Authors: Lynne Segal
This returns me once more to thoughts on the complexity of sex, and all that it symbolizes. The contrasting experiences it embraces are so impossibly diverse that they easily move us beyond words. These range from the soothing pleasures, or alternatively fierce relief, of desired physical contact, to the sense of self-affirmation that can be generated by the concentrated attention of another or, in particular, and most critically for a sense of connection to the world as we age, the promise – illusory or otherwise – of the comforts of enduring intimacy with some chosen partner. In heterosexual couples, at least, such partnerships usually confer social status and acceptability as well, all the more so if a woman is partnered with a man admired by others. Just what it is that an older woman who lives alone (as I do much of the time) might be wanting when experiencing differing shades of desire can therefore be rather hard to unpack. At least, I find it so.
‘Better to act as though we older women do not desire’, suggests Sara Maitland, and many older women clearly agree. Not so, however, those experts who nowadays conduct empirical surveys on the sexual lives and wellbeing of the elderly. Indeed, quite the contrary. The information that in earlier times sex in old age was not only seen as sinful and immoral, but capable of leading to madness, blindness and the shortening of life, only adds to the eagerness with which such advice is inverted by professional voices nowadays.
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However, nowhere is the relativity of human mores easier to see than in shifting perceptions of just when a person should be seen as ‘old’. This accompanies differing understandings of the behaviour thought appropriate to old age, with women in some countries already excluded as objects
of desire in their forties and therefore categorized as uniformly old. Sociologists, such as Edward Laumann and his co-workers in Chicago, have for some years now been spreading the message that ageing well usually means, and they argue should mean, engaging in regular sexual activity, with orgasms seen as both the definitive marker of sexuality and also a powerful demonstration of overall health.
Orgasms are good for you, and good to have often. Establishing their case, in 2004, these researchers interviewed over 3,000 ‘older adults’, between the ages of fifty-seven and eighty-five, for a National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project in the USA.
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In a related report, we learn that over two-thirds of men in that age range had active sex lives whereas, over seventy-five years of age, almost two-fifths of men, compared with only one-sixth of women, were sexually active.
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Lack of a sexual partner was the main problem women faced; in Laumann’s words: ‘It turns out that healthy people are sexually active if they have a partner, and that this is an important part of the quality of life.’
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Despite these researchers having some awareness of the diverse realm of the erotic, sexuality here is conveniently identified as something researchers can isolate and (purportedly) measure, reducing it to forms of genital intercourse. Moreover, it is not hard to see that their goal of accurate measurement accompanies the long process of medicalization of sexuality, especially the labelling of sexual ‘dysfunction’, begun at the close of the nineteenth century. Its related commercial ramifications have expanded exponentially in recent decades with the commercial success of Viagra as a treatment for erectile dysfunction. However, while it is possible and exceedingly profitable to promote technologies to ‘banish’ what are seen as physical impediments to sex in old age, primarily
those restricting penile performance, it is not so easy to change a situation in which older women, if single, find that they are no longer viewed as potential sexual partners by men.
When an earlier global study of the sexual practices of over 27,000 people over forty was conducted by Laumann and his team between 2001 and 2002, the majority of both men (four-fifths) and women (two-thirds) said that they were still sexually active. Nevertheless, among those over seventy, well under a quarter of the women compared to more than half the men reported having sexual contact in the previous twelve months. Since the overwhelming majority of both older women and men expressed the view that they would still like sexual contact, this would seem to leave many women short-changed and frustrated.
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One must be aware of the limitations of social statistics, which convey little of the complexity or nuance of desire. As the acerbic biologist Richard Lewontin suggested some time ago, self-reports of sexual activity are already contaminated by personally loaded, culturally acquired expectations of how people think they should appear to the world, making them ‘an indissoluble jumble of practices, personal myths, and posturing’.
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For certain, quantitative measures of genital performance lie oddly alongside the always ambiguous intricacies of what people might feel able to say about differing psychosomatic yearnings, which is why I prefer to explore the life of desire via introspection, memoir or fiction. Nevertheless, reliable or unreliable, posturing or not, empirical surveys do indicate how people report their situation in relation to ageing and sexual practices, information that clearly leave so many women out in the cold, or else needing to disown their potential for passion.
Apart from bare social statistics declaring the existence of sexual activity in old age, however, there is tellingly all too
little reflective literature on women’s sexuality in late life. It has become fashionable nowadays to suggest that our sexual desires and practices are not static. Yet we have no more control over, and still little understanding of, the nature, resurgence or retreat of erotic desire. Furthermore, it can be hard to grasp just how dependent what we understand and feel about ourselves is upon our social context and what it encourages, disdains or ignores. As we shall see, this seems to be especially true in relation to women. Never in my lifetime was this more evident than in the early years of women’s liberation. Suddenly many women, young women for the most part, began to look more powerful and alluring to other young female rebels, whatever our sexuality. As Lillian Faderman recorded, never had lesbian encounters, for instance, been quite so popular.
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Still Looking for Love
At seventy-seven, the lesbian poet and novelist Maureen Duffy ended one of her playful poems about ageing with the line, ‘Help us all then Lady, Sappho’s own goddess, / to sing your song until the last bittersweet note’.
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Just one of the lasting impacts of feminism in nurturing its own diverse audiences has been to make it a little easier for women of all ages to celebrate their desire for each other. Moreover, in my own experience, it is often easier for an older woman to feel herself the object of desire in situations that exclude men. As we have seen, the old woman is usually all too aware of the ways in which her image has classically brought fear into the hearts of men, whether running from their mothers or recoiling from the mythic witches and gorgons that have frightened them since childhood,
as Medusa rages in Carol Ann Duffy’s compelling rendition of her bitter tears: ‘But I know you’ll go, betray me, stray / From home. / So better by far for me if you were stone’.
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Looking around my own ageing feminist milieu, I can see that I am far from the only older woman who has enjoyed and, in my case, celebrated the delights of a heterosexual partnership that ended in her late fifties, who has subsequently found unexpected erotic pleasure in a relationship with a woman. This is not so surprising, according to the research of the American social psychologist, Lisa Diamond, in her book
Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire
. For over a decade she tracked the sexual accounts provided by eighty-nine women across the USA, concluding from the reports they gave of themselves, and their very varied and shifting experiences, that while they did have a sense of predispositions and intrinsic orientations, these proved ‘less of a constraint on their desires and behaviours than is the case for men’. Both Diamond’s own research, and several others she cites, suggested that unlike men’s, women’s sexual desires prove more responsive to context, or as she puts it, ‘the types of environmental, situational and interpersonal factors that might trigger her fluidity’.
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Consistently, many more gay men than lesbians or bisexuals report already feeling ‘different’ in childhood, claiming they were always ‘gay’. However, self-identifying lesbians show far greater variability than men in when they first become aware of an attraction for another women, and also in how fixed such desires remain.
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‘Who’d want to be a man?’, Adam Phillips asks, reviewing Diamond’s book. Despite his scepticism about the limitations of empirical research, he is convinced that she and others are right in suggesting that what is most ‘mysterious’ about women’s desire and relationships is that they are less
narrowly focused and more flexible. Indeed, although Diamond herself is not at all disparaging about men, Phillips concludes that ‘after reading her book it is hard to see the attractions of being a man’, when all the research suggests that, compared to women, men must remain ‘more relentlessly themselves’, ‘more determinedly themselves’.
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‘Masculinity’ and its constraints remain a powerful cultural force.
In thinking about desire and ageing, these findings might help us understand why some women in old age feel able to claim that they have happily abandoned sexual activity, while others, who may be – even unconsciously – waiting for something new to happen, sometimes find that they experience rather different forms of desire. Somewhat remarkably, given some of the views mentioned on older women as contentedly post-sexual, the lesbian writer and organizer Amber Hollibaugh reports that during her advocacy work with SAGE (the largest organization representing older lesbians, gays, bisexual and transgender people in the USA) she was astonished by the number of very old women turning up at the ‘coming out’ groups. Indeed, she writes that she ‘watched in fascination as SAGE was forced to close admissions to a “coming out” group for women over the age of eighty because there were so many who wanted to attend’. This was true for all the different groups serviced by the organization, including women of eighty-five and ninety years old, crossing lines of class, ethnicity and urban or rural locations.
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Moreover, those older women still looking for love have sometimes managed to write lyrically about the joys of ageing passion. ‘I see ageing as a wonderful time to question everything including gender’, another American lesbian writer, Joan Nestle, announced when she was sixty. Defiance was always
on her agenda, and when I think of the old slogan, ‘the personal is political’, it is Joan Nestle’s name that usually pops up first. It is quickly followed by a multitude of other feminists, gays, queers and more, from around the globe, all of whom know that there is a politics to personal life, and a place for personal life in politics, without ever wanting to collapse the two. Given their cultural visibility, it was always likely to be the Americans who were first out, and stood most prominently, under that banner of personal politics. Nestle herself began questioning gender from a very young age, early on tied in with her sexual radicalism. However, today in her seventies, having lived in a body struggling against the ravages of three consecutive cancers and their treatment for well over a decade, nothing is more challenging for her than the enduring determination to keep entwining her interest in left feminism and sexual radicalism with thoughts on ageing, ill health and dying.
Nestle tackled this most directly in her moving collection
A Fragile Union
, which she describes as a type of memoir, written after she had been fighting colon cancer for a year, in her late fifties. As she later commented, this made it a very intense book, in which she struggled to build a bridge between her old life as a publicly visible sex radical, a type of sexual ‘warrior woman’, and the realities of living with a terrible illness and its effects on her life and sexuality. She was by then not only a fifty-eight-year-old woman living with cancer, but one still sharing an apartment with an ex-lover, who had just left her for ‘a younger, prettier woman’. Moreover, she was now jobless, the illness having forced her to retire early from work she had loved – thirty years of teaching writing skills to poor, mainly black and minority students at a state-funded college in New
York: ‘It’s a cliché. I was feeling pretty sick from my chemotherapy and I felt like I didn’t know how to go on with my life.’
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At the book’s opening she lists the questions that will keep recurring throughout her memoir, which seem so pertinent for any ageing feminist, wondering how it is possible: ‘to love when I keep failing … to be brave when I am so fearful … to protest injustice when I am so tired … to embrace difference when I do not even trust myself’. Yet, remarkably, with a body often racked by pain, she writes of enjoying loving sexual encounters, while asserting, with all her old conviction: ‘I find this to be a time of great passion in my life, a time of deep commitments to the forging of fragile solidarities that, if of the body, may last only a night, and if of a more sweeping kind, carry me more humbly than ever into the historic processes.’
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Although her determination is often threatened with defeat, the one thing she simply will not resign from altogether is a certain hunger for future embraces, however often she recalls having turned away from her erstwhile lover’s desire over the previous year. Towards the end of these stories, Nestle had not fully recovered from her cancer, but she had begun a new relationship. This was with the dynamic Australian activist and human rights professor, Dianne Otto, ten years younger than her: ‘She’s just brought me so much all wrapped up in this incredible love and caring’, as she later expressed in an interview.
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A decade on, in the spring of 2011, Nestle said much the same thing to me when I met her in London. Although often weak, she is still, when she is able, speaking out publicly for social justice around a myriad of issues, as she did reflecting upon her Jewish roots while visiting Israel in 2007 and spending time with women committed to ending the occupation of Palestinian territories and working for peace in that troubled land.