Defying Ageism
I don’t know about you, but I feel like now that I’m 45, at the end of my child bearing years, I am finally able to have the clarity, confidence, and awareness how to have sex the way I fully and completely desire. Although I have had sexual experiences that were powerful and satisfying throughout the years, the way I approached sex was at the mercy of my subconscious patterning, family influences, and how our culture informed me of what sexy looked like, how a woman should behave, how a woman should perform to satisfy a man, etc. All of these things have taken me years to sift through so that I could really understand what I desired in each moment, based upon what truly felt good to me. It’s only now I feel my authentic sexual life is beginning. It’s as if the past few decades were for collecting data, making a lot of mistakes, and learning through suffering. Yet our world portrays a woman’s sexual life as a winding down at this time. Oftentimes, middle-aged women and beyond are portrayed as asexual, as if it’s inappropriate somehow to have a sex life.
How unfortunate it is that the wisdom we gain from our youth and our time as mothers to young children (if you are one,) is thrown under the rug. Rather than our elder years being a time of celebration and sexual freedom in a woman’s life, we are often dismissed as undesirable, stamped as “old”, with our erotic lives ready to be disposed of. A woman’s sexuality, regardless of her age, has everything to do with how she embodies it. It is the Way she walks. It is not how she is told she is supposed to walk. This superficial sexiness is something many of us spend years trying to navigate as we compare ourselves to magazine covers and others. When we look beyond the most gorgeous pictures, there often lacks a depth of confidence and knowing one’s self that can only be attained through life experience. In our golden years, we have the opportunity to embody so much more. Beyond the longing spurred by pro-creation, we can create something keenly spiritual, based on desire as an expression of our authentic truth. This expression is the arrival of many years of peeling away the layers, down to the bare nakedness of our essence. It is the masterpiece of a woman who is walking fully in utter vulnerability, knowing her transparency and receptivity are her greatest strengths. She is both the orchestral suite and the intuitive conductor, whose listening skills are masterfully developed to invite the subtlest expressions, in full range, from piano to fortissimo. The sexiness of this heightened state of embodiment is beyond age lines. It defies time.
When we integrate the experiences of our youth, we create a solid foundation built upon bricks of confidence. We know that we are the ones who define us, and not the world around us. We stop looking for external validation to define sexiness and performance ideals. When we bring this level of confidence into the bedroom, there are no stigmas about what is acceptable or unacceptable, there are no questions about what we desire, and there are no hesitations about requesting our desires be met by our lovers. If we stop nurturing our sexual vitality at middle age and beyond, we are missing the opportunity to experience some of the greatest pleasure and intimacy in our lives.
We have the choice to defy ageism and embody our sexuality in its fullest glory. We can blow apart the cultural stigma that implies a woman in her 60s, 70s, and 80s, lacks sex appeal. To do this, we must first believe it is true inside ourselves. We must embrace that our beauty and sexiness increase with time as we cultivate confidence based on our unique desires and practiced expression of them. When every step we take is with the absolute knowing this is true, we can look in the mirror and see our wrinkles as reflections of our histories that led us to where we are now. We can be gaze upon our weathered bodies and appreciate the markings like the glorious beauty of a canyon’s walls. We are after all etched in time by all the experiences of our lives, making us as remarkable as these cherished landmarks. If we go against the grain of what mainstream society advocates as sexy and desirable, we can create a new era of aging women as the apex of sexual expression.
Dare to Desire!
Kristen
(Written from the perspective of an American white woman. My frame of reference was both personal and what I experienced in mainstream media. The perspective of people of color on aging women’s sexuality may be a different norm than this. I also observe that the few older women that are portrayed as sexy are often women of color like icons J. Lo, Tina Turner, Shakira. While this remains consistent with cultural stereotypes of women of color, it also was quite the controversy at this year’s super bowl halftime performance!)