Female baby boomers are well into menopause – and beyond; part of a giant wave of grey (even though the grey has been tinted somewhat).

You would think this generation of women, teenagers of the 1960s en route to their 60s, the so-called "liberation" generation, daughters of Woodstock, drivers of modern feminism, would have an original attitude to sexuality as they engage the challenges of aging today. In truth, in general, they don't!

There are more woman over the age of 50 in the world today than probably ever before in world history; 45 million US women born in the baby boom years alone are now doing the critical menopause passage, and 11 million UK women. Globally, age distribution in the older category is increasing in all the more developed countries.

Although this enormous wave of women are more self assured and economically empowered than any generation before and can look forward to a reasonable lifespan and quality of life , nevertheless there is also a faltering and a wilting.

The same generation who "benefited" from the extreme youth focus of the sixties simply don't know for sure how to age these days. The matter of aging female sexuality is fraught with old psychic shadows and it is haunting baby boomer women today. The old stereotypes won't do; and new prototypes aren't there yet.

"Our sexual appetites aren't lost as we age, it is the image of ourselves as sexual that we dutifully abandon to fit the bygone stereotype of patriarchy that regimented women's sex to accommodate the economic power structure ... and keep men's shoulder to the wheel of commerce and women's prodigious sexual power confined to childbearing", says Nancy Friday, author of the seminal book My mother, my self..

We are terrified of becoming ugly old hags. The word hagia, which means "holy" in Greek, was once a reverential title for wise and respected older women; it degraded to "hag". How did the revered and sacred come to mean old and ugly?

Historical images that have stereotyped post-menopausal women are awful and insidious. They infect our culture – and deeply affect our own self-evaluations.

In 16th and 17th century Europe, post-menopausal women were witches, defined as satanic and diabolically sexual. In the 18th and 19th centuries, they were either pitiful old maids or idealised ageing grandmothers - righteous, virtuous – and totally asexual. (Sexuality was contained within marriage and linked only to procreation.)

In the first half of the 20th century, post-menopause was considered a dangerous age filled with melancholia, "climacteric insanity'', and "remnants of infantility". Sexuality after menopause was considered pathological by medical definition, and neurotic by Freudian definition. Except for being a doting grandmother, life as she knew it pretty much ended.

This is the miserable menopausal milieu into which baby boomers were born. Then the doctors took over and menopause, and life thereafter, was totally medicalized. Menopausal and post-menopausal women formed a perfect client group for the growing medical profession – large numbers, ample finances, and vague symptoms. Sex was at least now considered "normal" if there was an interest, but there was no deeper evaluation of what this could mean.

Page 1 of 3 :: First | Last :: Prev | 1 2 3 | Next