Authors: Lynne Segal
With these culturally freighted, unconscious dynamics in play, it may therefore be ‘wiser’ (consciously or unconsciously) if as older women we tell stories about ourselves that deny any personal interest in sex, insisting, like all the women we heard from above, that sex is something safely behind us. Those who care for old women (or men) with dementia, either at home or in care units, might suggest something rather different. They are usually all too aware that as former inhibitions disappear, along with the cognitive capacity for rectitude and restraint, significant levels of sexual interest are routinely displayed by older women, often accompanied by distress or anger when sexual overtures are rejected – as likely as not made to complete strangers.
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As the British writer Sara Maitland notes: ‘To acknowledge and address the sexual desire of women who can no longer bear children is to expose the whole structure; it is better to act as though they did not desire, and if they do, it is peculiar, tasteless and neurotic.’
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In this situation, false optimism, perhaps better seen as illusion or mythmaking, may indeed help people to survive more cheerfully. Yet feminists have always loudly objected to the view that the infinitely puzzling domain of intimacy and desire can be reduced to genital heterosexuality. However, it seems clear that we have not (yet) managed, and only rarely tried, to change the youthful iconography of what it is for a woman to be a desirable sex object. Searching for role models for the older
woman, Maitland invokes that of the fairy godmother. But this takes us straight back to youth, yet again, since it is the desirable and impoverished young woman whom such fairy godmothers assist. Furthermore, when applied to females, the ‘fairies’ in Western mythology conjure up the delicate and ethereal, rarely the physical and sexual.
Who or what, then, might come to the aid of the old woman wanting to feel visible, desiring and desired, before she dematerializes – apart from those demented oldies who are, quite clearly, not post-sex, but rather, post-decorum: ‘Drop ’em’, was what an acquaintance of mine, a young gay man, reported as a typical greeting when he arrived to work on his old people’s ward in Brighton. Similarly, in her beautiful family memoir,
Losing the Dead
, the British author Lisa Appignanesi describes her mother’s ‘demented fragility’ in her mid-eighties, at the same time pointing out that one aspect of her mother’s ‘character’ never changed. Whenever they visited the doctor together, all her mother’s aches and pains would disappear, as she sat seductively on the edge of her chair, her old self again: ‘Her eyelids fluttering, she tells him what a wonderful man he is … She flirts. She charms. For a brief span nothing but that matters.’
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Let me return for a moment to Beauvoir, that archrationalist, so committed throughout her lifetime to promoting and exemplifying the importance of the autonomous, self-critical, examined life. Yet her book on ageing is dense with ambiguities and contradictions, which is perhaps not so surprising given the theoretical tensions within her transdisciplinary sweep. Moreover, Beauvoir herself always understood ambiguity, contradiction and unpredictability to be inevitable features of the tensions between autonomy, contingency and the situational
constraints in which individuals are located, whatever their age.
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As I have highlighted from the beginning, for Beauvoir, as for most of us, the intellectual stumbling block around ageing is that in some compelling sense we feel we remain always the ‘same’, while also knowing that we have changed and will continue to do so. As she wrote in her book on old age: ‘All we can do is waver from one to the other, never managing to hold them firmly together.’ Aware of the atemporality of the dynamic unconscious, with its inability to distinguish between true and false, Beauvoir was also dismissive of what she regarded as the ‘mystical twaddle’ from those, beginning with Plato, who liked to suggest that old age releases us from the shackles of sexual desire into a more spiritual life, however incapable the flesh may prove of consummating desire. Beauvoir cited Freud to point out that adult sexuality is not simply, or even primarily, a genital affair. In her book she also provided many examples of the continuity of desire in old age, in both men and women, suggesting that sexual passion is never entirely spent, whatever our age, and whatever our fragilities: ‘The old person often desires to desire because he [
sic
] retains his longing for experiences that can never be replaced and because he is still attached to the erotic world he built up in his youth or maturity – desire will enable him to renew its fading colours.’ The old woman too often desires to desire, and remains attached to her erotic world, as Beauvoir knew all too well, despite also knowing, and often articulating, the extra degrees of shame she is likely to feel when she realizes that the man she wants no longer desires her. It is then, Beauvoir says, that she can no longer ‘bear to expose her poor person to others’.
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Bodily Shame and Narcissistic Mortification
The scandal for some of Beauvoir’s readers was that she believed that women too would come to share what often seemed men’s horror of their bodies, as she herself did. She projected the revulsion she felt about her own middle-aged face (‘I often stop, flabbergasted, at the sight of this incredible thing that serves me as a face … I loathe my appearance now’) onto the world at large, adding for good measure: ‘It wounds one’s heart to see a lovely young woman and then next to her her refection in the mirror of the years to come – her mother.’
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It wounds one’s heart, her critics may feel, to read Beauvoir saying this, even though there is nothing unfamiliar about her thoughts except the frankness with which she expresses her own recoil from the ageing female face. However, there is a certain tension between her refrain that ‘we only learn that we are old from the outside’ and the repulsion Beauvoir felt about her own body in middle age.
It may seem even stranger when from the many photos others have reproduced of her Beauvoir appears an impressively attractive older woman, despite female beauty and allure being made synonymous with youth. It is worth noting, however, that in the 1960s, when Beauvoir was expressing her bodily mortification, the self-conscious anti-ageism articulated in the later mantra of ‘ageing well’ had yet to emerge. That newer narrative, which we heard above from Greer and other women, would never openly admit to any such dread of the ageing visage, but emphasizes instead the possibilities for life-long health and creativity. Nevertheless, I suspect that even had she heard such voices, Beauvoir would not, could not, have echoed their optimism, but would probably have dismissed them as a
form of disavowal, bad faith, or evasion. In her early middle age, the only way Beauvoir knew of dealing with those periods in her life when she felt rejected by men was to try to accept, sorrowfully, rather than with any sense of release, that she would never again be allowed to love or be loved once more. As she aged, whenever she felt herself desired again, her ageing sorrows instantly retreated. This happened for her unexpectedly, at forty-four, when she started a seven-year relationship with one of Sartre’s follower’s, Claude Lanzmann:
[His] presence beside me freed me from my age. First it did away with my anxiety attacks … And then his participation revived my interest in everything … a thousand things were restored to me: joys, astonishments, anxieties, laughter and the freshness of the world. After two years in which the universal marasma had coincided for me with the break-up of a love affair and the first warnings of physical decline leapt back enthralled into happiness.
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As mentioned in my opening chapter, just under ten years later, completing the third volume of her memoirs
Force of Circumstance
, Beauvoir was once more without a male lover and consumed by the tragedy of being an ageing woman: ‘I have lost my old powers to separate the shadows from the light … My powers of revolt are dimmed now … but my joys are paled as well.’ The reason for her sorrows, we quickly learn, is her anticipation of the inevitable failure of erotic passion: ‘Never again a man’.
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Some of her critics accused Beauvoir of distancing herself from the lives of ordinary women. Such censure was levelled at her final work of fiction, the three novellas constituting
The Woman Destroyed
(1968), which deal with older women’s vulnerability and loneliness, deserted by husbands, and facing the process of old age alone.
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Others, including many women who wrote to Beauvoir herself, suggested she ‘was merely presenting the reality of what happens to women in our society’. In actuality, Beauvoir did manage to distance herself from the bleakness she saw awaiting her abandoned female protagonists, and not by eschewing passion, the fate she most feared, but by beginning a mutually enduring ‘intense and total’ relationship in her sixties with a much younger woman, Sylvie Le Bon, as she told her biographer, Deirdre Bair: ‘now I have Sylvie, and it is an absolute relationship, because from the beginning we were both prepared to live in this way, to live entirely for each other’.
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Though both women publicly acknowledged their love for each other, neither spoke of themselves as ‘lesbian’, as such, despite Beauvoir telling Alice Schwartzer in 1972 that she believed women were ‘more desirable than men’, and despite her public support for lesbian and gay relationships, not to mention her own admitted practice of sexual relations with women.
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Moreover, Deirdre Bair, among others, makes it very clear that Beauvoir was never free from the hurt of Sartre’s continuous affairs with the nubile young women who flocked around him, nor from the effects of his early indifference to her physical being as soon as she began to age, or from her own attachment to and identification with him. Thus, she did know something about the plight of many an older woman who still desires men but who, especially when single, notices how often the men they are attracted to either fail to register them, or turn away from the physical presence of their mature embodiment.
Beauvoir was surely right that such a woman is likely to find
it impossible to remain confident about her desirability, even though she was sure that passion itself was rarely extinguished. She points out, for instance, that the persistence of desire is often confirmed within long-term lesbian relationships, in which women may ‘continue their erotic activities well into their eighties’, proving, she adds, ‘that women go on feeling desire long after they have stopped being attractive to men.
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Beauvoir was also persuasive on the jealousy older women feel towards younger women (or men) who attract the attention of older men. It is again something she wrote about in her fiction, beginning with
She Came to Stay
through to
The Woman Destroyed
. Thus it seems to me that the nub of one of the most contentious issues around ageing for women is the space that exists for love, intimacy and passion. It is certainly a topic that is often on my mind, although both personal experience and opinion surveys make it clear that older women express varying degrees of interest in the subject, relating especially to whether or not they are comfortably partnered or living alone.
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Even more popular than Beauvoir, and more widely read internationally, it was the novelist Doris Lessing who in her many books quickly became another key narrator of the hazards, tensions and ambiguities of women’s experiences through life. Her writing both influenced and reflected the way in which many women came to assess their situation, especially those young white women who were first drawn to women’s liberation from the late 1960s. Roughly a decade younger than Beauvoir, and still being published in her nineties, Lessing’s prolific output includes her determined attempts to delineate women’s personal, political and, in recent decades, spiritual voyages at different stages of their lives, from girlhood through to very old age.
Her best-known novel,
The Golden Notebook
(1962), quickly became a landmark text, often described as one ‘that both changed and explained a generation’, as the British cultural critic Natasha Walter wrote forty years later. Lessing agrees: ‘I still get women writing to me saying, my grandmother and my mother read
The Golden Notebook
and I’m the third generation reader.’
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Moreover, from her autobiographical writing, it is easy to observe the interweaving between Lessing’s fictional and autobiographical texts as she ages; indeed, she is keen to provide her own versions of these connections. Her early narratives of political activism, betrayals and disappointments were always explored alongside the hazards women face in their personal life, from conflict with mothers to later frustration with men and with children. However, most significantly for my interests here, for over three decades the issue of women’s ageing has been centre-stage in Lessing’s texts and public pronouncements, whether in her autobiographical voice, or in her fiction.
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Lessing is far more candid than most women in addressing the narcissistic injuries of ageing: whether dramatically highlighting her own or her fictional characters’ sense of confusion, loss, loneliness and regret. Lessing says she first experienced these forms of distress in her late thirties, despite and seemingly also because of the status she has achieved globally as one of the most prominent women writers of her time. This was some forty years before she won the most prestigious prize of all for a writer, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007.