Here’s Why Older Heterosexual Women Have Better Sex
Many men finally focus on mutual pleasure, not just their own
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Here’s how the narrative goes — if you’re a woman of menopausal age or older, you’re going to lose your libido.
When society keeps pushing negative narratives about aging as a woman, of course that could lead a woman — even a woman who has enjoyed sex throughout her life — to feel less sexy and then avoid sex, or perhaps not enjoy it as much because she’s focusing on what’s “wrong” with her aging body instead of all the ways her body gives her pleasure.
But what if older women don’t lose their sex drive? What if, in fact, their sex lives become more expansive as they age?
That’s a narrative we rarely hear, but one that’s worth exploring.
It’s one Linn J Sandberg, an associate professor in gender studies at Södertörn University, has explored. Actually, she bluntly asks, How do older people fuck?
Sandberg’s focus has been on older heterosexual men and how they navigate masculinity and sexuality — especially how they continue to express their sexuality positively so they’re not seen as a “dirty old man” for wanting to be sexual. But if there’s an older heterosexual man interested in sex, then there’s going to be a heterosexual woman involved. And in the age of Viagra, the discussion has generally reinforced the masculine view of how “sex” is defined — penile-vaginal intercourse.
If that’s the only way hetero couples are defining sex, it’s going to lead to a lot of frustration.
In her study, “Sex in later life: Beyond dysfunction and the coital imperative,” Sandberg finds that desires typically attached to women — intimacy, kissing, touching, cuddling — become more important for men, too.
“[P]layfulness and inventiveness of later-life sexualities, which does not necessarily involve heterosexual intercourse, rarely makes it to the spotlight. Instead, a coital imperative — the idea that ‘real sex’ always necessarily involves penile-vaginal intercourse — increasingly informs mass media and medical discourses of aging and sexuality and assumes that impotence is a dreadful state for senior men. … When listening to the narratives of some older…
