Ageless Erotica: Pleasures That Never Grow Old

The characters in these stories may be seniors, but you can bet they take their bathrobes off!

By Roberta Hershenson

 

In a recent New Yorker cartoon, a fiftyish woman in a bathrobe looks down on a naked man in bed. “I am proud of my body,” she tells him. “Just not in this light.” He has already brought in two glasses of wine and undressed. Now it’s her turn. What will break the impasse?

Perhaps she will feel better about herself after reading Ageless Erotica, a new anthology edited by Joan Price, a prize-winning author who has made “senior sex” her specialty. Filled with 29 stories about the pleasures that never grow old, the book is aimed at sexually active readers over fifty who are coping with the realities of aging. Most of the characters in these stories suffer from creaky knees, aching shoulders, weak bladders, dim eyes or bad spines—not to mention the usual jowls, sags and wrinkles. But you can bet they take their bathrobes off—and they do it ecstatically. Sex trumps self-consciousness every time.

Price, whose previous books include Naked at Our Age: Talking Out Loud About Senior Sex (2011) and Better than I Ever Expected: Straight Talk about Sex after Sixty (2006) both published by Seal Press, says in the introduction to her new anthology that the stories “had to reflect the sexual experience of our age group with some accuracy—not just (by) slapping wrinkles and an arbitrary age on the same old issue. (You might also enjoy NYCW’s article The Ultimate Guide to sex after 50.)

I read the book last month on a tropical beach, and it was an eye-opener to read about undressed bodies while I was surrounded by scantily dressed bodies—making it easy, I confess, to imagine my reclining neighbors in the same situations I was reading about. A hot book on a hot beach! Who could ask for more?

Granted, some stories have 60-year olds behaving like 18-year olds (“My New Vagina” for example). Some of the writing could win one of the Bad Sex in Fiction prizes awarded each year. But it’s unusual to find a book like this one, written about older people for older people without a shred of inhibition. The short fiction and memoirs that Price has selected introduce us to the worlds of sex toys, gay sex, happy sex with husbands, painful pleasure with dominatrixes, masturbation, oral sex, anal sex and BDSM (bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism). And there are enough wonderfully written, enlightening, stimulating and surprising stories to make the book worthwhile.

Price eases us into the collection with the first story, To Bed by Erobintica; it leaves no body part unnamed, priming us for the works to follow. Although its frankness is admirable, the explicit vocabulary of this and other stories is not always sexy. The word “perineum,” for example, is more anatomical than erotic. Of course people “moan” and “groan” during sex, but a creative writer can find other verbs to evoke passion. Those two work overtime in this anthology.

While readers might recoil at sentences like, “Her secret muscles flutter in anticipation,” or “The pulsing ball of fire in her belly throbs and bursts, rolling up her spine,” hang on! There is really good stuff in the book. In the humor department, for example, there is Nancy Weber’s hilarious Something Borrowed, Something Blue about a 70-year-old saleswoman who cavorts with an unexpected customer. In Smooth and Slippery by Doug Harrison, Jack the cat observes two men having sex. “He retreats to his blanket, assumes a sphinx posture, and watches us like a movie critic.”

Fantasy is featured in stories like Invitation to Lunch, Jaguar Dreams, Other People’s Stuff and George. Train Ride by Harris Tweed lets us glimpse into the fantasies of men and also their insecurities and disappointments. Tension builds as a couple wait to be served in the train’s dining car. “The waiter was at our table so soundlessly it seemed he materialized,” writes Tweed. “He put the small, ceramic cream pitcher between us, followed by the sugar bowl with its slightly tarnished tongs.” He thinks that he has seduced a glamorous woman on a train; then discovers he has been played. “It damped me that she had set this rendezvous in motion,” he muses. “She wasn’t after me. She was after it.

Skillful storytelling enhances Linda Poelzl’s Endless Praise, Timeless Love, a voluptuous tale of pleasure featuring a most surprising gentleman, who has Alzheimer’s. The story is gently shattering and unexpectedly uplifting. Also of note is Toast for Breakfast by Cheyenne Blue, about a widowed mother who worries if her grown daughter will accept her mother’s new lover.

I was especially moved by the rage and ultimate triumph depicted in By the Book by Rae Padilla Francoeur. The narrator tells a classic story of self-discovery that begins with a chance encounter in a bookstore with The Joy of Sex. Having never seen her own sexual organs, even at the age of 62, she barricades herself in a stall in the store’s restroom to explore them. Her ensuing rage at her complacent husband, and her anguish at her own decades-long passivity, is surpassed only by the thrill she experiences with her own hand. A reader can only cheer as she returns home to instruct her astonished husband about how to please her. “From now on, use that,” she tells him, tossing a bottle of KY warming liquid into his lap.

But the story I can’t stop thinking about is At the Wane of the Moon by Bill Noble. Here time is compressed into a seamless present as an elderly woman slips into bed with a snowy-haired man and tells him in detail what she has seen on her evening walk. “ ‘I came down by Jason’s. I…I watched Jason and Bianca make love. I sat on the hill for a long time, watching them.’”

As she talks, she reminds the old man how they used to make love, managing to arouse him. “‘He began to stroke her back with his fingertips. He reached a hand to cradle the furrowed scar on her chest. A tear trailed down his cheek onto the pillow.’” Youth and old age come full circle as the couple’s memories yield to desire and then to tender, deeply-felt sex. The story concludes with this scene: “She helped him lie next to her, side by side, as the moon’s silver receded across the bedroom floor. Long after it had vanished, they turned and moved into one another’s arms, breath and pulse flowing together through the deepening night.”

Roberta Hershenson is an arts journalist whose features, profiles, and news stories have appeared in The New York Times and other publications. She wrote a weekly arts news column for the Westchester section of The Times from 2000 to 2006.

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