If you want to talk first Trollope works for me There is something deeply unattractive about desperation of any kind in an older person, be it for sex or for cream cakes. When older women have sex, many of their bodies scream: "Ouch! Ouch!"And of those who still enjoy sex, does anyone really disapprove? I don't think so. That's usually made clear, unless you are stuffed to the gills with hormone replacement therapy, or squirt yourself with KY jelly every three minutes or so during intercourse, by sex becoming excruciatingly painful We women are always told to "listen to our bodies" Well: listen. Roger Michell, the film's director, deplores society's disapproval of older women who long for sex. "One expects to see images of old men with younger women, but for some reason it's seen as undignified for old women to have sexual feelings of any sort," he says. "I suppose it's connected, in a Darwinian way, with evolution; if you're past childbearing age then why should you have sex? Why don't you just do the ironing?"Well, I'd like to put the case for ironing.Apart from the fact that ironing can be a deeply pleasurable experience, it must be faced that, yes, there is a biological taboo attached to older women having sex. She's smitten when he utters the ancient clich?which apparently she's never heard before): "The greatest pleasure for me in making love is giving the other person pleasure." The book ends with Jane arranging a week's country holiday with him. I can bet my bottom dollar that it ended in tears as well.In The Mother, an elderly, dumpy Northern woman, recently widowed, ruins her relationship with her family by coming up to London, and immediately leaping into bed with her daughter's builder boyfriend. "I feel like a beggar."Then there's the voyeur; then a man who only likes phone and email sex and refuses to meet her; another who sucks boiled sweets throughout intercourse; and she ends up with a patronising jerk (well, I think he's a patronising jerk) called Graham. His bad back precludes love-making, he has a regular girlfriend he rings every night to tell her he loves her, he's a member of AA, and he's just started drinking again.
Jesus Christ! Jane falls so deeply for him and he's so dismissive of her that she's reduced to misery for months "I feel ashamed and embarrassed and needy," writes Jane. But what a price she had to pay! First there was 82-year-old Jonah, who announced that he didn't desire her "Get yourself some KY jelly. You get dry before I can get in, and I can't keep it up long enough for you to get wet," he said, brutally, before vanishing Next comes Robert, a writer and a nightmare. She placed an ad into The New York Review of Books thus: "Before I turn 67 - next March - I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me."Well, Jane managed to get quite a few orgasms under her belt during the next year or so. The subject of older women and sex is billed as one of the last taboos. |
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