|
 |
 |
Erotic challenge for baby boomer women
Female baby boomers are well into menopause – and beyond; part of a giant wave of grey (even though the grey has been tinted somewhat).
You would think this generation of women, teenagers of the 1960s en route to their 60s, the so-called “liberation” generation, daughters of Woodstock, drivers of modern feminism, would have an original attitude to sexuality as they engage the challenges of aging today. In truth, in general, they don’t!
There are more woman over the age of 50 in the world today than probably ever before in world history; 45 million US women born in the baby boom years alone are now doing the critical menopause passage, and 11 million UK women. Globally, age distribution in the older category is increasing in all the more developed countries.
Although this enormous wave of women are more self assured and economically empowered than any generation before and can look forward to a reasonable lifespan and quality of life , nevertheless there is also a faltering and a wilting.
The same generation who “benefited” from the extreme youth focus of the sixties simply don’t know for sure how to age these days. The matter of aging female sexuality is fraught with old psychic shadows and it is haunting baby boomer women today. The old stereotypes won’t do; and new prototypes aren’t there yet.
“Our sexual appetites aren’t lost as we age, it is the image of ourselves as sexual that we dutifully abandon to fit the bygone stereotype of patriarchy that regimented women’s sex to accommodate the economic power structure … and keep men’s shoulder to the wheel of commerce and women’s prodigious sexual power confined to childbearing”, says Nancy Friday, author of the seminal book My mother, my self..
We are terrified of becoming ugly old hags. The word hagia, which means “holy” in Greek, was once a reverential title for wise and respected older women; it degraded to “hag”. How did the revered and sacred come to mean old and ugly?
Historical images that have stereotyped post-menopausal women are awful and insidious. They infect our culture – and deeply affect our own self-evaluations.
In 16th and 17th century Europe, post-menopausal women were witches, defined as satanic and diabolically sexual. In the 18th and 19th centuries, they were either pitiful old maids or idealised ageing grandmothers - righteous, virtuous – and totally asexual. (Sexuality was contained within marriage and linked only to procreation.)
In the first half of the 20th century, post-menopause was considered a dangerous age filled with melancholia, “climacteric insanity’’, and “remnants of infantility”. Sexuality after menopause was considered pathological by medical definition, and neurotic by Freudian definition. Except for being a doting grandmother, life as she knew it pretty much ended.
This is the miserable menopausal milieu into which baby boomers were born. Then the doctors took over and menopause, and life thereafter, was totally medicalized. Menopausal and post-menopausal women formed a perfect client group for the growing medical profession – large numbers, ample finances, and vague symptoms. Sex was at least now considered “normal” if there was an interest, but there was no deeper evaluation of what this could mean.
So its not for nothing that baby boomer women are a little confused – in terms of both aging and sexuality. What happens to baby boomer women as they meet their 50s onwards?
Somewhere along the menopause continuum, there is a acquiescence or reconciliation to whatever has been achieved or transpired to date. Emotionally there is an acceptance of sorts and a sense of being more authentically oneself, as best as is possible this time round; however content or discontented people are with their lives at this over-the-mid-point point. The issue around sexuality is entrapped in individual life stories, simply whatever they thought about it before. There is more concern about financial security.
A lot revolves around people’s physical well being, health and fitness. Of course by the time menopause has struck, people are living the consequences of a lifetime of stress, wrong food, hard living, plus the deep cultural expectations around getting older which have impacted their bodies. Partners may have died, become ill or lost interest.
Only now are there books around talking about the soul (as well as the medical science) of menopause, where thoughts, intentions and our spirituality determine a different bodily response. There is also the rapidly evolving nutritional science of anti aging and wellness which create more options. Where everything disintegrates into illness and frailty, sexuality dissipates with the life force itself. A good dose of luck and good attitude also makes a difference.
Discussions with baby boomer women reflect a remarkable stonewalling of sorts, as people defend the position they are currently carved into. “When people reach our age, what is there to learn?” There are those bold and passionate Lolitas in their 50s who love sex, love and seduction and are now coming face to face with the old double standard of older women with younger men.
Some baby boomer women don’t expect to be seen as sexy but are proud to be living from an authentic centre, with or without sex. Some, who are celibate, see sexuality as spiritual but sublimated into and expressed through art, home, loving family, pets. Or they get into religion and/or spirituality or good causes.
All will agree that you can enjoy a “roll in the hay” when you are over 60, but its all about sexual intercourse with a partner. There is a fundamental confusion between being sexually active and an erotic, spiritual sexual awareness.
For many its not about age but about situation; having a partner is the key. It is considered something normal, fun and if you are dating the right person, are married (and he can still do it) or in a committed relationship. Others speak about sex with a consenting friend, who for whatever reason you would not want a “relationship” with but agree to safe sex occasionally.
Others simply give up. Mary, a divorcee in her mid 50s, had spent a few unsatisfactory promiscuous years as she went through a difficult divorce. When she became a grandmother, she literally closed down and focused fully on her new role..
The media support the idea that grannies are asexual. Whenever we are presented with an older couple engaged in sexual intimacy, it is almost always as comedy. Why should older sex be so (uncomfortably) funny?
Women who have studied Tantra and Taoism have a conception of a sacred sexuality that is ageless. But these ancient systems only became accessible in the West during the nineties, so their profound teachings are still being integrated into and adapted into our life.
The key is that the whole understanding of sexuality and the erotic needs to be deepened and our personal wounds need to be healed. Midlife is a really good time to do this.
But most women operate exactly from the same set of memories, thoughts and feelings that ran their entire sexual lives. Everyone has an operating viewing point on sex: sex for reproduction, fun and pleasure, a sin, a need, a duty, for love or friendship. The sexuality they talk about is the same sexuality of their youth and adult years, a sexuality informed by old psychic thoughts and attitudes that they have not cleared and brought to consciousness and feelings they have not integrated.
Now, in post menopause, there is not a strong enough intellectual and psychological framework for another more sensuous and sustaining view – sex as something metaphysical, religious, spiritual, energetic.
Many boomer women talk about becoming a crone; but where should we seek the wisdom of the crone? And who said the crone is asexual?
There is a psychological resistance to the integration of what Dr Rachel Hillel calls the exile of “sacred erotic-sensual powers” from ancient feminine contents in the unconscious. She calls for the redemption of the feminine erotic soul in a book of the same name. in which she describes how our full expression and understanding of natural sexuality is fundamental to building a genuine female identity. The “erotic-sensual feminine psychic contents” are holy she says.
Perhaps the hard truth is that the sexual revolution of the 1960s failed to fulfil its promise of a real liberation because it offered an inverted version of a masculine prototype – assertive, goal oriented, manipulative. It might have been free, but it had no soul and no feminine sensibility.
What would a liberated feminine aging and aging sexuality be like?
It would seem that this is a challenge for those baby boomers who are not rushing into an asexual old age?.
Preparing yourself for menopause – Mind, Body & Soul – and Sex
Conscious preparation of mind, body and soul for menopause will help women to develop holistic and realistic attitudes and expectations which will make a huge difference to their actual experience. What you expect, consciously and unconsciously, is more often than not what you get. Modern women, even those in the prime of their thirties and forties should give a thought to menopause right now long before the hot flashes hit – if they do at all.
Menopause might be defined simply by the cessation of the monthly bleeding, but it touches almost all areas of a women's life and lifestyle, it does not exist in a vacuum. In the end all the life issues intertwine and impact on self-esteem, sexuality, spirituality and relationships.
The Mind Stuff
You need to find out about menopause. What is it? Is it going to be a problem - or not? When I was briefed for this article the specific instruction was "what menopausal women might effectively deal with the problem". A priority there is the idea of it being a problem. That is the problem!
Our understanding and perspective on menopause are strictly logical, rational or factual. Believe me its not straightforward. There are many points of view and a terrible history to boot with historical imprints still locked in our cells and psyches.
Reflect on what you believe you know about menopause – the stories from your mother, society, the doctors. What views have you internalised? Do you have any fears? Do you think menopause is mainly about the end of procreation / the end of sex / an illness / a collection of physical symptoms / psychological depression / a mania / a medical experience?
Knowledge determines our thoughts which affect our feelings and attitudes. And attitude is everything. Read up on the history of menopause. There is a wonderful condensed history in Sex, Age & Menopause: a baby boomer’s manifesto. Another excellent book on the history of aging women and sexuality including information on the history of menopause is In Full Flower by Lois W Banner.
It was not so long ago that menopause was defined as an illness to be cured. Notwithstanding that the pathological view no longer officially prevails, menopause has yet become primarily a medical experience. Doctors and the pharmaceutical industry have defined a syndrome of symptoms to be treated. In a brief window of history, between 1880 and about 1920 (corresponding with the early suffragettes in fact), menopause was viewed even by some doctors as no problem at all and the beginning of a time of energetic zestful potential.
What will you choose it to mean to you?
The Body Stuff
Menopause is certainly experienced in the body, and many women do indeed experience a great deal of discomfort. But its symptoms now incorporate every symptom of aging and wrong living. Fundamentally however it is all gets down to matters of good health and right living.
So if you haven’t before, now more than ever you have to begin to work on being healthy. You can resist it as much as you want. Healthy eating habits, good nutrition, regular exercise, balanced lifestyle are the essential foundation – for menopause, for post menopause, for life.
The fundamental condition that makes the experience of menopause so difficult for many is simply that all the poor health and bad lifestyle habits of decades simply catch up with women at the same time as their period ends.
There is so much information out there on nutrition, diet, fitness, natural menopause, vitamins, herbs, supplements, anti aging – it goes on and on. A good online resource is www.power-surge.com. Two excellent books are Leslie Kenton’s Passage to Power and Our Bodies, Ourselves: Menopause by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective.
Get onto a programme of healthy living as soon as you can and adapt it to the special nutritional needs as you get closer to menopausal age. I have read that it is anyway a really good idea to re-evaluate one’s eating and lifestyle habits every decade. It might sound tiresome and commonplace but it sure is fundamental.
The Soul (or psychological) Stuff
All emotional and relationship issues that are not working well, will work even less well during menopause. This includes work, family and intimate relationships; as well as the inner relationship with one's self.
Practical pressures like empty nest syndrome, coping with aging parents. career changes or endings in a youth driven dream world only increase the anxiety and strain emotional and financial resources. Many marriages become stale; some will argue that marriages were never intended to last as long as they now do due to higher life expectancy – increases the challenge!
In another long lost world, post menopausal women were the priestesses and wise women. There are not many role models like that in our culture today. Instead there is deeply imbued fear of aging even while there are more older people in the Western world today than at any other time in history, made worse by the youth obsessed standards of sexual beauty intimidating at every corner.
I don't believe that the overwhelming emotions and psychological challenges that often manifest at menopause are simply a consequence of physiological change. It might be rooted in instinct, but it is instinct calling to spirit. Menopause is a tangible visceral reminder that midlife has come and death is around the corner and down the hill. Suddenly mortality looms and more than that, some sadness and disappointment at the parts of life yet unlived, or not lived well enough. That’s enough to turn one’s life upside down and gnaw at optimism and self esteem.
Menopause heralds the ending of one period and the beginning of another; something different or new is required. Shaman wisdom recommends that you use the idea of death as an advisor, in order to live more meaningfully. Midlife is meant to be such a spiritual challenge.
So instead of spiritual quests being a response to the difficulties of menopause, it should be the requirement of menopause. Perhaps if that was the focus, the symptoms would be less problematic.
If there is ever a time to commit to deep therapy, soul work, personal growth workshops, spiritual work, vision quests, new learning, now is the time. If there is ever a time to make bold, radical changes in one’s lifestyle and relationships, now is the time.
Jean Shinona Bolen’s book Goddesses in Older Women is a wonderful and relevant read. Also Thomas More’s Care of the Soul. He does not talk specifically about menopause but his directions towards a more soulful way of living is profoundly relevant and inspiring.
The Sex Stuff
In the Western world, it used to be that by medical definition sex itself ended at menopause. This is no longer the case, but the vague notion lingers deeply in people’s psyche. So women sort of give up on deepening their sexuality at this stage because there is no role model for older women being sexual (except in bad comedy). Or they give up on sex entirely.
I consider the freedom from the prospect of pregnancy a great liberation. Post-menopausal time could be/ should be the time to live the more transcendental aspects of sexuality in a new understanding of sacred sexuality or spiritual sensuality.
The problem lies in our cultural understanding and personal experiences of sexuality: the bad, sad and dutiful, or at least the mundane and maybe profane.
Rarely do women re-look and re-evaluate their sexual lives at menopause. Or learn to extend the meaning of the erotic in life. If there is ever a time to learn more about sexuality, now is the time. And it really should not matter if you have a partner or not. This is sexuality as part of a spiritual quest. Clearing old wounds can both reawaken spirituality and sexuality. They are mutually inclusive
Read about or take courses on sacred sexuality, learn forms of Tantra or Taoist yoga, take up meditation, do rituals of renewal, take up belly dancing. Use the online resources of www.whitelotuseast.com and its various links. Meditate on the erotic nature of the universe – and our beings. Read Rachel Hillel’s The Redemption of the Feminine Erotic Soul, The Power of Beauty by Nancy Friday, Rainbow Serpent, the Magical Art of Sexual Energy by Merilyn Tunneshende.
Why not evaluate your sexual self by taking the Self Assessment Questionnaire on http://www.sexageandmenopause.com/UserFiles/File/QUESTIONNAIRE_01_AUG07.pdf
We can give up and go meekly into the dark night, or we can work to reinvent what menopause and post menopause can mean in our lives.
And if not now, then when?
The preceding thoughts are courtesy of: Hanna G Ruby
©2007 The Hanna G Ruby material.. Towards a Soulful Sexuality, a Different Menopause and a “New” Aging through healing your sexual self. Visit Hanna G Ruby on www.sexageandmenopause.com and http://blog.hannagruby.com or email hgr@sexageandmenopause.com