Wanted: a libido. As a fortysomething, she is supposed to be in her sexual prime. But instead Lucy Cavendish just feels exhausted and passionless. So where did her mojo go? And is it too late to get it back? Here she recounts her eyebrow-raising attempts to find out…
The problem about sex, for women, is that we only really get to understand it in our forties. We are told this all the time. Virtually every week I read something letting me know that now I have turned 40 I should be in my sexual prime. I should, apparently, be feeling the most sexy I have ever felt. I should be in touch with my deeper inner-sexuality, quietly lusting after young men (in true Mrs Robinson style) or at least feeling free and unashamed about my carnal desires.
This baffles me. I’m not sure why women are supposed to feel more sexy in their forties. We may understand sex more. We probably know as much about sex as we are ever going to know – but feeling the most sexy ever? Where has that come from?Many of us have children. We work. We run households, manage money, do the shopping, fret about homework, fret about ourselves, try our hardest to make time for our relationships and usually fail. And do we look good? No, we do not. We have wrinkles and saggy bits that never used to be saggy. We are tired. No, more than that, we are exhausted, dead on our feet. Dying. Yes, sometimes I feel so tired I imagine I am withering up and dying.
There is obviously something wrong with me. I read a book recently by the French author Catherine Millet in which she has sex with anyone, any time. It left me feeling exhausted. How did she have the time? The energy? I am waiting and hoping that this much-anticipated sexual awakening will happen to me, but, in truth, I think it may be in vain. Two years ago I noticed that my husband had bought me something from Agent Provocateur for my birthday. I got so obsessed by the thought of what it could be – and rather nervous at the idea of a basque and stockings – that I ended up making myself ill. It turned out to be nothing more than a candle and some body oil.
It’s ridiculous. I am, I realise, a prude and this society doesn’t seem to do prude anymore. I am behind the times – a dry old sack of a woman too busy with my head in a book or a crossword or playing with my children or working to think about sex. I convince myself I am not alone. There are hundreds of women out there who crave a good night’s sleep rather than hours of sex. It’s just that no one likes to talk about it, because we all feel so bad we’re not having sex all the time.
In Hanif Kureishi’s novel Intimacy the main character relates how he left his wife because she was the type of woman who 'read cookbooks in bed’. I’ve never forgotten it. I love reading cookbooks in bed. That’s the type of woman I am. But now I have decided I must do something about it. It is my mission to re-ignite my sexual being. I’m just not sure how.
I talk to my girl friends about this. Most of them tell me that sex is something you have to practise. 'You need to make yourself do it, a lot,’ says one girl friend, who has been married for more than two decades. She tells me that she and her husband have sex twice a week. 'We have to make that pact with each other,’ she says, 'because otherwise we’d stop altogether.’
This reminds me of an extract from a book I read recently, in which an American woman and her husband had sex every day for a year. Apparently, their relationship improved enormously because of this enforced intimacy.
I ask other friends how many times they have sex in a week. 'Not much,’ says one. 'Probably four times a week.’
'Four times a week?’ I say. 'That’s loads!’
'Is it?’ she says. She is also American.
Another friend of mine tells me that she and her husband very rarely have sex. 'It’s frustrating,’ she says. 'I want to have more sex than he does and I’m not sure what to do about it.’ She looks on the verge of tears. This starts me thinking about not just sex, but what sex actually means.
In my late teens, when I first started having sex, I found it all either terrifying (God, older boys can be very bullish when it comes to sex) or funny. I’m not sure I actually enjoyed it. It all seemed so alien to me. I had no idea what I was supposed to actually do and I couldn’t think of anyone to ask. I found a Playboy once under a bridge. I was probably about 10 years old. I was out walking my dog and saw it flapping in the breeze. When I opened it I was transfixed. I just could not get over it. Did people really do these things? I went home and asked my brother about it.
'Do people do that?’ I said.
'Yes,’ he said darkly,
'and some people actually enjoy it.’
So, this is what I know about sex now: it is deep and dark and powerful. It lures men – and women – into doing ridiculous things that sometimes they shouldn’t do. It is addictive. There are whole gaping chasms of it into which I have never wanted to jump (bondage, sadomasochism, etc) and probably never will. But the raw, essential power of it – the power that confused but also thrilled me as that 10-year-old with the racy magazine – is something that intrigues me. There is work to be done, however.
I decide to start by going up to London for a spot of lingerie shopping. I find an Ann Summers shop on Kensington High Street. From the outside it looks fine. There are mannequins wearing baby-doll nighties in the window. I go into the shop. At first I seem to be the only person there. A helpful assistant comes over and asks me what I am looking for.
'Lingerie,’ I tell her.
'What type?’ she says.
'Something, erm, classy,’ I say.
I am a bit reluctant to use this word. I am surrounded by brash things in magenta and scarlet that have tassels on the nipple area. I can see lots of ribbons and bows and thongs, but nothing classy as such. The assistant scurries off and comes back with something black and cream. It looks OK – a basque-type thing and a G-string.
'No G-strings,’ I say. The assistant runs off and comes back with a pair of undies that look less, well, painful.
'You can try it on,’ she says helpfully.
I wander through to the back of the shop.
I walk past increasingly disturbing-looking things: skin-tight latex catsuits, nippleless whatsits, things with no crotches, fluffy nipple clamps, handcuffs and – oh, goodness, I can barely look – other things. The other things section (DVDs and worse) is full of men.
'What are they doing here?’ I squeak at the assistant.
'Lots of men shop in Ann Summers,’ she says coolly.
I try on the black and cream corset. I like it. I can even look at myself in the mirror without blushing furiously. I decide to buy it. The assistant rings it up in the till, then tells me she’ll give me some freebies. She puts a tube of Booty Lube into my bag.
'Jesus Christ!’ I say.
She gives me a funny look. 'Can I say something?’ she says. 'Your generation are so strange about all this. Women in their twenties come in and buy a different vibrator every month or so. They’re very open about sex and you can’t even cope with Booty Lube!’
On the way home I think about what she has said. She’s right. Maybe I should try to get in touch with being openly sexy and less embarrassed.
A week later I am in a community church hall near Reading. I am wearing some tracksuit bottoms and a sweat top and standing next to 10 other women. In front of us is a pole. A slim, attractive blonde woman in her forties is showing us what to do. 'Right,’ she says in a businesslike fashion. 'It’s very easy, really. You just hoick yourselves up and then you do this.’ She puts her hands on the pole and proceeds to smoothly turn herself upside-down. She then starts spinning round it. 'Wow!’ the woman next to me says.
I look at her. She must be in her fifties. I am about to ask her what she is doing at a pole-dancing class when the teacher spins round and lands on her feet. We all clap politely.
'This isn’t just about getting fit,’ the teacher says, slightly breathlessly. 'It’s also about feeling sexy. Does anyone here today feel sexy?’ We all stare at the ground. The teacher sighs. She then suggests we all do a warm-up before we progress on to the pole. The warm-up involves lots of putting our hands on our hips and gyrating around to loud pumping music.
'ARE YOU FEELING IT?’ the woman shouts above the music. She starts swinging her hips around madly from side to side. She turns her head in the opposite direction and her hair swings from side to side.
The fifty-something woman next to me is grimacing. I don’t think she’s feeling it. After half an hour of attempting to launch myself up a pole I’m not feeling it, either.
I find myself in Paris a week later. I have been told by a chic French friend of mine to pay a trip to Sabbia Rosa, a smart lingerie shop in St Germain. When I walk through the door it reminds me of the old-fashioned small department store near where I grew up, where bras and knickers were kept neatly packed in wooden drawers and served up as offerings by bespectacled assistants.
'What is eet you want?’ the petite non-bespectacled assistant asks me. I tell her I quite fancy a silk cami-top and some knickers. She finds me something beautiful in ivory, then rummages around in a drawer. '’Ere you are,’ she says, handing me a cream lace-trimmed suspender-belt decorated with small pink roses. It is exquisite. 'And some silk stockings?’ she says, arching an eyebrow. 'Be careful with them. They rip easily.’
Once I am home I unwrap my suspender-belt and stockings. I stroke them lovingly. They really are beautiful. I can see the allure of something this exquisite. Then I put them back in the bag. I am too worried about the stockings ripping.
As a final attempt to unleash my inner sexual goddess I pay a visit to the Coco de Mer 'salon’ and shop in Covent Garden. I have signed up to a class where I will be able to find my G-spot. This sounds frightening – although not as terrifying as the one where you learn to pleasure your man by practising on fruit and wax objects. I ask who goes to these classes. 'All sorts of people,’ the nice assistant tells me. 'They are run by Midori and she is very good.’ I tell her Midori sounds like a drink.
The assistant then helpfully offers to show me round the shop. There are a variety of things that look totally baffling to me. Something I thought was a small bracelet turns out to be a sex aid. In fact, everything is a sex aid. There are whips and paddles and a saddle and ties and masks. I feel as if I am attending a slightly louche house-party. I think I may be beginning to see it when the assistant offers me a corset. It is pale pink and silken, with small lace bows on it. When I try it on the assistant comes in to tighten the ribbons at the back. She then leaves me to gaze at myself.
I stand in the changing-room with its seductive lighting and a musky candle burning. I jut a hip forward. The corset moves with my body. I have a waist and uplifted boobs. The sensation is rather lovely. I buy the corset, even though it is way over my price limit.
When I get home I watch the semi-erotic films on the Coco de Mer members’ website. The shop assistant has kindly suggested I do this. 'They’re beautiful,’ she says, 'nothing too scary.’ I watch a woman with long hair have sex with a man on a juddering washing-machine. I am transfixed. I then go and look at my washing-machine. It has children’s smelly socks and underpants spewing out of it. It is in a damp-smelling room. It’s not very sexy. I sigh and go and look at my corset, instead.
Later on, reading my cookbook in bed, it comes to me that it is the sensual side of sex I can work on. I love the candles, the oils and the expensive lingerie. I can do silk stockings – as long as they don’t rip – and I like lace and things you can tie up and, conversely, untie. It’s a start, I think. I could try seductive. I can’t do in-your-face, full-on, G-spot-finding sex, but I might be able to do a washing-machine, just not my own. ( telegraph.co.uk )
The problem about sex, for women, is that we only really get to understand it in our forties. We are told this all the time. Virtually every week I read something letting me know that now I have turned 40 I should be in my sexual prime. I should, apparently, be feeling the most sexy I have ever felt. I should be in touch with my deeper inner-sexuality, quietly lusting after young men (in true Mrs Robinson style) or at least feeling free and unashamed about my carnal desires.
This baffles me. I’m not sure why women are supposed to feel more sexy in their forties. We may understand sex more. We probably know as much about sex as we are ever going to know – but feeling the most sexy ever? Where has that come from?Many of us have children. We work. We run households, manage money, do the shopping, fret about homework, fret about ourselves, try our hardest to make time for our relationships and usually fail. And do we look good? No, we do not. We have wrinkles and saggy bits that never used to be saggy. We are tired. No, more than that, we are exhausted, dead on our feet. Dying. Yes, sometimes I feel so tired I imagine I am withering up and dying.
There is obviously something wrong with me. I read a book recently by the French author Catherine Millet in which she has sex with anyone, any time. It left me feeling exhausted. How did she have the time? The energy? I am waiting and hoping that this much-anticipated sexual awakening will happen to me, but, in truth, I think it may be in vain. Two years ago I noticed that my husband had bought me something from Agent Provocateur for my birthday. I got so obsessed by the thought of what it could be – and rather nervous at the idea of a basque and stockings – that I ended up making myself ill. It turned out to be nothing more than a candle and some body oil.
It’s ridiculous. I am, I realise, a prude and this society doesn’t seem to do prude anymore. I am behind the times – a dry old sack of a woman too busy with my head in a book or a crossword or playing with my children or working to think about sex. I convince myself I am not alone. There are hundreds of women out there who crave a good night’s sleep rather than hours of sex. It’s just that no one likes to talk about it, because we all feel so bad we’re not having sex all the time.
In Hanif Kureishi’s novel Intimacy the main character relates how he left his wife because she was the type of woman who 'read cookbooks in bed’. I’ve never forgotten it. I love reading cookbooks in bed. That’s the type of woman I am. But now I have decided I must do something about it. It is my mission to re-ignite my sexual being. I’m just not sure how.
I talk to my girl friends about this. Most of them tell me that sex is something you have to practise. 'You need to make yourself do it, a lot,’ says one girl friend, who has been married for more than two decades. She tells me that she and her husband have sex twice a week. 'We have to make that pact with each other,’ she says, 'because otherwise we’d stop altogether.’
This reminds me of an extract from a book I read recently, in which an American woman and her husband had sex every day for a year. Apparently, their relationship improved enormously because of this enforced intimacy.
I ask other friends how many times they have sex in a week. 'Not much,’ says one. 'Probably four times a week.’
'Four times a week?’ I say. 'That’s loads!’
'Is it?’ she says. She is also American.
Another friend of mine tells me that she and her husband very rarely have sex. 'It’s frustrating,’ she says. 'I want to have more sex than he does and I’m not sure what to do about it.’ She looks on the verge of tears. This starts me thinking about not just sex, but what sex actually means.
In my late teens, when I first started having sex, I found it all either terrifying (God, older boys can be very bullish when it comes to sex) or funny. I’m not sure I actually enjoyed it. It all seemed so alien to me. I had no idea what I was supposed to actually do and I couldn’t think of anyone to ask. I found a Playboy once under a bridge. I was probably about 10 years old. I was out walking my dog and saw it flapping in the breeze. When I opened it I was transfixed. I just could not get over it. Did people really do these things? I went home and asked my brother about it.
'Do people do that?’ I said.
'Yes,’ he said darkly,
'and some people actually enjoy it.’
So, this is what I know about sex now: it is deep and dark and powerful. It lures men – and women – into doing ridiculous things that sometimes they shouldn’t do. It is addictive. There are whole gaping chasms of it into which I have never wanted to jump (bondage, sadomasochism, etc) and probably never will. But the raw, essential power of it – the power that confused but also thrilled me as that 10-year-old with the racy magazine – is something that intrigues me. There is work to be done, however.
I decide to start by going up to London for a spot of lingerie shopping. I find an Ann Summers shop on Kensington High Street. From the outside it looks fine. There are mannequins wearing baby-doll nighties in the window. I go into the shop. At first I seem to be the only person there. A helpful assistant comes over and asks me what I am looking for.
'Lingerie,’ I tell her.
'What type?’ she says.
'Something, erm, classy,’ I say.
I am a bit reluctant to use this word. I am surrounded by brash things in magenta and scarlet that have tassels on the nipple area. I can see lots of ribbons and bows and thongs, but nothing classy as such. The assistant scurries off and comes back with something black and cream. It looks OK – a basque-type thing and a G-string.
'No G-strings,’ I say. The assistant runs off and comes back with a pair of undies that look less, well, painful.
'You can try it on,’ she says helpfully.
I wander through to the back of the shop.
I walk past increasingly disturbing-looking things: skin-tight latex catsuits, nippleless whatsits, things with no crotches, fluffy nipple clamps, handcuffs and – oh, goodness, I can barely look – other things. The other things section (DVDs and worse) is full of men.
'What are they doing here?’ I squeak at the assistant.
'Lots of men shop in Ann Summers,’ she says coolly.
I try on the black and cream corset. I like it. I can even look at myself in the mirror without blushing furiously. I decide to buy it. The assistant rings it up in the till, then tells me she’ll give me some freebies. She puts a tube of Booty Lube into my bag.
'Jesus Christ!’ I say.
She gives me a funny look. 'Can I say something?’ she says. 'Your generation are so strange about all this. Women in their twenties come in and buy a different vibrator every month or so. They’re very open about sex and you can’t even cope with Booty Lube!’
On the way home I think about what she has said. She’s right. Maybe I should try to get in touch with being openly sexy and less embarrassed.
A week later I am in a community church hall near Reading. I am wearing some tracksuit bottoms and a sweat top and standing next to 10 other women. In front of us is a pole. A slim, attractive blonde woman in her forties is showing us what to do. 'Right,’ she says in a businesslike fashion. 'It’s very easy, really. You just hoick yourselves up and then you do this.’ She puts her hands on the pole and proceeds to smoothly turn herself upside-down. She then starts spinning round it. 'Wow!’ the woman next to me says.
I look at her. She must be in her fifties. I am about to ask her what she is doing at a pole-dancing class when the teacher spins round and lands on her feet. We all clap politely.
'This isn’t just about getting fit,’ the teacher says, slightly breathlessly. 'It’s also about feeling sexy. Does anyone here today feel sexy?’ We all stare at the ground. The teacher sighs. She then suggests we all do a warm-up before we progress on to the pole. The warm-up involves lots of putting our hands on our hips and gyrating around to loud pumping music.
'ARE YOU FEELING IT?’ the woman shouts above the music. She starts swinging her hips around madly from side to side. She turns her head in the opposite direction and her hair swings from side to side.
The fifty-something woman next to me is grimacing. I don’t think she’s feeling it. After half an hour of attempting to launch myself up a pole I’m not feeling it, either.
I find myself in Paris a week later. I have been told by a chic French friend of mine to pay a trip to Sabbia Rosa, a smart lingerie shop in St Germain. When I walk through the door it reminds me of the old-fashioned small department store near where I grew up, where bras and knickers were kept neatly packed in wooden drawers and served up as offerings by bespectacled assistants.
'What is eet you want?’ the petite non-bespectacled assistant asks me. I tell her I quite fancy a silk cami-top and some knickers. She finds me something beautiful in ivory, then rummages around in a drawer. '’Ere you are,’ she says, handing me a cream lace-trimmed suspender-belt decorated with small pink roses. It is exquisite. 'And some silk stockings?’ she says, arching an eyebrow. 'Be careful with them. They rip easily.’
Once I am home I unwrap my suspender-belt and stockings. I stroke them lovingly. They really are beautiful. I can see the allure of something this exquisite. Then I put them back in the bag. I am too worried about the stockings ripping.
As a final attempt to unleash my inner sexual goddess I pay a visit to the Coco de Mer 'salon’ and shop in Covent Garden. I have signed up to a class where I will be able to find my G-spot. This sounds frightening – although not as terrifying as the one where you learn to pleasure your man by practising on fruit and wax objects. I ask who goes to these classes. 'All sorts of people,’ the nice assistant tells me. 'They are run by Midori and she is very good.’ I tell her Midori sounds like a drink.
The assistant then helpfully offers to show me round the shop. There are a variety of things that look totally baffling to me. Something I thought was a small bracelet turns out to be a sex aid. In fact, everything is a sex aid. There are whips and paddles and a saddle and ties and masks. I feel as if I am attending a slightly louche house-party. I think I may be beginning to see it when the assistant offers me a corset. It is pale pink and silken, with small lace bows on it. When I try it on the assistant comes in to tighten the ribbons at the back. She then leaves me to gaze at myself.
I stand in the changing-room with its seductive lighting and a musky candle burning. I jut a hip forward. The corset moves with my body. I have a waist and uplifted boobs. The sensation is rather lovely. I buy the corset, even though it is way over my price limit.
When I get home I watch the semi-erotic films on the Coco de Mer members’ website. The shop assistant has kindly suggested I do this. 'They’re beautiful,’ she says, 'nothing too scary.’ I watch a woman with long hair have sex with a man on a juddering washing-machine. I am transfixed. I then go and look at my washing-machine. It has children’s smelly socks and underpants spewing out of it. It is in a damp-smelling room. It’s not very sexy. I sigh and go and look at my corset, instead.
Later on, reading my cookbook in bed, it comes to me that it is the sensual side of sex I can work on. I love the candles, the oils and the expensive lingerie. I can do silk stockings – as long as they don’t rip – and I like lace and things you can tie up and, conversely, untie. It’s a start, I think. I could try seductive. I can’t do in-your-face, full-on, G-spot-finding sex, but I might be able to do a washing-machine, just not my own. ( telegraph.co.uk )
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