Authors: Lynne Segal
Above all, however, in what she sees as her final years, Nestle retains her roots in radical sexual politics, though today carefully trying to thread her way through the tentacles of the capitalist commodification of sex and its incitements of desire, which, as she says, is hardly the same as a culture genuinely open to sexual differences. What is special, and inspiring, about Joan Nestle is the way in which she continues, with whatever level of bravado, to present a sexual self to the world, to fashion an erotic identity that recognizes its bodily weaknesses, its dependency on others, while still hoping, indeed still managing, to be herself the object of others’ desire. It was in her late fifties that she announced: ‘Grey hair and textured hands are now erotic emblems I seek out.’ Then as now, she pursues, and she finds, at least a little of what she wants, affirming ‘a glory in love-making’, despite also experiencing ‘fear and change and loss’.
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Nestle’s writing brings to mind other audacious, if often foundering, efforts from the heyday of feminism to eroticize women’s lives – indeed, the voluntaristic determination to declare all women desirable and significant, whatever their age. Another North American lesbian writer from that era, who helped found a feminist press, was the late June Arnold. Almost forty years ago I first encountered and recall enjoying her book,
Sister Gin
, with its portrayal of sexual desire for a much older woman. In this book, published in her fiftieth year, Arnold depicts her menopausal, middle-aged protagonist, Su, also approaching fifty, falling in love with Mamie Carter, a poised and self-confident woman in her eighties. In this surprising yet compelling narrative, we read of Su’s yearning to stroke the parchment skin of the one she loves, ‘I would sand the whorls off my fingertip to avoid scratching that silk’. Her desire is gratified, and continues after the two women do eventually spend a
night together: ‘Su sunk her face into the ageless curve of her love’s shoulder and smothered a giggle “I never imagined the delights of age would include the fact of endlessly drawn out orgasms. Did you always know?” ’
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Although Su wants co-habitation, Mamie Carter decides that she will never live with her much younger lover, but this in no way diminishes Su’s desire, which only deepens as she reaches out to age itself, to ‘lust after a final different dry silken life and so much grace and elegance from all the knowledge of the day … There is no more beautiful word in the language than withered.’ There’s defiance writ large! I recall reading this novel at the height of my feminist conversion, and although identifying as a straight woman at the time, and entirely distanced from Arnold’s lesbian separatism, I found it exciting to ponder this direct assault on what had been the unbroken landscape of ageism I inhabited, with its exclusion of the old as conceivable objects of desire. It was a backdrop that had been barely named as such back then. ‘My darling’s face has been walked on by life’, Su reflects, as her aged lover teases her that she must not worry about her relative youth: ‘The truly free is she who can be old at any age … It has been said that geniuses are forever old.’
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For many people, however, and not only feminists, it will be the American poet Adrienne Rich who for over forty years was one of the most influential voices in fashioning a space for celebrating the bodies of women, whatever their age. Rich’s poetry and prose was usually written to express her commitment to identifying and opposing the complex fabric of entrenched inequality and injustices, near and far, noting the destructiveness of much of US global policy, especially over the last two decades.
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Sometimes, however, this ageing poet, who lived in a
body permanently enduring the pain and impairment of rheumatoid arthritis, simply expresses the sustenance she gained from the mutual love and desire enduring in the relationship she shared for decades with the Jamaican-born novelist and editor, Michelle Cliff. In her poem ‘Memorize This’, which she wrote at seventy-three, Rich celebrated their lives together:
Love for twenty-six years, you can’t stop
A withered petunia’s crisp the bud sticky both are dark
The flower engulfed in its own purple
So common, nothing like it.
The poem continues, describing their daily emotional support and enduring desire for each other over the years, concluding in joyful wonder:
Sleeping with you after
weeks apart how normal
yet after midnight
to turn and slide my arm
along your thigh
drawn up in sleep
what delicate amaze.
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(Returning to edit this chapter, I receive the sad news of Rich’s death, in March 2012, but she was very much alive, and inspiring me, during the years I was writing this book).
I have suggested that, as vividly exemplified in the writing of Beauvoir and Lessing, it is in heterosexual contexts that women, at least when single, are likely to find it hardest to turn around the pernicious effects of the picture of old women as
sexless and undesirable. Certainly, it is not easy to find instances of men expressing their desire for older women, even though I don’t doubt that such passion exists. Here is Seamus Heaney, at seventy-two, with a somewhat chaste image of the mutuality of love in old age, in his collection,
The Human Chain
: ‘Too late, alas, now, for apt quotation / About a love that’s proved by steady gazing / Not at each other but in the same direction.’
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It is almost as difficult to find evidence of older women publicly celebrating their passion for the man, or men, in their lives. One of the few novels I have found that depicts sexual passion between a couple in their seventies is
Age: A Love Story
, written by the late American writer, Hortense Calisher, published when she was seventy-five. The novel opens with a declaration, written by the wife – approaching seventy-seven, and four years older than her husband – explaining that against expectations they still make love: ‘Our performance is like memory, sometimes faint, sometimes strong. Often dampened by the daily rhythms, or refreshed by the slightest novelty.’ The wife describes their naked bodies, commenting ‘to me the aquiline of his nose is still a kind of physical poetry’, while telling us that her husband says he finds the lines on the loosening skin of her arms ‘like a Greek wave etched by an artist adept at those border patterns’.
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The novel is also an account of the anticipation of loss, and a defence against future loneliness, since the alternating entries of this loving couple, both keeping an anxious eye out for ‘each other’s hurts’, are being written to be read by the surviving spouse. Fearful of loss, yet still able to embrace what remains in the present, the book closes with them deciding to read each other’s entries together, while they are still alive, as the husband reflects:
Our nest here still smells of the sexual. I touch her there.
So the bland wall darkens. As we ride toward it.
Our bed a skiff.
As any child can see.
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If and when women writers do describe sexual desire in old age it is never through the dramatic moans or revulsion of a Roth, Amis, or even Updike, with their tales of impotence, prostate procedures, and incontinence. Despite their frequent sense of the world’s indifference to them, and whatever their private anguish, in general women appear to have mastered the art of losing a little more easily than have men. Maybe something about our existence as women in the world as we have known it has always suggested a certain sense of loss and failure: ‘Better luck next time!’, as my father, a doctor, would ‘joke’ to any woman he had assisted in giving birth to a daughter. The Lacanians might say that, with language, every woman knows she is born into lack, whereas men have to pretend otherwise.
Another woman writer, who could elegantly combine sexual passion with her own gentle wit and wisdom about the ambivalences of ageing, is the late Grace Paley. Decades before my own generation thought we had invented women’s liberation, Grace Paley, like another American Jewish writer, Tillie Olsen, was busy chronicling women’s typically undervalued labour of love. Paley’s first prose fiction,
The Little Disturbances of Man: Stories of Men and Women at Love
(1973), was written during the 1940s and 1950s, depicting hard-up, harassed housewives and mothers daily confronting the temper tantrums of agitated children and the deficiencies and desertions of husbands. Between sporadic outbursts of helpless rage over their round-the-clock responsibilities, Paley’s feisty housewives have surges of desire
for the men in their lives. Revisiting Paley’s writing today, at the advanced age she was when I first encountered her forty years ago, I notice thoughts on ageing that I barely registered back then (illustrating that it is readers and their contexts as much as authors and their work that determine what we attend to in reading).
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In the opening narrative of this collection, ‘Goodbye and Good Luck’, written in 1955, an old woman cheerfully recalls the joys of her youth: ‘I was popular in certain circles’, says Aunt Rose, ‘I wasn’t no thinner then, only more stationary in the flesh.’
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Shifts of the flesh are memorably mapped by Rose: ‘I noticed it first on my mother’s face, the rotten handwriting of time, scribbled up and down her cheeks, across her forehead back and forth – a child could read – it said, old, old, old.’
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And yet, refusing the flesh-loathing so pervasive in our time, this is not a tale of woe. Despite her wobbles and her weight, Rose retains the capacity to love and be loved again: the story ends with her returning to an old lover she had adored but forsaken half a century earlier, because he was married, now that he has become a widower.
Over thirty years later, in a poem written at seventy-nine shortly before she died, Paley mentions her enjoyment of her own now ‘heavy breasts’ and ‘nicely mapped face’, but most of all she reveals her capacity to express her continuing keen love and desire for her husband of many decades, the poet and playwright, Robert Nichols:
that’s my old man across the yard
he’s talking to the meter reader
he’s telling him the world’s sad story
how electricity is oil or uranium
and so forth I tell my grandson
run over to your grandpa ask him
to sit beside me for a minute I
am suddenly exhausted by my desire
to kiss his sweet explaining lips.
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With neither her political nor her personal passions ever deserting her, the enduringly activist, feminist, pacifist, anti-Zionist, Grace Paley could truly write, ‘It’s all life until death.’
The current British doyenne of old age, Diana Athill, would certainly agree. In her mid-nineties, she still regularly appears in our media, having written her memoir
Somewhere Towards the End
in her ninetieth year. Although she has lived alone for the last thirty years, only recently moving into a retirement home, she recalls with pleasure her last seven-year, weekly liaison in her sixties, with a man she calls Sam: ‘to be urgently wanted at a time when I no longer expected it cheered me up and brought me to life again – no small gift’. Decades later she still enjoys the memory of her late-life affair: ‘I feel him lying beside me after making love, both of us on our backs, hands linked, arms and legs touching in a friendly way. His physical presence is so clear, even now, that it is almost like a haunt (an amiable one).’
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Athill mentions the power dynamics present in all erotic attraction, though this is an aspect of desire which is usually repressed or disavowed, especially by feminists, even as it shifts dramatically for women as we age. In Athill’s case, she raises the complicated way in which status can feature in interracial relations, while knowing it is a difficult matter for white people to raise without courting accusations of racism. From middle age her two sexual relationships were with black men, the first and
most long-lasting and passionate with the artist Barry Reckord. She in no way condones the cultural hierarchies in play, but suggests that they explain why certain older white women, such as herself at that time, may still have an allure for black men. At any rate, she believes that for Sam, as for many black men from his background at that time, it was probable that her being a ‘well-bred’ white woman gave her a certain prestige that she no longer had for white men. She is grateful for its consequences, even as she deplores the underlying racism that gave her this advantage: ‘Sam was not a man of vulgar instincts so he didn’t want to show his woman off, but it gave him private satisfaction to feel that she was worth showing.’ Like Beauvoir, Athill also writes of the importance of staying in touch with younger people, so as not to slide into ‘a general pessimism about life’: ‘Always we are reflected in the eyes of others … So if and when we are old a beloved child happens to look at you as if he or she thinks (even mistakenly!) that you are wise and kind: what a blessing!’
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