The banya was on rue de la Sourdière in an area of tourist traps selling aprons, tea trays, and coasters printed with the Eiffel Tower. Mike, whose back was sore from the flight over, found the place online. We read that they also offered massages and salt scrubs. A photo beside the services showed red-cheeked men and women smiling at the camera like drunks at an office party. A handwritten note was taped to the banya door’s wrought-iron filigree that said to call a number to be let inside. A short, plump blonde woman stood beside the door talking on her cell phone in Russian. The woman wore a black strapless dress woven with threads of glittery red, blue, and gold. Her hair was blown out, and though it was hot, she wore a full face of makeup. The woman did not look like someone who’d want a sauna and a massage.
Inside, the hallway was paneled with pine. This was good, reassuring, like the banya back home in Brooklyn. We followed the short woman toward the front desk, where un-nested Russian dolls were lined up by descending size. A second woman, also blonde but much taller, came out of a back room. It was as if the tall woman were a stretched version of the shorter one. The two had the same yellow hair cut at the shoulders, same doll face, same eyes, removed but at the same time violently cheerful. The tall woman nodded to the short woman, who disappeared into the back room. The tall woman, who wore a short red robe, kissed my husband in the French fashion on each check. When she kissed me, I felt her loose breasts against the bare skin of my clavicle.
If I hadn’t been so disoriented, the feel of the tall woman’s body might have given me a sexual jolt. But beyond my current confusion, sex, which had held me under its spell for thirty years, was now slowly receding. Its signal, once distinct, was now so soft it was hardly audible at all.
The tall woman moved behind the desk and pulled out a xeroxed piece of paper in a plastic sleeve. Under a photo of a woman, it read 50 euros including a steam. Under a photo of a man, it said 120 euros. I asked why it was so much more for a man. The tall woman looked at me and then at my husband. I could tell her first impression of us had disintegrated into something else. “Because,” she said, “it is for man.”
Inside the dark sauna we spread our towels on the hot wood. We’d put on our bathing suits, to the obvious amusement of the tall woman. “What is this place?” I asked. Mike laughed and said, “I have no idea.” So many years of police reporting had numbed his sense of the absurd. He lifted a pale arm into the air, then bent it behind his back, stretching. He was enjoying the heat. I said, “Do you think it’s a massage parlor?” He switched arms, his glasses totally fogged up. “Maybe,” he said. “Do you want to leave?” I did. But I also felt embarrassed. Here we were, two nitwit American tourists. Also I couldn’t quite believe it was a massage parlor. I’d fantasized about such places, and to find myself not in imagination but physically inside one felt both unreal and portentous. The door swung open then and a naked man entered. Around his middle hung a thick doughnut of flesh. Below, like coconuts held in nylon, his heavy genitalia. He settled himself in the corner and stared at Mike and me as if he’d never seen humans before.
In a Parisian sauna just like this one, the art critic Catherine Millet, author of The Sexual Life of Catherine M, writes about taking many men at once: “I had alternately bent and reached up to take all the eager pricks in my mouth.” That scene of orgy now superimposed itself over this moment of awkwardness. What, if anything, was supposed to happen? I was getting hot, and not just from the air that emanated from the metal contraption in the corner where electrical embers glowed. I was moving into the aura before a flash. Normal reality floated away through space like the lost panel on a starship; then the heat rose like fire rolling along a wire. Mike emphatically had not wanted a massage, while I’d felt pressured into getting a massage as well as a sauna. Now I just wanted this all to be over.
I stood, said I was going to have my massage, slipped out of the heat, and walked down the hall to the front desk, where the tall blonde woman was reading a paperback and listening to techno music. The short woman had changed into the banya’s signature red mini-robe and was sitting on the floor against the wall, still talking on her cell phone. Her toenails were painted neon orange. I said I was ready for my massage. The tall woman looked at me as if she’d forgotten the money that had changed hands. But then she smiled deeply, her lips cutting up into her cheeks. She said something sharp in Russian. The short woman jumped up and walked quickly down the hallway. She pulled off her robe, hung it on a hook. Her body, while not thin, was young and lovely. Her breasts swayed a little but her nipples were large, puffy, and between her legs there was no hair at all, just a slit of deep, grainy pink. I watched her yank the sauna door open and disappear inside.
Her body reminded me of the first body, besides those of my family, I’d seen. After a movie at the Cineplex and a Pizza Hut pizza, my high school boyfriend and I lay on a plaid blanket under a yellow school bus parked in a Baptist church lot. After making out for an hour, a bobbing pink object emerged just below his waist. The cock seemed unconnected to his body, crude, unfinished, like a lump of elongated clay.
You might think that coming of age in the 1970s, as I did, the perks of the sexual revolution would have trickled down into my physical life. You would be wrong. Free love was on television, something far away and consistently denigrated by my mother. I remember fixating on John Denver, Bobby Sherman, my best friend Mandy Messner’s feet encased in lacy white ankle socks. Also hard rain, lying in a patch of moss, bubble baths. I’d heard of masturbation, but only as something that boys did. I don’t think I knew women could self-stimulate, make themselves come. Sexy was on the outside, not on the inside. Sex was something a man started up with you; it wasn’t an intrinsic inner reality. I thought of my vagina, when I thought of it at all, as a blankness, a void. I was like my childhood doll—if ripped open, there’d be nothing, a hollow, an empty space.
My sexuality developed in the hothouse of my mother’s negativity. Like a lot of women in the ’50s, before the pill made premarital sex less dangerous, she’d been taught that sex outside marriage could ruin a woman, that desire should be pressed down, that only slutty girls enjoyed sex. Free love confused and frightened her. In our one and only sex talk, she told me that intercourse was disgusting, that the sperm ran down your legs. When I was late for my curfew or wore a top that showed too much cleavage or midriff, or shorts that did not cover enough thigh, my mother, confronted with my teenage sexuality, lost it.
Her negativity did not keep me from having sex, but it did, for a long time, keep me from enjoying it. After I lost my virginity, I locked myself in the bathroom of the apartment my college boyfriend shared with two other friends. I had lied to my parents, said I was sleeping over at a girlfriend’s house, and driven two hours on the highway to be with him. This level of duplicity was new for me. I was light-headed. I cried as I hugged the toilet while throwing up my dinner and eventually yellow bile. I remember how the shower curtain hung by only a few hooks and had a lattice of black, lacelike mold along its hem. What had I done? I’d cut myself off from my mother and my family, violently and forever, and entered the stream of a greater force that I knew I could never control. I was aware of sex’s overwhelming power. Its disorienting chaos: “What a human being possesses deep within him,” Georges Bataille writes, “of the loss of the tragic, of the blinding world, can be found again nowhere but in bed.” My boyfriend tried to get me to come out, but I fell asleep on the floor. I woke to muzzy light coming from the frosted-glass window and the sound of my boyfriend again saying my name from behind the locked door.
I am not focusing here on men or my relationship to them but on the history of this body, my legs, my arms, my mouth, my cunt. What it wanted, how afraid it was, how it moved relentlessly forward, how it was sometimes cowardly, other times brave.
It wasn’t until the summer after college, when I finally touched myself and began to fantasize outside the physical reality of intercourse, that my sexual life improved. My first time masturbating was the opposite of the horror of the first cock I’d seen under the bus or the anxiety of losing my virginity. House-sitting in Washington, D.C., I was flipping around on the channels when I landed on a woman in a transparent dress, her hands pressed between her legs. Behind her was a swirl of moving color, like the hallucinatory montages in ’60s movies. Blood flowed into my lower body and I tightened, as I did when making out. I put my own hand between my legs. Within a few strokes I came, going off convulsively, like a windup toy.
In relation with myself I learned the nuances of my body and grew conversant with my inner sexual landscape. Sex became less stressed. Oddly, by not being completely present, I could be so much more passionate and engaged. When I met the man who was to be my first husband, we had sex every single night. I remember how the pressure built between my legs during the day, and how in the evening my future husband and I fucked on the terrible mattress of a fold-out couch. Sex was the force that bracketed my days, kept my life’s narrative in order. Rising desire, fulfilled desire, over and over, day after day.
The hours spent on that fold-out couch have a warmth and completeness unlike any of my other sexual memories. It’s an irony to me that during the hours I was the most sexually worked up, literally dizzy with desire, I was also the coziest and felt the safest. I was sated, warm, expansive. Unsure where my body ended and my future husband’s began. Romantic bonding uses the same pathways and chemicals as mother-child bonding. Oxytocin drives both systems, and the neurological programs are identical. During those long Saturday afternoons when I got out of bed only to pee or heat up a little soup, I was brought back to my earliest sensation of pleasure: the drugged exquisiteness of pressing up against my mother’s warm skin.
Back in Paris, the tall woman in the red robe told me to call her Katrina and pulled back the velvet curtain. I stepped into a cellar room with a vaulted ceiling, a room you might envision as a monk’s cell described in a Gothic novel. Dimly lit, damp, it had in the far corner a table that held what I first thought was a whip but then realized was a black extension cord. To get here, I’d followed Katrina down a narrow spiral stairwell into a long, dark hallway that smelled strongly of sperm. The smell brought back the old man I’d seen the one and only time I’d gone to a New York City sex club. All night I’d watched him under the black light, wandering around like a lost child in a diaper and a pair of bunny slippers.
Over the mantel was a large black-and-white poster of a naked woman. She was thin, her eyes vacant behind a feather mask. The poster board the image was mounted on had bowed a little and had what I hoped was a water stain in one corner. It wasn’t until I saw the photo that I finally accepted that I was in a place where women took money for sex.
Katrina told me to take off my bathing suit and lie facedown on the table, and she left the room. I heard her walking away down the hallway, her steps getting faint. I pulled my suit off, crawled up on the massage table, and lay facedown, head in the table’s hole. I tried to arrange a towel that did not seem completely clean over my bare ass. What the fuck had I gotten myself into? On the table, I felt completely without erotic energy. Maybe it was anxiety or embarrassment, but I felt my sexuality was buried or lost.
Early times of sexual frenzy seem almost impossible now. After my first marriage ended when I was in my late thirties, I had a few months of frenetic sex. I’d burned down my life and, like a crazed survivor, I’d bashed my way into one bed after another, each encounter both acute and fleeting: a man kneeling behind me, rooted inside; a friend-turned-lover asking to come on my face. These encounters, while erotic, were also unconnected and ephemeral, like beads flown off a broken chain. In throwing myself at bodies, I was trying to trigger forth new life, but using this method I was unable to make anything new happen.
During that time, as my first marriage ended, I fantasized violently. The sexual act took on an almost mechanical intensity. Cocks pistoled into pink holes. Words that during the daylight hours would hurt me I loved hearing in the dark.
“Your hole OK?” My hole? “Your head not hurt?” Katrina meant the hole in the massage table my face was jammed into. Fine, I said. I tried to sound businesslike and keep very still. I wanted to make clear to her that I was here for a regular massage, the kind a ginger man with a bird tattoo gave me back in Brooklyn. Katrina started a two-finger poke down my spine, like a novice playing “Chopsticks” on the piano. It was clear she had no idea how to give an unsexy massage. Even now I don’t understand why I didn’t get up politely and say that my stomach hurt or that I had a sudden headache. I didn’t want to hurt Katrina’s feelings. She was obviously uncomfortable as she tried in her rudimentary English to be kind, asking about stress and how much I slept each night. I wasn’t sure if she thought I was a debauched housewife, wanting group sex in the sauna, or a resigned wife accepting of her sex-crazed husband’s dirty fantasies. Maybe she’d figured out we’d misunderstood the website and so, to keep cover, was pretending everything was normal. I began to worry about what the short blonde-haired woman was doing to my husband inside the sauna.
I tried to remember the last time Mike and I had had sex. It had been at least a month and maybe more. Before I met him, in the sad wake after my first marriage ended, I’d regularly prayed: Send me someone good to love. I promise not to fuck it up this time.
Since early adulthood, desire had been the main way I’d oriented myself. Without it, I often feel now that I’ve lost the thread. When I go to a party, I no longer rank the men in order of fuckability. I don’t feel desire accumulate day after day until my pussy is buzzed, jittery. It’s not that my husband isn’t attractive. He is. His pale blue eyes are set off by salt-and-pepper hair, and he has very nice legs. He’s self-deprecating and funny. But it was as if between me and my longing, a thick pane of frosted glass had been erected.
Lying on the table, I felt Katrina, using one finger, jab at my shoulder. I wondered if my husband had known this was a brothel all along. Maybe he’d planned to come here and have sex with someone other than me. We sometimes told our fantasies to each other, and he’d had a few that had taken place in an erotic space like this one. I regretted how closed I’d been to him lately. When I flashed, he brought me ice packs from the refrigerator, and he put up with our bedroom’s cold temperature—both in winter, when I’d leave the window open, and in summer, when I’d blast the air-conditioning. I’d acted like my body was a room I didn’t want to get messed up. I’d shut myself off. During our trip to Paris I felt a sensation of coming up short, a sort of running out, like pulling the last piece of tape off a roll and being left with no way to bind things together.
“Tumble over,” Katrina said. Tumble down was more like it. I was in free fall, like Alice down her hole, falling past not clocks and doors but dildos and handcuffs. Imagining my husband with the short woman I’d seen go into the sauna, just a girl, really, her lovely breasts and the pink of her skin warmed by the sauna. I moved the two of them around in my head like Barbie and Ken dolls in one position after another. Worst, when I went in for a close-up, was the expression of gratitude on my husband’s face.
In menopause I often find myself ejected from my own fantasies. Not a central and desired player but a bystander at best jealous and at worst dejected and betrayed. Several of the menopausal women I spoke with told me they had traded fantasies of their own degradation for ones of their partners with younger women. “I used to have rape fantasies, but now they have been replaced with walking into a room and seeing my husband sitting on a couch with a college-age girl straddling him,” one woman said. “She’s always skinny with small, firm breasts and dark hair. He has one hand on the back of her head and the other fingering her anus.”
In the psychoanalytical study Change of Life, the therapist Ann Mankowitz follows her patient Rachel through menopause. Rachel dreams about a burnt-out house. Her loss of fertility feels sudden: “First there was the shock to her mind; she felt as though she had woken up from a deep sleep to find that part of her was dead.” Midway through her treatment Rachel admits to fantasies that Markowitz calls masochistic. “They were truly so that the pain of them enhanced her own sexual pleasure.” Rachel sees her husband as a lecherous old man and herself as a young girl. “Sometimes she matched him in lechery, sometimes she was resistant—while the part of herself that was the middle-aged matriarch watched, excited by jealousy.” The fantasies that disturb Rachel the most are the ones where she is left out completely, “excluded from the erotic dyad.”
It seems perverse to feed off an image of my own betrayal. Maybe so. But clearly I’m not the only woman who has erotized what hurt her. In their book Private Thoughts, the sex therapist Wendy Maltz and the journalist Suzie Boss found that many of the women they interviewed had sexualized traumatic experiences. One woman, when she drew a blueprint of her violent fantasy, realized it was the bedroom where her grandfather had molested her. Another woman’s fantasies are fixated on an older man having sex with a young girl; while the characters vary, the scenario replicates her own early abuse by an uncle.
These women erotize an early trauma, I an imaginary one. Scientists believe that our ability to spontaneously lubricate at the sight of almost anything even slightly sexual was selected to protect us from tearing and infection. I’d argue that fantasy serves a similar, though emotional, function as a sort of coping mechanism, a way to incorporate, deactivate, and erotize what we find most frightening.
Celia, nearing fifty, worried about the appeal of her aging body. She told me that she often obsessed over women younger than herself. A young male friend confided to Celia that his wife’s vagina was too tight, that it was hard for them to have intercourse. In the weeks that followed, Celia found herself fixating on men fucking young women with tight vaginas. Tightness became a sensation she relished, but one that, after giving birth to her two children, she did not possess. She felt the fantasy lacked self-esteem. Celia tried to stop, but the image was like a magnet pulling her back. She even googled “how to get rid of an unwanted fantasy” but found little help. The solution finally came from an unexpected source: gay porn. “It was all cock,” she told me, “and no pussy.” For Celia, the porn worked like a reset button. Watching men have sex was a palate-cleansing sorbet that wiped out her fixation on men and their tight-pussied partners and let her place her own body back in the center of her fantasy life.
There is the mind and, nestled like an egg in its nest, the erotic imagination, but there is also the body. During menopause the vagina comes under medical and sexual surveillance. Not since virginity has there been so much interest in its fleshy realities. Like the breasts, the cunt is an organ that, while a part of my body, is also judged communally. I remember my mother, her voice shaky with outrage, telling me that she’d heard a man on television, a man in line to get into a strip club, say, “I don’t know what the big deal is? It looks like an oyster and it smells like one too.” His remark aimed at devaluing what had so much power over him. Vaginas are both physical and metaphorical. Unsettled places. Liminal openings that exist not in a brick railway station wall or the back of a wardrobe but in our own bodies.
I thought the origin of the word vagina might hint at its mutability, its position as conduit to all new life. I was wrong. The word vagina comes from the Latin vagina, which means “sheath for a sword.” I’ve often felt oppressed by the sheer multitude of pliable pornographic pussies. Their openness. Their velvet complicity. These are the qualities, from a cultural standpoint, that define the ideal cunt. Women, though, have often wished for an organ with more intrinsic agency. In William Faulkner’s Sanctuary, Temple Drake fantasizes that her own genitalia might become aggressive: “I was thinking maybe it would have long sharp spikes on it and he wouldn’t know until it was too late.”
As a girl, I found solace in the image of the vagina dentata, the toothed vagina. From my first awareness of the hole between my legs, the pink lips, I’d wondered if, like my mouth, my vagina might one day speak. Tales of the vagina dentata mostly read as male castration fears. There is the Maori myth in which the trickster Mauri turns himself into a penis-like worm. As he tries to wriggle inside the Night Goddess Hine-nui-te-po, she awakens and bites him with her obsidian vaginal teeth. In another account, written by a priest during the time of the Inquisition, a witch keeps the penises her vagina has severed in a wooden box. Inside the box the penises move around loudly, waiting to be fed their daily dose of corn.
A toothed vagina, by reason, is attached to a castrating bitch. But as Tina Fey has said, bitches get shit done. At the Brooklyn Museum, less than a mile from my house, Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party imagines the vaginas of thirty-nine historically important women, from Susan B. Anthony, the queen of the table, whose ovoid hole is fenestral black, to Virginia Woolf, whose meat-petal labia rise up around the stones she put into her pockets to drown herself.
Chicago’s vaginas, like horror-movie villains, look a bit unhinged. Violently generative, some even have cowry-shell teeth. Teeth or not hardly matter, though, because these depictions have nothing to do with pornographic fuckability. Hilton Kramer, the late art critic, called The Dinner Party “failed bad art” in “abysmal taste.” I bet he’d never, as I have, sat in a birthing class where a would-be father asked if after pregnancy his wife’s vagina would go back to its original tightness. I do wish, though, that he could have heard the birth instructor’s Chicago-like reply. “No,” she said, “but by then hopefully you’ll be mature enough to handle it.”
Vaginas are not static. They are malleable, elastic; during birth they blow up to several times their normal size. Once fertility is over, the vagina transitions again. The walls may thin; lubrication can lessen. While age can affect the materiality of the vagina, it has no direct effect on the biology of arousal. Desire still releases dopamine, capillaries in the genitals still swell with blood, and the area of the brain just behind the left eye that is linked with reason and control still shuts down. Blood and electricity shoot into the cerebellum and the frontal cortex. Cells discharge oxytocin, which leads to pelvic-floor contractions, followed by uterine and vaginal contractions. It’s never been conclusively proven that decreased hormones affect desire in any way. Yet according to medical studies, nearly half of all women complain of low desire as they move through menopause. Hypoactive sexual desire dysfunction (HSDD) is the medical term for female low desire. Factors that make women vulnerable are depression and exhaustion. The most predictable similarity among women who have HSDD, though, is that they are partnered.
Around fifty, when entered, I felt a fullness, a tightness I remembered from my first few sexual acts as a teenager. Even with lube, intercourse was not comfortable; it was as if I’d traveled back through time to the very beginning of my sex life, before intercourse was normalized, when it was still a little painful and very strange.
Orgasms, while no more elusive, have in sensation also changed. The clitoris spreads down from the little nub, known as the glans, into a large mass of sensitive tissue, the root. From there, bulbs attached to dozens of thread-thin legs stretch out inside the body. The clit is a star configuration fanning like a fish skeleton around the uterus. In menopause climaxes vary in both velocity and gradation. Some stars surge, others flicker, and a few are completely blown out.
The most common complaint in menopausal chat rooms is that penetration hurts. “I have low libido and vaginal dryness, so sex is not fun at all,” one woman said. Another woman noted a burning sensation: “I felt like my vagina was ripping open as if giving birth.” One old friend told me sex hurts and that she now understands the term “wifely duty.” Another told me that she could not imagine enjoying a penis being thrust into her. “If old people are doing it,” she said, “I’d like to know how.” A gynecologist I interviewed told me that her patients don’t care if intercourse is enjoyable; they just don’t want it to be painful. They want to “give” their husbands spontaneous moisture and pliability, even if they have to be medicated to do so.
The psychologist Lisa M. Diamond writes in her 2014 book Sexual Fluidity that pharmaceutical companies are feverishly searching for a treatment for HSDD, “yet the more we learn about women’s desires, the more obvious it becomes that they involve complex interplays among biological, environmental, psychological, and interpersonal factors.” Diamond reports that “relationship context appears to be particularly important to women, so much so that some clinicians have suggested reframing the term ‘low sexual desire’ as ‘a desire discrepancy’ between partners. After all,” she writes, “maybe a woman’s sex drive seems low only when her partner wants sex more often than she does. If that is the case, who has the problem?”
Women too, at least heterosexual ones, privilege intercourse. I know this because for much of my life, fucking was the center of my sexual universe. For me, the drama of sex moved in frenetic rushes of desire toward penetration. I liked oral sex, but I thought of it as prelude only, not the main course. To have a cock rooted inside me, to feel the pulse, the warm spurt, and to go off just after. I thought of coming together as a hook, as if the proximity of orgasm made an actual material link that bound me to my partner. I won’t deny that the pleasure was intense, euphoric. But I also know I privileged intercourse in part because the culture in general did. I wanted to be fuckable. Also I was drawn to moody, uncommunicative men who could be best reached through intercourse, and the surest way to make that connection was through the cultural ideal of simultaneous orgasm.
Enter my second husband, Mike, he of the thin hips and odd hairy wrist mole. Our first night together we moved along the familiar sexual script toward intercourse, but once our bodies connected, I felt not rising excitement in him but a lull. It wasn’t that the act bored him; it was more an excited but neutral phase. I kept trying with my hips, the pressure of my weight, my mouth, to get him to ignite, to focus our energy together toward the summit. But he pulled out and we moved on to other positions. At first I was confused. Was there something wrong with me? Was there something wrong with him? After a month I asked him if he didn’t like intercourse. He looked startled. “I love it,” he said, “but I love other things just as much.”
For a long time I felt frustrated and even a little bitter about this. A few times early in our relationship he accused me of checking out during sex. He was right. Without fucking being central, I felt let down, and in passive-aggressive protest, I would zone out. As time passed, though, I realized my pleasure was no less than in my early phallic-centered sexual life and actually greater. As more time passed and I entered menopause, with its sexual changes, I realized how lucky I was that intercourse had been uprooted from its central position.
Some women prop up intercourse with lube or hormonal treatments. Others open up what it means to be physical. A small but enthusiastic group stops having sex altogether. For those women, celibacy brings freedom. One said, “A lot of men my age have spent their lives being in charge—and I don’t want anyone behaving as if they are in charge of me. Loss of libido is a really small price to pay for autonomy.” Another woman told me that while she masturbates occasionally, she never thinks about sex. “At first in my forties I was afraid not to think about it, thought I was losing something important. Now I just feel relieved.”
Susan, a fifty-five-year-old artist and mother of two, told me the movement away from sex was gradual: “It happened slowly without either my husband or I initiating the conversation. It was natural.” Susan felt that sex was becoming stressful. “It felt compulsory, routine-like. Also when I was not in the mood, it was painful.” Now she feels unburdened. “It’s so much better, as I don’t have to feel guilt or give an excuse, because it is not expected.” Susan feels her connection with her husband is much deeper than physicality. “Not having sex doesn’t in any way reduce the way we feel about each other. There was a time for it, and maybe now it is time to do other things.”
Celibacy, in a sex-crazed culture, is the most debased form of sexuality. And while celibacy has had ruinous effects when it is enforced institutionally, after a long sexual life a percentage of women, small but content, see it as a way to get out of the sexual rat race. In her book A History of Celibacy, Elizabeth Abbott writes that celibacy is a way to love many people at once without being unfaithful to any of them. Abbott points at celibacy’s long ties to spirituality, how at Delphi, the Pythia, or female priest, had to be at least fifty and completely celibate: “Apollo could not enter a body blocked by sexual pleasure.” Finally, though, it’s not divinity but peace that celibacy engenders. “Our eroticism is not tied solely to heterosexual intercourse or reproduction,” Abbott writes. “We can reclaim our sexuality without turning the world upside down; we can, through celibacy and masturbation, define our own sexuality and satisfy ourselves.”
Celibacy, for most of the women I talked to, was out of the question either because of their own desire or their partner’s, or both. While some do not enjoy the act and feel forced to comply, more have expanded their idea of what it means to be sexual. “I have gained the wisdom as I aged,” one woman told me, “that all our bodies are different, that the media has distorted what a real body looks like, and that most men are just thrilled to have a naked woman in their bed.” Another woman taught her partner to use a vibrator, which she calls “life-changing.” Many discover a late-life interest in sex acts other than intercourse. One single woman, a stylist, felt that menopause ramped up her sexuality. She discovered anal sex and began to date younger, less uptight men. Through them she realized she was still attractive. “Maybe not in the same way I was in my twenties and thirties, but that’s all right,” she said. “There are several seasons to a woman’s sexual attractiveness. No need to look like you’re twenty or get Botox. Sexuality is way deeper than superficial looks.”
Even my most sexually adventurous friend, fifty-two-year-old Mercedes, a San Francisco fabric designer, has slowed down a little: “I don’t have those afternoons anymore when my body is screaming for sex.” When her daughter was young, Mercedes felt she had to censor herself, but now that her daughter is at college, Mercedes is “putting herself back together again.” Mercedes still goes to sex parties, but instead of pursuing the acts she once savored—S&M, swapping, sleeping with much younger men—she is now more interested in voyeurism: “Now I get turned on by watching.” Still, whether it’s with a partner or by masturbating, she likes to come at least once a day to “detox” but also for the chance to get out from under her own consciousness. “In orgasm I’m like a ringing bell,” she tells me. “And afterwards for an hour or so, I’m not quite me—I feel outside myself.”
Of the half dozen men I spoke to who had menopausal partners, many were frustrated by their wives’ changing attitude toward sex. They deflected questions about their own aging bodies and were focused instead on their wives’ libido. One man told me his wife no longer wanted to have sex with him; she had told him to go elsewhere. “This breaks a bond,” he said. Another man said that while his day-to-day relationship with his wife was steadier, he did miss their old sex life: “I do sometimes long for how it was before, no doubt about it.” Another man, a professor in his sixties, told me that his wife’s sex drive had diminished: “Now we have less sex but more hugging, hand-holding, and kissing.” Another man, a freelance writer in his late fifties, found more positive than negative in postmenopausal sex. Sex, he told me, is now more like play. “That doesn’t mean that there can’t be or isn’t intensity and urgency—just that sex doesn’t seem as apocalyptic as it once might have been.” The underlying knowledge that a child could come from sex was weighty. Birth control did not do away with that subterranean sense. After menopause there is a relinquishing of stakes. “It takes us back to play and a different, more luxurious relationship with time.”
One woman I spoke to, a sixty-four-year-old lesbian who works in film production, said she too feels a postmenopausal sexual freedom. “One of the best things about being a lesbian,” she told me, “is that I was able to be myself and still find romantic love. This is more true now than ever.” She does have a weaker libido, but because her wife is also in her early sixties, this is not a problem. “We would never put sexual pressure on one another.” Jane and PJ, a lesbian couple in their early fifties, are more melancholy about the changes that menopause brings. Their sex life has mellowed. “We don’t have the same range,” PJ said. “We’re not, like, strapping dildos on and fucking each other against the refrigerator.” While sex is less frequent and intense, it is now more satisfying. The couple have been together a long time, and they know each other’s bodies completely. “We have sex less,” Jane said, “but we enjoy it more.”
I’d argue that it’s the call to authenticity that menopause provokes, the urge to root out segments of life that are fraudulent, that at least in part upset and realign sexual life. “The aging woman,” Simone de Beauvoir writes, “well knows that if she ceases to be an erotic object, it is not only because her flesh no longer has fresh bounties for men; it is also because her past, her experience, make her, willy-nilly, a person; she has struggled, loved, willed, suffered, enjoyed, on her own account. This independence is intimidating.”
I can embrace my body’s transition, realize there is nothing tragic in using a little lube, feel that an earlier fragmentation created by cycling and the male gaze is finally mending. I can sense, as I sometimes do, that I am back where I was before menstruation—a fierce girl ready to take on the world. The thing I can’t change is the sexual disgust the greater culture aims at older women. Sooner or later I will become a body not only invisible but also despised.
There is no manifestation of sexual repulsion for female flesh more visceral than the bathroom scene in The Shining. Jack Nicholson is drawn to room 237 in the Overlook Hotel. The bathroom there is green, fecund, leaf-like. The shower curtain shifts, and a young woman steps out of the tub. Nicholson’s face, as he watches, moves from trepidation into his signature expression; chin lowered, eyes aslant, a smile as malevolent as it is lustful. As they kiss, worry creeps into Jack’s features. When he opens his eyes, he sees in the mirror the woman’s back, not young and smooth but wrinkled, sagging, with patches of soft, brown-colored flesh. Jack springs back and runs from the bathroom, through the bedroom, and out the front door.
I had to watch this footage ten times before I became desensitized to the disgust that blocks out the old woman’s power. Smiling, arms reaching out, she understands that Jack is unable to see her, or any woman, as anything but a sex object and that her sudden emergence has thrown him into wild, chaotic repulsion. She knows his horror is not of her age but of the material law itself. Forced to create the illusion that growth stops in the first decade or two of adult female life, the old woman is nearly giddy now that the mask is off and she is finally free. Interwoven with the chase are scenes of the old woman rising up out of the bathtub. Her hair is short and she looks, while rotting, oddly elegant. We understand what Jack can’t: that the crone doesn’t replace the young woman, that all our previous ages stay tucked inside us. We are old women, young mothers, and small girls. The young woman is essentially the same as the old one, the seed buried inside a wrinkled fruit.
Is it our aging female bodies that disgust or the familiarity engendered by our long-term relationships? The Kinsey Reports posit that humans are not the only species that becomes “psychologically fatigued” with long-term partners. “Among monkeys it has been noted that animals caged together gradually become less aroused by each other, preliminary sex play must be extended before they are stimulated enough to attempt coitus, and the subsequent copulation is less vigorous.” Of course when a new monkey, no matter its age, enters the cage, all the old monkeys want to have sex with him or her. “Foreplay time shortens and copulation is vigorous.”
Everybody wants to fuck the new monkey. The new monkey, unlike the old monkey, is not yet aware that you leave your used dental floss all over the floor, that you regularly and repeatedly stain the couch with pen ink. They don’t yet know the depression you feel after you speak to your mother on the phone or how chronic hives have you scratching your feet all night. Fucking the new monkey has that lack of context that is often called sexy.
Jonathan Huber, an MD and a researcher in Canada, told me that unlearning is the most important part of remaining sexually vital in later life. Unlearning is key to loving both the old monkey that is our partner and the old monkey that is our self. In an ongoing long-term study of older couples who continue to have what Huber calls “great sex,” participants told him that the way to sexual vibrancy was to welcome our own and our partner’s authentic self. What might someone unlearn in order to move toward authenticity? “Basically everything society and culture tells you about sex,” Huber told me. “Much of the information we pick up along the way is contradictory, negative, or just downright incorrect. Examples might be people who have a lot of sex are bad, women should orgasm as a result of vaginal penetration, masturbation is dirty and shameful, the only good sex is spontaneous, sex has to result in orgasm for both parties at the same time.”
Great sex was the last thing on my mind in Paris as Katrina told me the massage was over and left me alone to get dressed. I sat up dazed, not with relaxation but with extreme anxiety. I felt as if I’d stumbled into the shabby back room of my own fantasy and was finally able to see an early sexual self, a woman who had fetishized the gender binary as well as more conventional aspects of the erotic life. Like O, in The Story of O, I’d often gotten off on self-negation, wanting to be a zero, an emptiness, in an almost religious attempt to transcend myself. As soon as I got an honest look at my earlier self, she was gone, receding like a loosed balloon, higher and higher into the heavens. I felt a little sad to see her go. While she’d had some messed-up ideas, she’d also, in her thigh-highs and push-up bra, given me a lot of pleasure.
As I pulled my bathing suit back on, I felt tender, wobbly-legged, vulnerable. The circular stairwell was like a corkscrew birth canal. At the front desk there was no sign of Katrina. I walked past the metal lockers where we’d stored our clothes and shoes, then around the corner to the sauna. There was so much blood pulsating in my ears I felt woozy. Would I find inside the sauna a scenario that would prove my body had been replaced by a younger, more pliable one? I pulled the door open, the heat hit me like I’d opened an oven door, and it took my eyes a moment to adjust to the dimmer light. There was no sign of the short blonde woman, who, my husband told me later, had left cheerfully after both he and the fat man had said they did not want a massage.
Mike was pink and glittery with sweat. He radiated an animal immanence that was, frankly, intoxicating. I felt an unbearable longing for my old monkey, his chaotic chest hair, his giant big toes, the swell of his belly. I wanted Mike less as a man than as a human. I wanted the disembodied part of Mike, the one I am getting to know as we age. He was relieved to see me too, reaching out for my hand, pulling me down beside him, and throwing a sweaty arm around my waist. He introduced the fat man as Marcel. Marcel was a botanist who studied ferns. “I was just telling him,” Mike said in his gentle Southern drawl, “how beautiful the Blue Ridge Mountains are in spring.”