel better if you came along.” Mair asked Ralph if she could join them and he agreed.

On our ride home, Zack was cranky. He’d been bored and irritated when taken aside with the other men for “coaching” by Charles. Zack said, “These guys were duds. They were complaining: You mean we have to serve and we don’t get anything?”

I told him what Michael Tucker had said after the workshop. “I always thought I wanted my pleasure, but the point is to fill the woman with pleasure and then the man will get everything he wants and more.”

“These guys didn’t want to hear that,” Zack said. “They wanted to measure the sacred spot with a slide rule. Is it an inch, two?” We walked into the house, drank some cognac, and he was still gloomy. He said he didn’t belong there; nobody had talked to him and he didn’t want to talk to anybody. “This happens a lot when I go places with you.”

“I thought the woman was supposed to try to start the fight.”

We found the G-spot. An erogenous zone that I hadn’t known existed—a zone that was just as feverish and riveting as the clitoris, if not more so because of the novelty. I felt as if concrete was cracking; a political edifice was toppling.

I had a strong sense memory of being nineteen, with my first lover, and I remembered how astonishing it had felt—simple intercourse. That’s what it felt like again. Then Zack and I found ourselves in a green and secret glade, shot through with a sense of the wonder and love in all things. We lay silently with our chests pressed together, breathing in unison, and there was a fusion between his skin and mine, his ribs and mine, his heart and mine.

“I’ve never felt so close to you,” I said softly.

He smiled. “You’re my wild little angel.”

Sunday morning in the Sheraton Miramar, the men and women looked as if they’d taken Ecstasy, the love drug. Ralph was sitting on the floor, beaming, his arms around Mair and Julie, the redhead with pocked skin. Couples were kissing, lacing their fingers together. The women didn’t sit so much as flow over the chairs, and the men looked powerful.

Charles asked people to describe their experience. Julie raised her hand. She said that Ralph was “the most giving, loving man I’ve known. I woke up this morning, touched my own arm, and felt I was being loved. I walked outside and felt the sun loving me.”

“She got her money’s worth,” Zack whispered.

“Did you find the sacred spot?” Charles asked.

Julie rested her head on Ralph’s chest and said dreamily, “Mmhmm.” Ralph smiled.

Later, Ralph told me that when he’d sat down to do the ritual, he’d found Julie so unattractive he had to force himself to look at her. “But as we stared into each other’s eyes and synchronized our breathing, everything in the room began to melt away and we just merged. I went into a state of ecstasy.”

Interesting, I thought—more evidence that age and the condition of one’s body are not the determinants of sexual bliss.

In the afternoon, Charles and Caroline began instructing us in what they called “healing for men.” Charles said men don’t have to be erect—“lingams are usually soft”—and they don’t have to come to reach the heights. The relief in the room was palpable; you could hear the guys exhale. Charles whipped off his belt and trousers and lay down in swim trunks, holding the lingam puppet in front of him. “This region in men needs healing—from all the times it was rejected, criticized, teased, from having its neck wrung in masturbation.” Caroline sat down and, using the puppet, showed us “thirty-seven ways to touch a lingam.” One was “the Arnold,” which involved gripping the muscle at the base so it became pumped.

At the end of the workshop, it seemed the men had been given short shrift. We’d spent a day preparing for the women’s night and a few hours for the men’s. I asked Charles about this and he said they’d purposely made women the priority. “Women need to be healed first because they’re the most scarred. If the woman of the house is happy…” He smiled. “Good things will flow.”

And they did. The practice—whether it’s called Christian sexuality or tantra—carried Zack and me to altered states. With no effort on his part or prior intent, Zack was so nourished after the weekend that he stopped smoking. He’d been consuming two packs a day since he was fourteen and had tried many times to quit, but after three days of “conscious loving,” the addiction fell away.

We had four more years together before we found, ultimately, that sex alone could not sustain us. What we created when we were by ourselves—the laughter and deep communion—did not carry into the outside world. Friends viewed us with puzzlement, and our children reacted with hostility. Zack became increasingly dysfunctional financially, and as I lost my ability to work in TV, there were clashes and resentment that rent us apart.

So I was left with the dilemma many will face: How do you satisfy the need for sensuality as years go by? The question is not just for singles. What happens to couples when one partner shuts down and the other still wants intimacy? I talked with a man in New York who’s leaving his wife of twenty-eight years because she’s finished with sex and he feels, if anything, more lustful. She argues that this is no reason to break up the family; lots of their married friends have settled into cozy companionship. But he isn’t willing to sneak off to liaisons, as some of his friends do, or pay an escort. He wants the whole enchilada.

A number of singles at the tantra workshop solved the problem by finding a “buddy” with whom they could “practice,” just as friends. But for me, this wouldn’t work. The level of trust and vulnerability required to open one’s body to another is likely to trigger emotions I associate with love. I can’t draw the line. “I’m that way also,” Caroline Muir said when I interviewed her recently. “Most women can’t draw the line. Once he’s penetrating us and it’s wonderful, we’re in love!” She gives a deep sigh. “We decide, ‘This is where I want to be,’ and we overlook a lot of problems.”

In the late 1990s, friction over this issue led to the breakup of her marriage with Charles. Caroline says that from the time he began studying tantra, “he’s believed that for his own learning, he needs to open to love when love comes toward him.” He and Caroline had many partners. “It was fabulous, fun, tremendously exciting, and I always knew that in the inmost reaches of his heart, I was the one, but there came a point when I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t open to one more woman in our bed.” She said her life is simpler and saner “if I keep my sexuality for me and my partner. That’s my choice. Charles tried to do it my way, but it came down to the fact that it wasn’t his way.”

They still teach together, but at Charles’s prompting, Caroline started teaching “the feminine mysteries,” creating what she calls Divine Feminine workshops, where straight women “initiate” one another to attain “sexual wholeness.”

This sounded weird to me. But an internist I met in San Francisco, Karen, a widow in her fifties who’s stunningly slim and beautiful, told me she’d attended a Divine Feminine workshop when she was grieving. “The idea of doing sacred spot massage with women was totally yucky!” Karen recalls. Then Caroline Muir, whom she’d met years before, told her it was not about being sexual with other women but about healing and nurturing, “which you obviously need.”

Karen agreed. “At that point I might have gone to any port for comfort.” She drove to the workshop expecting to see a small number of spacey ladies bedecked with crystals and feathers. Instead, there were thirty-five professional women: lawyers, businesspeople, therapists, and college teachers. As they introduced themselves, Karen says, “the common thread was that they’d learned to be assertive, tough, and competitive with men but they have trouble being receptive, being feminine.” The women took turns working with each other—massaging backs and stomachs, doing partner yoga and dancing—“and a lot felt hokey,” Karen says. They ate soft comfort foods like guacamole, macaroni and cheese, and chocolate soufflé. They were asked to hug each other with total acceptance, the way a mother comforts a child, “and when the first woman held me like that, I started to cry,” Karen says. “I thought: This is not about sex, it’s about love. The love in the room was so sincere and generous that I felt cared for and slept well that night for the first time since my husband died.”

The following day, the women, all together in one room, were invited to remove their clothes if they felt comfortable doing so and, working in groups of three, take turns giving and receiving sacred spot massage. “I thought, I don’t want to do this!” Karen recalls. Caroline told her she didn’t have to. “But I felt so connected and understood by these women that I figured: You’re here, you might as well go for the full Monty.” Before she could change her mind, Karen asked her two partners if she could go first. The other women massaged her with oil, “and it felt soothing.” One was a physical therapist, and after she helped Karen relax, the woman asked if it was all right to enter her sacred space. Karen said yes. She closed her eyes and, after a few minutes, opened them and said, “Why did I not want to do this?” The three women laughed. “It felt wonderful,” Karen recalls. “Usually when we hug our women friends, there’s a boundary, an invisible line we don’t cross. In this gathering we could let down the barriers, give and receive warmth, and it was safe because no one was going to want a relationship or make demands.”

Sex with women is not something that attracts me, but listening to Karen, I could see that just as sources for love widen in later years, so could sources for sensuality and the joy of being in a body. Joan Hotchkis had told me she’s learned “how to have a moment be as fully felt and sensual as it can be. When I’m smelling something, I inhale deeply and feel the scent through the skin of my nostrils. When I’m hearing beautiful music, I stop and let it fill my whole body.”

Karen says, “I would rather have sex with a man I love, but when that’s absent, there are other ways of finding physical comfort so we don’t become starved.” Caroline Muir said during our interview, “So many women, myself included, have suffered, trying to extract or pry—just pry out tenderness and nurturing from a man. So I teach: Don’t expect to get all that with the man in your life. Love him for the unique and different creature he is, and for real nourishment, go to the women.”

Well, this is the fringe, the edgy version of the Red Hat Society inspired by Jenny Joseph’s poem “Warning,” which begins: “When I am an old woman I shall wear purple/With a red hat which doesn’t go…” The message is, I won’t give a shit, and in Red Hat clubs around the country, women over fifty adopt names like Queen Pin Head and Lady Smelly Good, wear purple clothes and red hats, and meet for uninhibited fun.

But what’s pushing the envelope are groups with names that include words like “divine” or “goddess” and are aimed at cultivating feminine sexual energy. I went to a meeting of women who’d taken Caroline’s workshop and were gathering once a month to keep the flame going. They were hugging full on, chest to chest, belly to belly, moving their hips together playfully in ways I’ve never done with even my closest friends. They would kiss each other with sweetness on the forehead or hand, and I was struck by how natural and relaxed they seemed.

The equivalent for men, I’ve heard, is wrestling. A friend tells me that in his men’s group, they become physically close by grappling and sparring, sometimes without clothes, as in the famous scene from D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love. Are we surprised? Women cuddle and men fight?

Caroline Muir said of her work with women, “It’s like we’re weaving a web of the feminine together with male-based teachings.” She’s been told—though when I ask about her sources she can’t be specific—that in ancient cultures, women priestesses would initiate young women. “Our sacred sexuality is the fountain of youth,” she says.

I look dubious.

“Why not? That mythical source of rejuvenating water is certainly not down in Florida. What if we’re all walking around with the fountain of youth inside us?”

I laugh. This concept is not, I think, ready for prime time. But neither was tantra when I first heard about it. People may turn to esoteric practices or find more traditional ways to relight the fire, but I’d wager that the majority of this cohort—and certainly this reporter—will not go without sex or sensuality into that good night.