Sex After 50: The Naked Truth, new column

My latest column, "Sex After 50: The Naked Truth" quotes Naked at Our Age author Joan Price, who's about to go on a book tour, Sugar in My Bowl editor Erica Jong and more on senior sex. If you like the column, there are buttons at the top of it to spread the word - as always, that's much appreciated!



Joan Price is 67 and wants you to know that sex doesn’t stop at 50—or 60, 70 or 80 and 90!

The author of Better Than I Ever Expected is back with a new book, Naked at Our Age: Talking Out Loud About Senior Sex (Seal Press), inspired by the many readers who wrote to her asking about how to deal with issues ranging from vulvar pain to breakups, illnesses such as cancer and Alzheimer’s, as well as “dating while older,” erectile dysfunction, divorce, grief, even hiring people for sex or erotc touch. The tone of the book is supportive but realistic; Price isn’t telling seniors to expect to have the exact same kinds or frequency of sex, but instead that if you’re adaptable, sex can continue (with yourself and others) for one’s entire lifetime.

Throughout the book, Price and a series of experts such as Charlie Glickman, Lou Paget, Carol Queen, and Candida Royalle offer tips related to specific queries in concise, practical responses. Price is a big sex toy advocate as well. “When I review a sex toy on my blog, I concentrate on what it does well (or is supposed to do well!), and how well it works from a senior perspective. e.g. It shouldn’t hurt arthritic wrists; it should last as long as we need without overheating or turning itself off, and more.”

Read the whole column

Joan Price on me, Candida Royalle and others not having sex

Naked At Our Age author Joan Price writes on her blog about me, Candida Royalle, herself and other women who are taking a break from sex. I'm so pleased I made this decision; I almost wrote "belated decision," but I was so mired in a certain way of thinking that it didn't even occur to me until there was no other choice, until it was so glaringly obvious that I was looking for love/lust/attention/affection in all the wrong places and had to go all the way back and look for it within myself.

So thanks to the Top Chef and a very crazy November, December and January for leading me to the light! I'm trying very hard to take better care of my health, my home, my finances and resurrect my flagging writing and realized how much all of that energy was being taken away by devoting it to people who I so didn't belong with and vice versa. They didn't take it away, I did, and seeing that so starkly, seeing how I thought I was so empty I should continue to pursue and privilege the most unavailable of people, after a series of extremely unavailable people, well, that was just the kick in the ass I needed.

I repeated those poor choices over and over because they were familiar, easy, because I didn't think I deserved all of someone, so I settled for the tiniest slivers they could offer, for as long as they were interested, which is the subject of another piece I'm working on, but like stopping the sheer wastefulness of time and money I was throwing into In The Flesh with nothing to show for it, I stopped that madness of sex and dating to preserve myself and find out who I want to be. If I ever go back to it, and right now I feel like I'd be perfectly content to not and look into alternative means of procreation, I want to do so as a better person, not as the broken fuckup I was and still, to a large degree, am. I will never be perfect, and I am not striving for that, but I am working on measurable goals so that I can assess how I'm doing, hold myself accountable. I'll be lucky if I'm there in November, but November is where I'm focused, when I can leave 35 behind and hopefully wrap up a year of thoughtfulness and action over things I can be proactive about. Maybe that sounds inarticulate, and the last few weeks have been challenging but I'm 100% positive they'd be way more challenging if I was still engaging in very bad-for-me behavior.

That's why I loved the phrase "crazy girl willing to work on herself" in the Sascha Rothchild Vows profile in The New York Times. As for me, I'm glad it's not too late to save myself, to work on the long and, yes, at times lonely, path to being someone I can be proud of. I was never going to get there by privileging sex and dating over, well, me. In an ideal world, they would complement each other, but I never found that ideal, and maybe I never will. I am okay with that; I'm looking for those ideals within myself, within the things I have the power to change. Other people and their feelings about me are always going to be beyond my power to change, and I finally recognize that. And it doesn't feel like an exaggeration to say that has made all the difference.