March 16, 2006

Sex and the Seasoned Woman
by Gail Sheehy
Random House $25.95

By SALLY JAMES
Contributing Writer

Gail Sheehy takes us into bedrooms of some American women over 50 and lets them tell us frankly about their sexual lives. But the best part of the book is not sex but dignity.

What women from Peoria to Tulsa to Los Angeles say, in varying degrees and with different accents, is that they demand their freedom. They want the right to court younger men. They want the right to require satisfaction from adoring but clueless husbands or lesbian partners. They want doctors to help them maintain sexual lives, rather than assuming they should pass into a sexless future. To paraphrase a famous line of poetry, they do not want to go gently into any good night. Social historian Sheehy calls this a “universe of lusty, liberated women.”

Estimates predict Americans over 65 will surpass the numbers of those under 20 within the next four years. Whether one fits inside this bulging demographic or not, it commands our attention. Sheehy interviewed about 200 women for the book, and she carefully includes stories that will blow stereotypes out of the water.

We meet C.J. Haynes, a 70-year-old product of the traditional South, who sells vibrators at “passion parties” all over Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi. She describes her customers as her traditional religious sisterhood. “What other entertainment do they have?” C.J. says. “Women down here are repressed.”

Carlene is a dental surgeon in California who flies vintage airplanes and lives with a lover who is 25 years her junior. The two spend dusty hours working on airplane engines together and then fly acrobatic twirls in the sky.

The best of the book is these slices of lives: descriptions, for example, of when one woman found the courage to leave a bad marriage or another proposed a tryst to a new man. Women explain frustrations or successes at maintaining sexual identities, even as society seems to tell them to give up. Evidence of society’s prejudice exists in the U.S. Census Bureau, which defines people as elderly at 65. But these same folks told the American Association of Retired Persons that they don’t consider themselves “old” until 79.

Where Sheehy’s book starts to flag is in her attempt to wrap it all up in a tidy structure, to chart the typical path. She creates a map purporting to show us the five phases in the progression toward the “passionate life”: “romantic renaissance,” “learning to be alone,” “boldness to dream,” “soul-seeking,” and “grandlove.” This structure dishonors the complex stories of searching for identity recorded in the book.

Critics have been bashing Sheehy for emphasizing middle-class women with the free time to indulge themselves in second careers and dance lessons. But she freely states early on that this book was not intended to examine the plight of older women who are impoverished or sick and alone. What she does do is open a window into the lives of an age group that suffers from an image problem. She makes us see further into the women who may pass us on the street, or ride the bus with us, and forces us to consider them as wielding more power and imagination. n