Clare Boylan Body Language When asked what age a woman ceases to feel the torments of the flesh the Princess Metter-nich replied: “I do not know. I am only 65.” Last week Marj Thoburn, a 60-year-old marriage guidance consultant, rocked a youth-obsessed boat by stating at a conference that people over 50 were more likely to be at their sexual peak than those in their 30s. “Sex is not just for the young and beautiful,” said Thoburn, who is co-author of The Relate Guide to Loving in Later Life.
Dear Marj! Surely not. Of course those high on oestrogen supplements or Viagra will be getting a second wind, but isn’t it a bit like trying to use a tea bag twice? “A mature wine is more rounded and full bodied than this year’s pressing,” Thoburn argues. But surely most middle-aged
people have been pressed too hard and too long. One might think that for older people, sex would be an occasional and delicate plateful. And one might be wrong. I recently met someone who returned from a Saga holiday to report that it was “hooching with sex”, the clients having discovered the joys of a good time without the threat of pregnancy.
Suddenly I am getting that strange feeling I got when, aged 16 and disguised as a woman in a thick tweed suit, I discovered that in another part of the world there was a wonderful invention called a teenager. Here am I with one eye on the pleasures of sensuality and another on the comforts of the thermal sock, but elsewhere there are vast numbers of women of grandmother age who are only getting to grips with their sex lives. Of course, it isn’t the same as for the young. The grannies are not in pursuit of love. They are gleefully gallivanting. But what about the men? As middle-aged women grow restless and rowdy, middle-aged men become wistful and sentimental. Even those notorious old boys who are never without a babe usually want her more to testify to their sexual power than to test it. For the women, it’s not just a question of sex. Primarily they want some fun. Secondly, they are curious. They have grown up in an age in which many have limited sexual experience. Jerry Hall, just about to take over the role of Mrs Robinson in the West End production of The Graduate, admitted in an interview that in spite of having been married to the sex idol Mick Jagger, she herself had little sexual experience, having only had one boyfriend before she was married. “I’m dating men for the first time in my life and having a wonderful time,” she said. Her new boyfriend is closer in age to Benjamin in the play (22) than her own age, which is 44. “I think women are in their sexual prime in their 40s and men are supposed to hit it in their 20s.” Honor Blackman, a startlingly radiant 74, is also sporting a sexy little number in the shape of a younger boyfriend. “Sexuality is either there or it isn’t,” she maintains, but the facts remain that older women can and do mainline on the hormonal munificence of a seductive youth and that boys enjoy the confidence and wit of older women.
For older women, the pursuit of men is, in part, an education. Having used the vagina as a path to the womb, they want to see how it operates as a solo performer. The sexuality of the mature woman is also based on redressing a power balance. Young women are vulnerable; older women are powerful and like trying out their sexual authority.
American journalist Deborah Gimmelson wrote about this in The New York Times magazine in an article called “Forget equality – I liked it on top”. Gimmelson picked up a youthful fitness trainer for her middle- aged treat. “There is power for a woman involved with a younger, less-educated, open man,” she asserted, “power the way it has always existed for men in similar circumstances.” She added that it was almost as heady as sex, introducing her lover to good restaurants, Broadway plays, important people whom he would never have met without her. A friend of mine in her 50s took herself off to the other side of the world to explore her creativity. While doing so, she embarked on a two-year affair with a boy of 19, describing it as the only relationship in her life in which she was wholly sexually uninhibited. “He was able to introduce me to a side of myself that had been repressed all my life, and I enabled his intellectual development. We had something to offer one another that no one else could have given.”
This echoes the experience of 18th-century French writer and intellectual Mme de St,el who, when over 45, chose very young men, who were “overwhelmed by her prestige”.
The reality, it seems, is that true recreational sex is almost exclusively the preserve of the older woman. As Hall put it: “I’m in extra time now and I’m enjoying every minute.” There is much less at stake than for the young – no hungry womb begging to be filled, no susceptibility to manipulative or untruthful men, no domestic hankerings. And if the affair comes to an end, well, it would, wouldn’t it?