Sex and the Seasoned Woman

by Gail Sheehy, Kate Reading (Narrated by)

Overview

A seasoned woman is spicy. She has been marinated in life experience. . . . She can be alternately sweet, tart, bubbly, mellow. She can be maternal and playful. Bossy and submissive. Strong and soft. . . . The seasoned woman knows who she is. She could be any one of us, as long as she is committed to living fully and passionately in the second half of life.In her most groundbreaking work since Passages and The Silent Passage, bestselling author Gail Sheehy reveals a hidden cultural phenomenon–increased vitality in women’s sex and love lives after fifty. Sex and the Seasoned Woman is the story of an intimate revolution taking place under our very noses. Boomer generation women in midlife are open to sex, love, dating, new dreams, exploring spirituality, and revitalizing their marriages as never before. This is a new universe of passionate, liberated women–married and single–who are unwilling to settle for the stereotypical roles of middle age and are now realizing they don’t have...

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781415931684
Publisher:	Books on Tape, Inc.
Publication date:	01/22/2008
Edition description:	Unabridged

About the Author

Bestselling author and cultural observer Gail Sheehy made history with the publication of Passages, which was an international bestseller, appearing in twenty-eight languages. She followed up with The Silent Passage, New Passages, and Understanding Men’s Passages. Sheehy is also the author of Hillary’s Choice, a biography of Hillary Clinton, and Middletown, America, about a New Jersey town devastated by the World Trade Center attack. A contributing editor to Vanity Fair since 1984, Sheehy is the recipient of the Washington Journalism Review Award for Best Magazine Writer in...

Hometown:

New York City and Berkeley, California

Date of Birth:

November 27, 1937

Education:

B.A., University of Vermont; M.A., Columbia School of Journalism

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

When Is It My Time?

My first glimpse of what I came to recognize as a seasoned woman came in a chance encounter at an Oakland restaurant. A popular entertainer who was seated at the next table overheard me talking with my husband about my book. She leaned over to ask what it would be about. "It's about sex, love, and dating among women over fifty," I blurted out.

The entertainer's dinner companion rolled her eyes: "She's the poster girl for dating and sex after fifty!"

The entertainer, whom we'll call Bebe to protect her anonymity, was eager to elaborate. Bebe had been raised in the South with parents who were in love until the day they died. She had fully expected that she, like they, would marry for life. And happily, she had enjoyed an extended sexual honeymoon with the man she married in her twenties. It was in her forties that Bebe began to notice the cracks in their marriage. "But it's like you see a hairline crack in the wall in your California house and you say, 'Not to worry.' A couple of years later, you notice the crack is now a quarter inch wide--don't panic, it's a plaster thing. Then one big shake and the whole house tumbles down and you say, 'Wow, how did that happen?' "

In retrospect, she understands. Her frustration with her marriage was an echo of the complaint that fortyish husbands used before feminism went mainstream: "I've grown and, unfortunately, she hasn't." In Bebe's marriage, as in many more today, it was the husband who resisted taking risks to grow. It took her five years to get up the courage to ask for a divorce. She took that final step a few months before her fiftieth birthday.

"You must be crazy," she told herself. "You're going to spend the rest of your life home alone watching reruns of The Brady Bunch." But it wasn't like that at all. Quite the opposite, she says; it's been the greatest adventure of her life.

The sociologist in me cast about for a context into which to fit this revelation. In fact, even while Bebe was settled into staid married life, a new public square of midlife singles was being flooded with divorced and never-married women and men. All the old rules were up for renegotiation. What was it like out there? I prodded.

In the first couple of years after her divorce, Bebe said, she had felt shell-shocked. "I went through a stage of mourning and learning to be alone. But people kept coming into my path. I met men at the airport, the grocery store, at church. Because once I started opening my eyes, there were really men everywhere. It wasn't like I was shopping, but they were flirting with me, talking to me, asking me out." Her therapist told her, "You have a neon sign on your forehead that blares: Available."

"Pretty young women with firm bodies scared me as long as I saw myself as having to compete with them," she explained. "But what I found is I'm not in the same pool as they are. The older men who are looking for twenty- or thirty-something hard bodies are not the men who would look at me to begin with. These are two different universes."

Bebe's first dating experience turned the usual calculations on their head. He was a young man she met in church--and not just a little younger, fifteen years younger than she. "I was flabbergasted," said Bebe. "I was thinking, 'This gorgeous young man wants to go out with me?' " She bit the bullet and asked him, "Do you really know how old I am?" He said he didn't care. She told him anyway: fifty. He didn't...