Prime Time (34 page)

Erections

We pay way too much attention to the importance of an erect, hard penis. More accurately, men pay too much attention to this, and, all too often, if erectile dysfunction (ED) inhibits their erections, they will lose confidence and interest in sex. Some will blame their older wife and seek out younger partners; however, this doesn’t always work out. A younger woman may be more physically attractive, but she may be expecting the youthful, phallic model of sexual intimacy, even though a sizable percentage of women (if not most) are unable to experience orgasm from intercourse alone and require extended clitoral stimulation. A confident older woman can bring more to the bed: experience, empathy, and understanding—especially an understanding of her own sexuality and the reality that her pleasure is not exclusively dependent on penile penetration. The late Dr. Helen Kaplan was a world-famous sex therapist and the director of Human Sexuality Program at New York Hospital–Cornell Medical Center. When interviewed by Betty Friedan for
The Fountain of Age,
she said, “The older woman who is loving and sure enough accommodates herself to these age-related changes—they have oral sex. Do it in the morning, whatever.… The paradox is the older woman is likely to be much more accepting of his reality and his vulnerability.… A man can have a million dollars but his penis is still sixty-eight years old. An older man can be a wonderful partner, a wonderful lover, if they both can get away from that obsession with the penis and the performance.”
²

If men insist on trying to repeat the youthful model of sexuality in the Third Act, they will miss out on discovering the pleasure and intimacy that can occur later in life, when the slowing down and showing up of two mature, trusting, fully realized people allow for a deeper intimacy and more holistic sensuality. Older women have a greater potential for sexual agency, claiming their pleasure without fear of being too forward, while, conversely, older men are freed to experience a deeper connection and intimacy. At last, perhaps, the two genders can come together with greater sexual compatibility than ever. For most of us, this doesn’t just happen. It takes working at it with courage, humor, and intentionality.

Differentiation

In
Passionate Marriage,
Dr. David Schnarch writes, “Sex isn’t a natural function—at least, not intimate sex. Intimate sex is a natural
potential
that requires development for its fulfillment.’ ”
³
Part of the development that Schnarch writes about is “differentiation”—that is to say, when an individual stands on their own two feet and becomes a whole, more confident, self-validated person, unafraid to claim their desire. “Differentiation” is another name for what Carl Jung called “individuation,” which I discussed in the last chapter. Many older women, myself included, were raised feeling that “good girls” didn’t show desire. We were recipients of the desire of others, pleasers who dared not ask for what we needed for sexual fulfillment. This harmful double standard is still all too prevalent today, and girls are harmed because of it. As I wrote in the last chapter, women in their Third Acts tend to gain confidence, self-understanding, and self-control, and become more able to stay in relationship to themselves while in a relationship with a partner. When we feel confident, we are more able to reveal all of ourselves to a partner. Intimacy requires a stable identity.

As Dr. Schnarch writes, “If sexual intimacy has to do with disclosing yourself through sex, people who can let themselves be known have more potential for profound sexual experiences.”
⁴
It took me longer than some, perhaps, but I know that because I have finally become my own person now—with a lot of work, on my own and in therapy—I am also a better, more sensuous lover than when I was younger. I’ve kept my body in pretty good shape, but there is no way that a woman in her seventies can have as taut and toned a body as a younger woman. Gravity takes its toll; the skin loosens. Still, when I think back to the time when, physically, I was at my peak, neither my pleasure nor the pleasure I gave was as deep as now or as much fun. As Dr. Schnarch writes, “It’s not about how your body looks or how you position it, it’s about your frame of mind and emotional connection with your partner. It’s not about frequency of sex; it’s about eroticism. It’s not about technique; it’s about integrating your head with your genitals.”
⁵
Language, self-confidence, and self-awareness permit us to bring meaning to sex beyond just the knee-jerk reaction of lubrication, erection, orgasm. We can talk to each other, gaze into each other’s eyes. “The brain,” says Dr. Schnarch, “is our biggest sex organ.”
⁶
He also points out that “emotional stimulation is often a more powerful determinant of genital function and satisfaction than is touch.”
⁷
Happily, this coincides with the age-related changes in sexuality that can be offset, to an amazing extent, by a shift from the biological drive to thoughts and feelings as determinants of our sexuality.

Freed of the need to “perform,” men who have trouble getting erections may be able to experience a whole new type of sexual intimacy that has no boundaries. The entire body becomes sexualized, and the experience can last for hours. Just what women have longed for! Now, when both women and men need more tactile stimulation—touching, massaging, stimulation with hands and mouth—we need to get comfortable about asking for what we want instead of thinking that “if he really loved me, he would just know.” Our partners aren’t mind readers, and what may be good for them may not do the trick for us. He might love knowing how to please you more. Tell him. Show him. Teach him. Read the books. Read them together. Ask him to tell you what he likes, and then implement what he asks for. This will encourage him to do the same for you. Don’t leave out his nipples. Many men’s nipples are highly sensitive, and suckling on them may be just what he needs to get aroused.

We must not assume that lack of erection means the man is not attracted to us or is unable to provide exquisite pleasure. “Remove the belief that sex is intercourse,” writes Dr. Marty Klein, “and all those non-erect penises become non-problematic.… That’s what modern older people need—a new way to think about sex so that they can be sexual regardless of physical capacity.”
⁸

I like what Gail Sheehy writes in her book
New Passages:
“The mature man is ready to graduate from adolescent ‘racing-car sex’ to ‘body-surfing sex.’ Imagine riding the waves of love, moving up with the swells of pleasure when sexual energy is high and down with ebbs of intensity, when love and stroking can be enjoyed, then up on the next pleasure wave, and down in the rest cycle, when partners just lie there breathing and holding each other and whispering love, until they feel the next wave of sexual energy starting to rise again.”
⁹
This requires trust and the investment of time. It means giving up the performance-oriented striving for orgasm. If orgasm does come, it will be much more profound, because the body is so ripe with sexual energy. Whether or not there is orgasm, whether or not the penis is erect, this approach to lovemaking demonstrates the matured power of the man to give and receive pleasure and love.

Erica Jong, the author of twenty-one books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including the acclaimed novel about women’s sexuality
Fear of Flying,
told me that when her husband takes medications to keep his blood pressure down, it makes sex difficult.

“So,” Erica explained, “we’ve discovered tantric sex, which I always thought didn’t exist. Boy, was I wrong. It took a long time to get there, but we have amazing sex when we can stop running around and arrange to be alone together.”

In her original
Passages
book, Gail Sheehy postulates that the holding back of orgasm so as to extend pleasure, what is called tantric sex, was developed by the Chinese because, unlike Western culture, age is venerated in that culture, so they want us to keep having fun!
¹⁰

“How did you discover tantric sex?” I asked Erica.

“We started to do oral sex and touching and looking at each other, and he discovered he could have an incredibly intense orgasm when I came through oral sex.”

I asked my friend Dr. Bill Stayton, the sex therapist I wrote about in the previous chapter, how he would define a really good lover. “The best lover,” Stayton answered, “is the one who really enjoys the
process
of lovemaking without it having to have a certain goal—the old orgasm goal-oriented model. The process is what’s very exciting. The process is making love. When you’re orgasm-oriented, everything is the orgasm, the erection. Think of all the fun you have getting there.” Lucky Erica Jong. Clearly her husband fits Stayton’s description of the best lover.

“One of the things we know is that as a man gets older, he has less need to ejaculate,” Dr. Stayton explained. “It is important that men know that erection, orgasm, and ejaculation are three separate events and are not dependent upon each other. You can have an orgasm without an erection or an ejaculation. You can have an ejaculation without an erection or an orgasm.”

There’s no doubt that the sexual landscape will continue to change as those in the huge cohort of baby boomers enter their Third Acts. Age simply isn’t going to get in the way of their interest in and enjoyment of an active, robust sex life. After all, numerous studies have shown that, in addition to providing pleasure, an intimate, satisfying sexual relationship reduces the risk of heart disease, depression, migraine, arthritis, and stress, and boosts the immune system. My friend Reverend Debra Haffner (who is also a sexologist and a boomer) puts it this way: “Boomers will change how the culture thinks about sex and aging. We think we discovered sex, and we’re not going to give it up easily. With new medications such as hormone replacement therapy, Viagra, Cialis, Levitra, et cetera, our knees and backs will give out before our genitals do!” Tell me about it!

Match.com
, the world’s leading online dating service, claims that people over fifty are the fastest-growing age group using its site. And X-rated films showing older women and men are reputed to make up the fastest-growing area of the video porn market!

Reverend Debra Haffner.

Women’s Bodies

Alongside men’s age-related changes, there are plenty of changes happening to women’s bodies, and we do well to anticipate and understand them.

• There will be less vaginal lubrication, and lubrication will take longer.
  
• The lining of the labia thins and becomes more apt to tear.
  
• The vagina loses some elasticity.
  
• We experience fewer uterine contractions with orgasm and, because of a drop in estrogen, the pressure sensors deep in the cervix will lose some of the sensation of thrusting. This may be remedied with estrogen replacement, which I will discuss further in the next chapter.
  
• According to a Kaiser Family Foundation report, the aging process itself seems to increase women’s susceptibility to infection … possibly due to thinning of the vaginal walls and abrasion resulting from insufficient lubrication.
  

If you have been celibate for a long time and then begin a new love affair, be aware that your vagina is likely to need some attention. You would do well to have a gynecologist to turn to for answers to your questions and for prescriptions for such things as bladder, urinary tract, and yeast infections and tears in the vaginal walls.

Some women find that intercourse is painful because their vagina has shrunk. I interviewed gynecologist Dr. Michelle Warren, medical director at the Center for Menopause, Hormonal Disorders, and Women’s Health at Columbia University Medical Center New York. She told me, “I had a patient the other day who has just remarried; she is in her seventies. She called me from Florida and said, ‘Even with the vaginal estrogen you have given me, I just can’t have intercourse, and I don’t know what to do.’ I sent her some vaginal dilators, a series of progressively larger plastic molds that you insert into the vagina for twenty minutes to an hour a day and gradually they expand the vagina, and she came back and said, ‘Oh, you saved my life!’ She used the dilators along with the estrogen and she was able to resume an active sex life.” Conversely, the vagina may have stretched so that the man’s penis doesn’t experience enough friction to cause ejaculation. In this case, regularly performed Kegel exercises that strengthen vaginal and pubococcygeus muscles are helpful. I explain these exercises later in this chapter. If, because of childbearing, these pelvic muscles have been badly torn, an operation can be performed to repair and tighten them. Such an operation requires about six to eight weeks of recovery before intercourse can be resumed.