The media support the idea that grannies are asexual. Whenever we are presented with an older couple engaged in sexual intimacy, it is almost always as comedy. Why should older sex be so (uncomfortably) funny?

Women who have studied Tantra and Taoism have a conception of a sacred sexuality that is ageless. But these ancient systems only became accessible in the West during the nineties, so their profound teachings are still being integrated into and adapted into our life.

The key is that the whole understanding of sexuality and the erotic needs to be deepened and our personal wounds need to be healed. Midlife is a really good time to do this.

But most women operate exactly from the same set of memories, thoughts and feelings that ran their entire sexual lives. Everyone has an operating viewing point on sex: sex for reproduction, fun and pleasure, a sin, a need, a duty, for love or friendship. The sexuality they talk about is the same sexuality of their youth and adult years, a sexuality informed by old psychic thoughts and attitudes that they have not cleared and brought to consciousness and feelings they have not integrated.

Now, in post menopause, there is not a strong enough intellectual and psychological framework for another more sensuous and sustaining view – sex as something metaphysical, religious, spiritual, energetic.

Many boomer women talk about becoming a crone; but where should we seek the wisdom of the crone? And who said the crone is asexual?

There is a psychological resistance to the integration of what Dr Rachel Hillel calls the exile of "sacred erotic-sensual powers" from ancient feminine contents in the unconscious. She calls for the redemption of the feminine erotic soul in a book of the same name. in which she describes how our full expression and understanding of natural sexuality is fundamental to building a genuine female identity. The "erotic-sensual feminine psychic contents" are holy she says.

Perhaps the hard truth is that the sexual revolution of the 1960s failed to fulfil its promise of a real liberation because it offered an inverted version of a masculine prototype – assertive, goal oriented, manipulative. It might have been free, but it had no soul and no feminine sensibility.

What would a liberated feminine aging and aging sexuality be like?

It would seem that this is a challenge for those baby boomers who are not rushing into an asexual old age?.

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