Dear L,
Just as we have to teach our children that the radioactive porn that nukes their phones and brains from around the age of 10 is not a healthy, desirable or accurate version of “normal” sex, we have to realise that sex on the page and sex between your own sheets is also very different.
That is because the fictional romance in the books of which you speak are escapist fantasy, designed to transport you from the humdrum quotidian reality of your actual flesh and blood partner in the metaphysical direction of a lusty seeing-to by a ripped fireman, an ice-hockey player or a workman with power tools (GEDDIT).
Yes, I have just checked Audible so that you don’t have to, and lo and behold a smorgasbord of audiobooks with the word “hot” or “rod” in the title, sometimes both, awaited my ears. Some examples include: “Hot Puck” in the “Rough Riders Hockey” series, “Hot Biker Daddy” and so on. I have to confess that I didn’t want to use up a credit by downloading one so I took your word for it that when the women climax they see stars and pass out. Of course, an orgasm at its best can be a very intense, pleasurable, almost ecstatic, experience but then so is eating a Caramel Double Magnum if you ask me.
As I was born in the 60s, my sex education came from novels by Nancy Friday, Lisa Alther and Jackie Collins, as well as that much-thumbed wedding bit in the Godfather, and even Thorn Birds. When I was at Oxford, I remember a summer holiday in Tuscany during which I was so gripped by some bonkbuster that every morning I refused to go to Rome, even though one of my specialist subjects for my finals was classical Greek and Roman art and architecture. “No thanks,” I’d tell my father without looking up from my Jilly Cooper novel. “I want to stay here by the pool reading Riders.”
Now, of course, what teenagers see is far more explicit than anything I saw and read and yes, I’m sure that romantic fiction is keeping up, to some extent. So is literary fiction, as it happens, which you should perhaps add to your Audible library for texture. I just read All Fours by Miranda July, having been warned that I’d need a fire extinguisher handy as I sizzled through what must be the first sexy novel about the perimenopause. Don’t Be A Stranger by Susan Minot is also cited as evidence of an “erotic reawakening” of women of a certain age too. Indeed, the New Yorker has decided that fiction has entered the “Season of the Witch”.
So the answer to your first question is also a yes, in the context of a pornified society, it’s more out there than it was, but that’s not to say you’re missing out on anything. Maybe just tell yourself, you’ve dodged a bullet! People are a bit more adventurous, or think they should be, but human nature doesn’t change. There will always be folk with niche interests – what my friend Mary Killen calls “special needs” – but there always have been, think of de Sade. As for whether women really do have such intense climaxes that they black out and so on, don’t forget that famous scene in When Harry Met Sally. As Meg Ryan almost once said, we’d all like to have what she’s having but that kind of experience is confined to fiction.
Also, if you’re after an exuberant, fleshy rendition of knockers-out nookie on screen head over to Disney+ and Rivals. The aforementioned author Dame Jilly Cooper is unusual in that she conveys a kind of schoolgirl giggly gusto in her sex scenes, which this adaptation captures perfectly.
Dear Rachel,
Although I am 76, my wife is 73. We are in a good, loving relationship with an enviable lifestyle and diet. We make love every two or three days, sometimes more often. Ann nearly always has two or more orgasms while I rarely have even one. What do you suggest we should do please? Many thanks and best wishes from us both.
– P
Dear P,
It doesn’t sound like much of a problem to me! “Two or three days maybe more often” is a frequency a teenager would envy, let alone those of us in the riper years. What a turn-up! I’d say a solid two thirds of my mailbag is from middle-aged men complaining about their wives and their unilaterally imposed Sus laws (Sus is short for shut up shop, which is what women of a certain age and stage tend to do after the oestrogen has left the building but their domestic duties haven’t).
Of course, sauce for the goose is sometimes sauce for the gander and I also get the odd, puzzled missive from a woman with the same issue. But I know readers across the world will read about your perfect golden years, the only cloud on the horizon the orgasm deficit on your side with envy and think, “I wish I had your problem!” Mazeltov to you both and as I am unable to assist in this department, I passed your letter to my expert, Sophie Haggard. Again, what follows may offend those who prefer to draw a discreet veil over the plumbing and hydraulics of the human male.
She tells me that there’s a technical diagram called “The Ladder of Desire”. It suggests that couples go up and down at different speeds. So that’s the first thing. Haggard says: “Any psychosexual therapist would advise not to make orgasm the be all.” But, she says, for you to have a diagnosable problem in reaching orgasm, the issue would have to have been around for six months and be causing “significant distress”.
It’s a Catch 22 as, of course, it’s something that gets worse if you stress about it (like everything else). The “refractory period” – Google is your friend, Readers – lengthens dramatically with age (oh alright then, it is the time it takes to, ahem, come), which means that you may struggle to achieve completion in what Haggard refers to as partner sex.
SSRIs are also well known to affect enjoyment and can “numb genital sensation” (I have never taken antidepressants so cannot verify this). Haggard concludes: “Readers may blanche… But if he DOES masturbate he may be used to a certain ‘grip’ [sorry] and he had better show it to her”.
Haggard reports that there are self-focus exercises you could do, such as “take a long shower and focus on your sensations as you wash different parts of his body”. In summary, she suggests that you explore fantasies and generally get in touch with your own sensual experiences. Try to fit that into your enviable lifestyle and do report back.
Rachel Johnson, is a journalist, author of eight books, broadcaster, host of the Difficult Women podcast and the Telegraph’s sex and relationships agony aunt
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