Authors: Lynne Segal
One thing that no male writer ever seems to suggest, however, is that men lose their longing for sexual encounters as they age, even as their erectile capacities falter. Quite the opposite! This information is in agreement with all the empirical studies of sex in old age, in which older men are twice as likely as women to say that they are still extremely interested in sex. Although, as the British health reporter, Jeremy Laurance, suggests: ‘It is hard to be sure whether the gender imbalance shows the resilience of male interest in sex or the resilience of their propensity to boast about it.’
31
Either way, disappointment shadows putative phallic vigour.
There is one Swedish study that does attempt to highlight an alternative to the dominant vision of phallic sexuality imperilled by ageing. However, this comes not from any well-known male author, with his fictional or autobiographical representations of ageing masculinity, but from an altogether different source. It is the data collected by a young feminist scholar Linn Sandberg, discussing masculinity, sexuality and embodiment in older men. Sandberg interviewed twenty-two heterosexual men of around seventy and older, and supplemented her interviews with diaries she asked the men to write about their bodily experiences and physical encounters. In both the interviews and diaries the men stressed the significance of intimacy and touch in their experiences with wives or partners. They did not report any waning of sexual desire, but they did often describe a certain shift away from the phallic preoccupations of youth to
describe instead far more diverse possibilities for shared physical pleasure and satisfactions.
In Sandberg’s analysis, these old men’s emphasis on their pleasure in the mutuality of touch and intimacy in their relationships – perhaps in bathing or stroking one another – present a clear alternative to ‘phallic sexualities’. Indeed she sees older men’s affirmation of such pleasures as suggesting a possible way of rethinking masculinity and its pleasures more generally, as something ‘less clearly defined and more fluid’: ‘The case of old men may in fact be illustrative of how to think of male sexual morphologies more broadly. Touch and intimacy could then be understood as a potential for the becoming of masculinity altogether; the non-phallic body is not a characteristic of some men but a potential in all men.’
32
However, if the rush for Viagra is anything to go by, I fear much more will need to change in the still obdurate symbolic and social hierarchies of gender and ageing before such accounts of the ‘softening’ of older men’s activities can begin to undermine the phallus as the privileged marker of masculinity. Meanwhile, if it is still sexual (con)quest and the comforts that a woman’s (or occasionally another man’s) body can provide that reinforces a man’s sense of self, and then threatens to undermine it as he ages, how different is the situation of the older woman?
All Passion Spent?
At first glance, the difference in women’s recent writing on ageing compared with that of men lies in its relatively cheerful tone. It owes much to the rhetoric of feminism and its desire to
celebrate the lives and agency of women, as evident in one of the first American anthologies of old age with its triumphant title,
Fierce with Reality
(1995).
33
More generally, women’s popular writing on ageing over the last decade or so tends to stand in stark contrast with men’s precisely in its reflections on the life of desire. This is especially noticeable in the writing of familiar voices from the literary or media mainstream, such as Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinem, Irma Kurtz, Jane Miller or Virginia Ironside. Beginning with Greer, all these writers distance themselves from sexual desire, indeed they usually speak of their ‘relief’, rather than panic, at leaving sexual passion behind them as they age.
Greer set the tone with her popular book,
The Change
(1991), in which she insisted that women should celebrate old age as a time when we are ‘free at last’, free from the shackles of sexuality. The book was first of all keen to expose a market-driven misogyny in the rhetoric of those she labelled the new ‘Masters of Menopause’, aggressively peddling the necessity of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for older women. However, Greer was also disdainful of those late-middle-aged women she now saw among the ‘gallery of grotesques’ still trying ‘pathetically’ to please and satisfy men by denying their own ageing. This was not the way to age with grace and dignity, she chastised, despite having once tried to inspire women into greater erotic rebelliousness through her own exemplary sexual assertiveness over twenty years earlier.
Indeed, turning the usual tenets of ageism on their head, along with her own prior views, she asserted that older women benefited from abandoning altogether the whole clamorous arena of sex and relationships: ‘To be unwanted is to be free.’ The lucky ones who manage this are liberated, just as they had
been before adolescence forced them to become tools of their sexual and reproductive destiny: ‘You were strong then, and well, and happy, until adolescence turned you into something more problematical, and you shall be well and strong and happy again.’ In short, as she concludes in her final chapter, entitled ‘Serenity and Power’: ‘The climacteric marks the end of apologizing. The chrysalis of conditioning has once and for all to break and the female woman finally to emerge.’ Like the ‘final girl’, the actress left standing in all horror movies, this ageing female figure in Greer’s writing could surface once more, ‘shiny and new … like a Virgin’, but free from the desire to be touched by any man, ever again.
34
I am not so sure.
Greer does not admit to any mythmaking when she determinedly presents her life as one for others to emulate as she ages. Indeed, she told readers that she finds herself saying: ‘The best time of life is always now … You can’t live regretting what’s past, and you can’t live anticipating the future. If you spend any amount of time doing either of these things you never live at all.’
35
Two years later, a similar rejection of the abiding fears of ageing was also evident in the late Betty Friedan’s
Fountain of Age
(1993), which was launched with US government endorsement and much media fanfare. Friedan called for a ‘new paradigm’ of old age, emphasizing its potential vibrancy and wisdom, rejecting its associations with neediness and dependency.
At the same time, at last in perfect harmony, her former feminist rival, the equally formidable Gloria Steinem, was writing about the ‘unexpected liberation’ that comes with growing older, as in her brief upbeat memoir,
Doing Sixty and Seventy
(2006).
36
In celebrating the coming of old age, the cheery chorus provided by these popular avatars of feminism contained what
seems to me a very loud silence on any experiences of loneliness, loss, envy, fear or anger. Nor are issues of frailty, dependence and cognitive deterioration allowed to surface. These women could be a different breed from me, but I must confess I find a crafted disavowal in those omissions. I am reminded here of the New York literary scholar, Carolyn Heilbrun’s thoughts before she died on what she eventually came to see as the waste of effort she spent writing a biography of Gloria Steinem, about whom, she came to think, ‘to become the public, generous, productive person [she was and remains] … required a personality ill at ease with introspection, or indeed any deep sense of a self in conflict with her mission’.
37
Indeed, I suspect that what these three very public figures of feminism – Greer, Friedan and Steinem – have all at various points shared is a certain blithe complacency in their self-presentation.
The buoyancy of these spokeswomen insisting upon the joys of old age, especially in their celebration of the rebirth of self-sufficiency, seems to me to promote the illusion that we can age agelessly. False optimism, as Barbara Ehrenreich explored so wittily in her book,
Smile or Die
, can rob a person not just of feelings of rage and disquiet, but also of the capacity for critical reflection.
38
Such resolute sanguinity is just one of the reasons I am wary of a pattern I see amongst older women, especially those in the public eye, eager to impart their secrets for ageing well, who proclaim themselves happily celibate. In Britain at this moment, it is the journalist, author, agony aunt and, belatedly, actress, Virginia Ironside, energetically promoting her belief that ‘growing old is great’. On her website she affirms that the years after turning sixty have, ‘no question, been the happiest years of my life’. That is why she published and has taken to the stage to perform
The Virginia Monologues: Twenty Reasons Why Growing Old Is Great
. One aspect of this, she too emphasizes, is ‘the freedom of no sex’. Having had far too much sex in the past, she explains, she is now ‘older, wiser and luxuriating in [her] single bed’. Moreover, ‘one of the really positive effects of being less interested in sex’, she adds, ‘is that one can have so much better relationships with men than when one was young’.
39
She quotes the views of other ageing sex idols, such as Diana Rigg, agreeing that having had ‘quite sufficient sex’ in the past, she is ‘happy not to go there again’.
40
Her fellow agony aunt, Irma Kurtz, in her seventies, and who like Ironside has spent most of her adult life advising others about sex and relationships, says much the same thing in her recent book,
About Time: Growing Old Disgracefully
. She may be wishing to age
dis
gracefully, but Kurtz tells us that she decided to become celibate at forty-eight, and now the only ‘romantic’ attachment she wants or feels is to her infant grandson.
41
Another pioneer of women’s liberation in Britain, the late Eva Figes, when in her sixties, was equally dismissive of any form of erotic life. She too urged women to find release in their grey hair, wrinkles, cultural invisibility and long-gone sexual allure: ‘She may be alone, but she is no longer lonely, since her body no longer craves what she cannot have.’ Unlike men, she argued, ‘her body has been liberated from foolish longings, and perhaps she could find it in her heart to pity the men of her generation who are led by their penises into all kinds of foolishness’.
42
Now, I don’t doubt that some older women may well feel more freedom from the unrelenting cultural chorus coupling ‘real’ happiness and sexual fulfilment. Likewise, some women in old age, if in relationships, may feel less constrained by former ‘obligations’ to satisfy a male partner, unless he is taking Viagra: thus it is possible to read about ‘Viagra wives’ of
husbands previously unable to perform, who are ‘not excited to be asked once again for sex’.
43
Yet I doubt this is the full picture. Giving up on sex is an easy claim to make, if we think its meaning is straightforward, presumably on the assumption that ‘sex’ reduces to some particular physical action or engagement that is no longer performed. It is true that this is how sex tends to be conceived in sexology, especially from the mid-twentieth century, when researchers such as Alfred Kinsey began quantifying the different routes to orgasm. In this literature, tellingly, masturbation became paradigmatic of ‘the human sexual response’, when other people, and in some sense sexual desire itself, were seen as getting in the way of genital orgasmic climax.
44
However, I suspect this is not exactly what these older women have in mind in reflecting back on the ‘quite sufficient sex’ they had in the past, which I imagine would be likely to have involved the full panoply of joy, hope, longing, frustration, disappointment, pain, and more, coalescing around physical intimacies that may or may not involve genital contact or orgasmic climax.
Pronouncements of cheerful sexual abstinence look much less compelling for anyone used to delving more deeply into the curious and bizarre world encompassing sexuality and desire. Here, sex is never best seen as any one thing, or singular event. Viewed more thoughtfully, whether by way of psychoanalytic conjecture, clinical observations, discursive musings, or unguarded personal reflection, sexual feelings permeate an infinite cluster of keen, anxious, stifled, blocked, voyeuristic desires popping up in all the secret spaces within and between people. From these perspectives, sexuality in the form of desire is an all-pervasive aspect of our physicality. Its aims are endlessly varied, from wishes to be noticed or needed by another,
to remain close to and able to please or receive pleasure from them, through to seeking out patterns of domination or humiliation that reiterate, in ways we rarely recognize, the pleasures and pains of past intimacies with others.
The situations that trigger desire are diverse and unpredictable, with or without any hope for or interest in direct physical contact. Seen in this way, rather than simply reduced to a version of genital interaction, it would never be straightforward to declare sex ‘safely’ over, least of all, as in Ironside’s reflections, because of any prior orgasm count (or the lack of it), except perhaps when pain or morbidity rule the body entirely, obliterating every other sensation. Moreover, as we’ve seen, old men are far less likely to make this claim than women, but instead, just like young men, tend to exaggerate their engagement with and interest in sex.
45
Something more complicated than any notion of the rise and fall of physical drives is surely in play when we speak of ‘sex’.
Nevertheless, it is easy to grasp why it may be comforting, perhaps even seem necessary, for older women to declare themselves ‘post-sex’, especially if unpartnered and, for reasons we’ll see, strictly heterosexual. Few adjectives combine faster than ugly-old-woman. It is not only Beauvoir who internalized the prevalent shame around ageing female flesh. Despite recent declarations rejecting ageism, ongoing research confirms older women’s continuing shame, disgust and guilt at surveying ageing female bodies.
46
In one recent study of women’s display of such affect, the New Zealand gender theorist Tiina Vares reports that in lengthy discussion groups with older women and men, it was, surprisingly, the women in particular who expressed verbal and bodily signs of disgust when commenting upon the visual portrayal of an older woman’s short liaison
with a young builder in the film adaptation of Hanif Kureishi’s play,
The Mother
. This was despite most of these women objecting more generally to the invisibility of older women as sexual agents in cultural representation, and in principle supporting their right to be in sexual relationships with anyone they choose, including young men.
47