Post-Fertility Sexuality
I've attempted to dispense with the concept of post-menopausal invisibility, but now I feel fierce about overthrowing the narrative of socialised withering.
After a local screening of the movie “I Feel Pretty” with Amy Schumer, I stayed for a group chat in my village of Penastenan in Ubud. It had fast become my spiritual home, and I was feeling out the community, which consisted of my adopted Bali family and ex-pats en masse. We could all accept that each of us was actively searching for more meaning just because we were existing in this space together. What I wasn’t prepared for was the self-defeating narrative that poured from the mouths of my peers about what happens after the eggs have stopped hatching from our ovaries.
The movie was essentially an American “feel-good” about learning to love yourself in a world that judges women on their looks. The woman who had organised the screening did group body positivity work and felt that this movie started a great conversation. However, what I heard was a buy-in to the idea that once you’ve hit menopause, you better find some hobbies other than sex. What the actual fuck? And it didn’t stop there. The belief that other women (still fertile) were not seeing or hearing them anymore was also apparent.
I felt a rise in the seat of my power; my innate feminine was waking to the challenge of this misinformation ( I don’t even want to use the “p” word anymore). At one point, I rudely interrupted a woman who was trying to tell us she was “fine” with the absence of the sexual gaze from others and told her, “But there’s a next stage if you want it.” Later, I realised it’s not just a matter of wanting it or knowing it exists; you have to believe it is your birthright, and we are conditioned not to. I have pondered this for too long now and have to speak up…or write up, as the case may be.
I will not gallantly retreat to the swamp and become the witch of crone myths, waiting for my nose to meet my chin. Instead, I become more desirable because it is clear that I ‘know stuff’ now. I have been on this planet long enough to have learned that magic and mystery intensify the longer we are here, and active sexuality is far from the domain of the fertile.
Our vaginas become dry in the absence of estrogen, but it is not just estrogen that makes us wet. It is the knowledge that we are powerful that supersedes the estrogenic effect.
I would love to blame a conspiracy for our conditioning to socialised withering, but that won’t counter the suppression of the truest and most exciting version of ourselves. I would instead ask women to go deeper when the menopause symptoms threaten the very essence of who they believe themselves to be. At this point, I see us brandishing swords and slashing at the vines that choke the city of our becoming. We could view it as a test that some ‘Master of Games’ (read: God) has prepared for us so that we might come to the fullness of our understanding or as pushing back against that which perceives us as a threat.
We are vital, and never more so than now, not just as mentors and grandmothers but as sexual power sources in our own right. And as luck would have it, we are fashionable. It doesn’t take much of a paradigm shift to discover that what we know and offer is desirable to many. One brave toe dip and anyone can experience the hunger for a woman who is clear about who she is. Then, the best bit…we get to choose what we do with that…a decision that should first edify ourselves and then others. By this, I mean, “Leave the campsite better than you found it.”
I understand that many initial reactions to these concepts will include the belief that the maiden to crone voyage includes “rising above” sex, and I would ask you to reconsider. Why would the energy that drives us through so much of our life cease to have relevance just because we’re not here to make babies anymore? Maybe it has an even greater purpose now.
In my clinical work, I have sat with many distressed women during this transitional time in their lives. They question the reason for their ongoing existence and despair at the life force they feel leaching from their bones. Our society is conditioned to shun these women as they believe themselves to be deserving of this fate. This is the fucking conspiracy. It becomes a self-perpetuating convenience to the system.
And! Thirty-something-year-old women producing podcasts interviewing Sharon Stone using the measurement of the male gaze isn’t helping; it’s hindering. I speak of desirability, but this is not the currency; it is not the outcome we should aim for; it is simply an external cue should it be needed that we are probably on the right path.
As an example, after having a lot of sex, one twenty-four-hour period (as an aside…with someone much younger, because we’re not scripted to age ranges either), I took my well-oiled, feral self up to my village to find a different form of sustenance. After food and a documentary screening at my local, I made to leave quickly, knowing my feralness was reaching a peak. Out of the blue, I was approached in the middle of the restaurant by someone who wanted to declare my attractiveness to them…be assured, it had NOTHING to do with the way that I looked and everything to do with my post-sex energy. Many women would consider that the last thing they would want to have happen. That is not my point. Sex provides a richness to our energy that can be used for the greater good. That is my point. And some systems and structures fear this.
Sex, sexuality, creativity, vitality and power are all part of the same family…they exist on the same spectrum and in the same cycle. Denying one diminishes the others, and this is what we have been accepting as our ‘mature’ duty. I say fuck that. I want all the juiciness, power, and self-love available to enrich our one precious feminine life and, therefore, the lives of the people we love. I want to use it to move us forward, valuing connection over manipulation and edification over oppression. I want to turn each other on, not turn each other off.