I’ve had some lovely sex.
I’ve had some great sex.
I’ve had some pretty awful, dull sex.
I’ve had some so so sex.
And I don’t think I’m unusual.
Sex is a bit like ordering a chicken Caesar Salad every time you go out; same basic ingredients but a wide range of results depending on your appetite, how good it’s made, the location and ambience, the company and a myriad of other tiny factors that just make it of the good, great or the simple “send it back” variety.
Yet, somehow sex is sold as a high ticket entertainment, rather than an exercise that can fall anywhere on the spectrum of great to grim. And grim doesn’t mean trauma bad, by the way. Just grim in as just not worth the time spent when you could have been sleeping, eating dark, salted chocolate or reading a good book.
And since I’m The Midlife Coach and write about and constantly think about what midlife means for us sassy, sorry, sexy, simply-getting-through-the-day midlifers, I’m going to add my midlife caveat - “especially at midlife.”
Like everything in life, sex can be ruined by expectation. Sexpectation, if you like. Not helped by romcoms, porn and Bridgeton, of course. This constant sexpectation that sex “should” always be fabulous, sexy, spontaneous, spectacular and connected or liberating depending on the mood, can make midlife sex rather confusing, sometimes ‘too much’ to take on when there is so much going on. If we could remember that sex is firstly, not just penetrative, and secondly not always bed shaking, then the ground-breaking results would be us seeing sex as a multi-faceted exercise with multi-dimensional outcomes.
What was thrilling to experiment in our 20’s might not be flavour of the month at a hormonal time of our month, overwhelmed with life and laundry. What might have felt like constant connection at the start of a new relationship can feel like old hat 15 years in. What became routine and dull during and after kid-production might feel like a new surge of sexual potency after menopause. What was one thing in a marriage might be a complete surprise in a post-marriage relationship.
For my next book Midlife Sensuality, Sex & Relationships, redefined I’m reading a few books for research (my teenage girls are just thrilled with the books lying around the house when their pals come over, like “Great Sex After 50” by Tracy Cox).
In her fabulous book ‘Come as you are,’ Emily Nagoski explains that everyone has brakes and accelerators when it comes to sex. These can derive from cultural teachings, interpretations of experiences, personal icks and fetishes, and times of the month / year / life.
So little research has been done into women’s sexuality, she writes: “For a long time in Western science and medicine, women’s sexuality was viewed as Men’s Sexuality Lite - basically the same, but not quite as good.”
Which probably explains why sex can be so confusing for women in midlife - we were told it should be opulent and orgasmic (because this is what men expect), rather than the fact it is constantly changing like our own weather. Taking that point alone - that women’s sex is somehow just a lighter version of men’s - threw out a critical myth that all penetrative sex leads to orgasm, for example. For a long time women thought they were broken if this wasn’t happening for them, until it became a bit more apparent that the apparatus is different and therefore so are the methods of satisfaction.
So let’s go back to the brakes and acceleration in your sexual brain. The accelerator responds to sexual stimulation, but there are also sexual brakes which hold you back. The really interesting part for midlife women is how sensitive these sexual accelerators and brakes are to environmental changes and mood. AND THAT THEY CAN CHANGE. So you are not a one size fits all when it comes to your relationship to sex throughout your life, but both your accelerators and brakes can chop and change.
Because if there’s one thing that the mayhem of midlife likes to impact, it’s mood. And your environmental pressures and possibilities.
Your sexual accelerator is stimulated by positive things in your environment; things you smell, see, touch, taste, hear or imagine that tell you “turn on!”
Your sexual brake is triggered by potential threats in your environment; things you smell, see, touch, taste, hear or imagine that tell you “turn off!”
Doesn’t this make so much such sense? That we are not automatic sexual beings with one setting marked either high sex drive or low sex drive, but beings who require sexual stimulation and that may look like different things at different times?
Then the pressure isn’t on us to be high octane sexual beasts even when we’re hormonal, hysterical with tiredness or huffing over the unfair workload, but rather on the mood, setting and our own relationship with ourself (and our ever-changing body in an Age of Anti-Ageing Propaganda).
It means our brakes can change too….. the risk of pregnancy can be a brake at one stage of our lives and an accelerator in another. Fear of being seen by others could be an accelerator or a brake depending on what episode of Bridgeton you’ve just watched. Trying new things could be a brake when you’re knackered and breast-feeding but an accelerator inn a new relationship during a “fuck it” time of your life.
What Nagoski explains is that while most people think it’s their accelerator that needs fixing (the turn on), it’s more often likely to be too many brakes. Whichever is the more prominent, sexual arousal is usually down to a combination of both activating the accelerator and deactivating the brakes. To quote her, “So your level of sexual arousal at any given moment is the product of how much stimulation the accelerator is getting and how little stimulation the brakes are getting.” (My italics.)
AND (my favourite word in coaching, so much more full of potential than OR), it’s also a product of how sensitive your brakes and accelerators are to those stimulations - we all have brakes and accelerators but we’re all different in terms of our individual sensitivity to them. So we might have high sensitivity on our sexual accelerator and low sensitivity to brakes, or high sensitivity to the brakes and low sensitivity to accelerators or any combination in between. And here’s the rub…. There is almost nothing our brakes and accelerators respond to that is innate; our brains learned to associate particular stimuli with excitement or inhibition… culture, things our parents said, the language we heard, what we learned about sexuality, etc.
All this is to say that a bit like menopause, sex at midlife is a deep and steep learning curve, where we have lots to learn, explore and change narratives around.
And the most important thing to consider is that Nagoski goes on to say that the most influential aspect that affects the sensitivity is context. And as I know so well in my work, context is everything.
You can have all the equality in pay you like but if the context of a women’s life is still radically unfair at home, she isn’t feeling she has an equitable life. (See the difference I wrote about here between equality and equity).
And it plays such a big part of life for women in this midlife… a unique one that is in transition between Patriarchy and Equity, but not there yet so women just straddle a foot in each camp and take on unhealthy and unsustainable levels of physical and emotional workloads. We also have decades more time in our mid-life to figure out our sexual selves in different ages and stages.
But this context is likely to be a serious issue.
When a woman is living in a family unit and there is huge inequity in physical and emotional workload and her ability to thrive as an individual, that context is certainly going to impact the brakes. Feeling resentful is going to pull on the brakes. Feeling constantly overwhelmed and exhausted is gonna affect those brakes. Facing the backlash of ageing while actually ageing is going to affect the brakes.
Here’s how a conversation went yesterday in one of my coaching sessions. “My husband told me I’ve just been angry for five years.”
When I listened to her life - a husband (not a bad man by the way) who is consumed with his work, four teenagers and her, where she runs the home, looks after everyone AND has a full time job, I could see that most of us can understand an anger on her part. Overwhelm is something I come across over and over again in my work and it strips so much from our lives. Including our sex lives.
I asked this particular client to write down how she is in her separate roles… as mother (the loving, kind, funny, woman that she is), as partner (the loving, interesting, sassy person he met) and as Facilitator of Everyone’s Else’s Lives (the one who seems to be left with all the work and no support). She realised not only had these roles all just merged, but actually the last role had completely smothered the former two.
So as I research and read and think more for this book I’m writing, I can’t separate sexuality from context.
Can you?
As I write the sections under sensuality - connection to sense of self - I can’t separate sensuality from context.
Can you? I’d love to know your thoughts.
And on that note…….there can be a whole new life after love. In so many ways…. but the road is a road not a shortcut, so I am so excited to finally get this event in the diary:
RENEW - Recover, reset & relove after divorce
Myself and Genevieve have been taking about this workshop for over a year, and I just wish I’d had something like this when I was going through my own divorce.
We’re going to be workshopping with practical tools and holding space in three areas: recovery, reset and relove.
Recovery - looking at past patterns, we’ll be doing a how to let go of the past ritual, and giving practical tools for navigating the actual process of divorce in terms of defining your big picture, establishing clear boundaries, and co-parenting.
After lunch we focus on Reset… focussing on your present values and needs, checking in with who and how you are now, and defining what success looks and feels like for all aspects of your new life.
And finally in the afternoon we’ll be looking at relove - your future choices and chances and how to make sure you are embarking on a new love / sex adventure with the right curiosity and intentions.
All the details are here and we’d love to have you along in Howth on the 30th June.
I’d love to know how you think about midlife sex and sensuality, so please join me in the comments below (if you’re reading this in an email, please click on the link below to go through to the website to join the conversation.)
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