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by Jonathan Margolis

  In the macho society of Argentina, it has been noticed by researchers recently, oral sex and anal intercourse have lost their status, especially among younger male Argentines, and come to be thought of as activities to be indulged in with prostitutes. Mutual masturbation with a female partner is increasingly viewed as a means of sharing pleasure and orgasm without penetration.

  Some fascinating data unearthed by Dr Shirley P. Glass, a clinical psychologist from Baltimore, in a 2003 book on infidelity, provided evidence that men are looking for more from such affairs. ‘The old “sex first” definition of men’s affairs is changing,’ said Dr Glass. ‘In this new crisis of infidelity, more men are now following what has traditionally been a female pattern, that of emotional bonding first and sex later … an increased number of unfaithful husbands have deep emotional connections to their affair partner.’

  ‘In my clinical sample,’ she wrote, ‘83 per cent of involved women and 61 per cent of involved men characterised their extramarital relationship as more emotional than sexual.’

  The trend was almost as marked in a poll Dr Glass conducted in 1980 at Baltimore Washington International Airport. Here, she handed out 1,000 questionnaires to travellers. An amazing 300 mailed them back. Of the airport sample, 71 per cent of involved women and 44 per cent of involved men described their extramarital affair as ‘more emotional than sexual’. Dr Glass went on to characterise such relationships as more dangerous to marriages than old-style affairs between, typically, older men with time, money and opportunity to spare and younger, sometimes vulnerable, single women curious to experiment. ‘The most threatening kind of infidelity combined a deep emotional attachment with sexual intercourse,’ she commented.

  Hand in hand with such feminisation of men came what critics such as Shmuley Boteach have described as a masculin-isation of women. Shirley Glass noted in her book that, ‘In a sexual addiction recovery program, 16 per cent of all of the sex addicts were women’, but Boteach has publicly taken issue with the sexually rapacious ethic exemplified by the women characters in Sex and the City. He believes that ‘women can be everything men are, and more’, but argues that in ancient times women were lauded for their power and sexual prowess, and that the fight for equality has lost them their souls. Equality for women, Boteach says, was a step back for women. ‘Real greatness,’ he says, ‘is where you don’t have to prove yourself constantly.’

  It is interesting, incidentally, that in order to make the Sex and the City women plausible as sexual huntresses with the pursuit of orgasm their ultimate goal, the show’s creators had to insulate them from any intrusive sense of reality. They live in the rarefied upper echelons of Manhattan, never worry about money, never seem to do much by way of work and have little to do but eat and drink endlessly (but naturally, never put on an ounce in weight). A shard of the reality normal women face, one can easily conclude, would be like a piece of broken glass under their delicate feet. Yet, as evidenced by sentiments such as the Cosmopolitan writer who fakes orgasms to save time, or Ann Landers’s 72 per cent of a huge sample of women who would really rather be doing something other than having sex, Sex and the City was never anything more than make believe.

  Better supported by real-life evidence, however, is a profound shift in older people’s attitudes towards sex. If you use the media as your sole indicator, it would appear that something quite drastic happened to all the longhaired lover boys and mini-skirted chicks of the 1960s when they hit sixty; they seem by most accounts to have lost their prodigious former libido. The orgasm must surely, a flick through any newspaper or magazine will show, be exclusively the privilege of young, firm-fleshed people.

  Yet an ICM poll of 1,000 married couples published by the Reader’s Digest in 2003 showed that sexual satisfaction was more important during mid-life than in early marriage, and was ‘surprisingly important’ during a couple’s oldest years. The survey discovered that those aged 24-34 were the least concerned with sexual satisfaction, while those of both genders between 35-44 placed a higher value on having good and frequent sex – with wives rating it more highly than husbands. There was a dip in interest in sex (but not in love) for the 45-65 age group – but every aspect of a sexual relationship was still more important to men over 65 than it was to the youngest husbands.

  Shere Hite made the point too in The New Hite Report (2000) that older women are more likely than younger ones to enjoy more multiple orgasms. ‘Confusion between reproductive activity and sexual pleasure is playing havoc with our lives,’ Hite wrote. ‘It is true that the capacity to reproduce ends at menopause, and that vaginal lubrication can decrease, but women’s sexual arousal or orgasm capacity actually increases.’ Hite added that Hormone Replacement Therapy, which boosts oestrogen levels to pre-menopausal strength, can overcome the dryness question. Hite was writing before some of the negative aspects of HRT were widely known.

  Such is the arrogance of youth through history, especially in the West where age is less venerated than in the East, that the idea of orgasm being of the remotest interest to older people can arouse feelings of palpable disgust in young people. The novelist Fay Weldon has said that she believes at young people don’t like to contemplate sex at sixty years-plus because they are squeamish about ‘crêpey flesh’. ‘I think that is why I cried when I was thirty, because I didn’t understand that attraction had not all that much to do with youth and firmness. It is only when you are at childbearing age that physical appearance is important. Once you are beyond procreation, you relate more as human beings. The male/female pairing off goes on, but it is more spiritual – less to do with lust and more to do with love, which is not a bad thing.’

  Only today is the orgasm beginning to be seen as the province of older Western people also. But this is not such a new phenomenon in Southern Europe or South America. A Brazilian psychologist and gerontologist, Lucia Helena de Freitas, has studied the sexuality of a group of retired people who involved themselves in cultural activities at a social club. She made the discovery, alarming to some maybe, that 73.8 per cent of them still had sex, with 35.7 per cent claiming they made love two or three times a week. Almost all de Freitas’s interviewees (90.5 per cent) felt sex was necessary to them; 95.2 percent believed that sexual desire does not end with age; 40 per cent said it increases with age; and a third averred that sexual pleasure increases with age. Almost 30 per cent said they were able to reach orgasm quickly, although 40.5 percent said they needed more time these days. Just 13.5 per cent of the women at the social club said they experienced any change in their sex life as a result of menopause; some said they now reached orgasm more quickly. Just 4.8 percent said they suffered impotency. De Freitas concluded that, in Brazil at least, the frequency of sex typically decreases with age – but that its quality does not.

  In Britain the Pennell Initiative for Women’s Health was set up in 1997 as a charitable trust to champion the cause of the health and, specifically sexual, needs of women over the age of 45. Chaired by the former editor of the BBC radio show Woman’s Hour, Sandra Chalmers, the organisation took its name from a species of clematis, the Vyvyan Pennell, which blooms with a double flower in the summer and then again with a single flower each autumn.

  Dame Rennie Fritchie, a Civil Service Commissioner, pro-Chancellor of Southampton University and Pennell’s President, spoke publicly in 2001 at the launch of a study of the sex lives of older women about the misconception, that ‘old women don’t have sex’: ‘When I flick through my television channels late at night, I come across all these bodies and limbs and thrashings and gruntings. I’m fifty-nine and it makes me think what a limited view the younger generation has of sexuality. This report takes us beyond these thrashings, and highlights the fact that sexuality in older age is a whole chapter in itself.’

  The study revealed that the main reason the misunderstanding had arisen was that research had always previously been restricted to the number of sexual encounters a woman reported in a given period, with the ‘sexual encou
nter’ taken to mean an act of penetrative sex. But, as Julia Cole, Pennell’s Development Director, explained: ‘A researcher asking direct questions might come away with the impression that older women have little sex, whereas the woman may merely be having less penetrative sex and instead enjoying plenty of other forms of sexual or sensual activity which are just as important to her.

  ‘I have found that women in mid and later life have great sexual relationships. They may make love less often than when they were younger, but more frequently than people would imagine, and many go on enjoying sex into old age.’ Older women, according to Julia Cole, are more aware of what they want, and better able to voice those desires, have an acceptance of their bodies, fewer inhibitions and no fear of getting pregnant – most of what is needed, that is to say, for a satisfactory sex life.

  But, as Dame Rennie explained, sexuality for older women can encompass far more than sex. ‘One of the things I love about the Pennell Report is that it lists having your hair combed as a sensual act,’ she commented. ‘If you live on your own, as many older women do, you may desperately miss being touched in a loving or caring way, and having someone comb your hair might be all it takes to make you feel good. If something makes you feel more womanly and good then it is a part of your sexuality. Sexuality in older women is not about grannies in hotpants. It is about feeling good about yourself. All of yourself.’

  17

  Epilogue:

  How Was It for Us?

  ‘We’re all in this together – by ourselves’

  Comedienne Lily Tomlin

  One of the few certainties about life is that there are no certainties. However, if there is one thing we can be reasonably sure about, it is that in many areas of previous uncertainty, especially concerning medical matters, the current century will be an age of closure.

  We see this proved in our understanding of the physiology of the human heart, on which the book is now probably very near to being closed. Despite the ever-looming risk of being hugely embarrassed by some unimaginable scientific advance, we seem now to know practically everything there is to know about keeping this glorified pump working to the best of its design capability.

  The book will most likely, in the next few decades, be similarly closed on the scourges of cancer, dementia, AIDS, many mental illnesses and infectious diseases. New problems naturally will arise; in their non-conscious way viruses, pestilences and plagues are problem-solving organisms, for whom we are the problem.

  Will our understanding and enjoyment of sex also reach its terminal velocity in the coming century?

  Will the greatest number of people find themselves enjoying the best possible orgasms for the optimum possible time?

  The answer to this has to be, very possibly, yes. A broad scan of the sexual scene worldwide today suggests rather cogently that while the journey towards widespread optimal sexual enjoyment has a long way to go, humanity across a wide variety of cultures and socio-economic classes is very much on the right track. The right track towards what, though?

  Towards getting the pursuit of orgasm into perspective, whereby it occupies neither too little, nor too much of our time. Towards ensuring that the desire for orgasm is equally felt and discharged by both sexes. Towards ensuring that ancient, pervasive myths about sex and orgasm are debunked for ever.

  This may seem an over-optimistic prediction. But just look at ten instances of where we stood regarding the orgasm less than a hundred years ago.

  • Most people, doctors and educated women included, believed there was no such thing as the female orgasm, and that women who enjoyed sex were mentally ill, morally degenerate or both.

  • The only point of sex, for most people, was that the male should ejaculate as quickly as possible with a view to getting the whole sordid business over swiftly – and, ideally, impregnating the female.

  • The harmless, largely beneficial practice of masturbation was regarded as sinful, psychologically corrosive and medically dangerous. Doctors were so worried about its effects that they happily invented evidence and syndromes to convince people to stop doing it.

  • Most women were unaware they owned a clitoris, or where, if they knew of its existence, it was located.

  • Contraception was regarded as a social, moral and medical evil. (Today, even many Catholics, for whom it is a sin, practise it nevertheless.)

  • Progressives who believed the orgasm was not only natural but a human right for both sexes were, nevertheless, highly dubious over whether the working class should be let in on their secret.

  • Progressives were also in thrall to a completely false belief that the only orgasm that was worth having was a simultaneous climax attained by penetrative sex alone.

  • Educated people who believed in the female orgasm were convinced by Freud that the clitoral orgasm was ‘immature’ and undesirable and that the only valid, adult sexual response was the ‘vaginal’ orgasm.

  • There was no sex education of any kind for children or teenagers, apart from misinformation.

  • Women who were raped were regarded as sinful themselves and legally and socially marginalised’.

  Let us by contrast briefly scan the sexual scene as it is across the world in the early-twenty-first century, with special regard to orgasm, its status and pursuit. Not all these developments, as can be seen, are necessarily ‘good news’; the important point is that they are in the news.

  • Orgasm is out in the open, but it has retreated from its status as the absolute sine qua non of relationships. The Canadian website QueenDom’s survey of 15,000 Western women and men reveal that 35 per cent of women and 29 per cent of men say they do not necessarily need to orgasm to enjoy sex.

  • Alleged new forms of orgasm, from the ‘whole body orgasm’ to a new ‘heart orgasm’ – another borrowing from Tantric sex – are widely discussed in women’s and men’s magazines.

  • Sexual foreplay is a matter of everyday media debate. One recent global sex survey by Durex asked what constitutes ideal foreplay. The top answer for men was oral sex. For women, the top choices were touching, feeling and kissing – and a romantic dinner à deux.

  • The National Health and Social Life Survey, a study conducted by researchers at the University of Chicago and reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association, finds that 43 per cent of women complained of dissatisfaction in the bedroom, 10 per cent more than the men who participated in the study. They declare lack of libido ‘an epidemic public health concern’.

  • Vibrators are now widely acceptable and available in a huge variety of designs. The hard, round head of the device has metamorphosed into such variations as phallus-shaped dolphins and other animals. Electronics made possible tiny but powerful machines such as the Cybervibe, a 10-speed pseudo-phallus with a remote control. And plastics can now be supplemented by silicon, which retains body heat, and a life-like material called Cyberskin. Vibrators based on the vagina are also available. ‘To have a phallus shape for the clitoris is silly,’ says an American former art student, porn star and producer of feminist porn films, Candida Royalle, who is now big in the vibrator business. Her models include the Petite, which is about four inches long and looks like a peach-coloured, slightly curved mobile phone; the Superbe, a larger chartreuse model; and the Magnifique, a seven-and-a-half-inch version. In San Francisco, a feminist sex shop, Good Vibrations, stocks almost two hundred different designs of vibrator. One of its fastest moving lines, the Magic Wand, is made by Hitachi.

  • Where women used to be accused of ‘frigidity’, it is now men who feel the pressure to ‘perform’. When Kinsey reported in the middle of the twentieth century, men thought one to two minutes was a reasonable time to elapse before ejaculating. Today, men asked at the Australian Centre for Sexual Health how long they think intercourse should last reply ‘between ten and fifteen minutes’.

  • In Germany, research shows that the proportion of women experiencing orgasm increased sharply in the 1970s. By the age of 2
7, 99 per cent of women there have experienced orgasm. The rate of orgasm during sex has also increased. There is, reports Humboldt University in Berlin, ‘a growing aversion to orgasm achieved with all manner of tricks, and used as a measure of male or female performance, celebrated as a victory in joint conflict, and feared as a stress-obsessed prestige event. Instead, the individual quality of a steady relationship is sought, linked with closeness, trust, warmth, carefree pleasure, and unpredictable, un-calculating, uncalculated affection within the total erotic form. Cuddling is back in fashion; compulsive or cheap commonplace sex is out.’

  • Women in Australia, counselled for the past twenty years by sex expert and author Dr Rosie King, used to ask simply how they could achieve orgasm of any sort. ‘Now, they want G-spot orgasms, female ejaculation, multiple orgasms, preferably all of them at once, over and over,’ says Dr King.

  • The most common problem seen today at the same centre in Sydney is ‘desire discrepancy’, where one partner seeks more sex than the other. Says Dr King: ‘Often when men say they want more sex, they are really saying they want more love and affection. It’s easier to ask for sex than emotional comfort. The reverse tends to be true for women. While men need sex to become intimate, women tend to need intimacy to desire sex.’

  • Sex is in crisis in fundamentalist Islamic communities. In Iran, for example, lay teachers and mullahs present sexual behaviour of all kinds as polluting, rendering the participant spiritually and physically unclean and obstructing spiritual readiness. While the polluting effects on body and spirit of excretion can be washed away in the bathroom, sexual contact or orgasm requires a ritualised bathing with spiritually cleansing words.