We need to talk about desire
And what happens when you let it die ...
I have let desire die. I didn’t realise it had flickered away and I didn’t give any thought to what it might mean that it had. But I can see now it has left and gone someplace else, I’m not sure if I can get it back, nor what I would do with it if I could, nor even if I have the time for it anymore. If I could get it back, where would I put it?
It seems now, when I consider it, to have been extremely careless of me, negligent even, to allow this unfortunate situation to arise.
It has been some years. A Sahara, an Atacama, a Gobi of desire.
It stopped, just stopped. After that last relationship. I stopped, it stopped. And I stopped thinking about it. But what have been my options to actually do anything with any desire that might arise, at least for another body?
Over the past five years I have met precisely TWO single heterosexual men organically, in the course of being out and about (and I am out and about a very great deal, not least because of my Lola’s three-times-a-day-dog-walking requirements). Both of those single heterosexual men have been almost young enough to be my sons. One of them was a self-important dullard. The other was (is) fabulous, but, well, “hello son!”.
Some women take the option of exploring escorts – see, for example, Emma Thompson in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, fiction, film. And in fact, too – as in this article in tomorrow’s Good Weekend magazine (published with The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald newspapers … rush to your newsagent). The headline: “I hired a male sex worker for my 70th birthday. It didn’t go as planned.” (Spoiler alert: she got her AUD$1650 back.) Excerpts from the article:
“I have a good life with meaningful work, travel and loving friends but, without a partner, pets or children, I crave touch. As a psychologist, I know that skin hunger is an actual condition that can cause physiological and psychological distress.”
And:
“At 39, he could be my son. And while that was a little unpalatable, hiring someone who could be my grandson just felt wrong. ... I sent Mitch an email: ‘I want an orgasm for my 70th’.”
Yes, it is true, I have found myself idly Googling for similar, then slammed the lid of my laptop down as though I’d touched a bloody great huntsman spider.
Others, like my 50-plus friend Esmerelda* who not so long ago left a barren long-term relationship and embarked on a wild, year-long, hanging-from-the-chandeliers sexual odyssey via online dating apps, have paid not more than the price of a glass of wine or two to keep desire alive.
But there are so many others of us who long for rain but can’t see any possible way to make it fall.
A year or so ago, in the early days of the first incarnation of my newsletter and after I’d seen Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, I surveyed my readers (some of you reading this today responded to that survey, I’m sure) on the subject of “sex and the middle-aged woman”. For the statisticians among you, of course it wasn’t a representative sample or sample size but still, I got a few hundred replies and I think the results say something, if not a great deal, about the subject (and probably a lot about my readership!).
Topline findings:
90% of respondents were women, the rest men.
43.8% of respondents were single; 49.3% were partnered; the rest described their circumstance as “complicated”.
37.3% NEVER, EVER have sex; 17.4% only have sex every few months (I bow down with respect and awe to the 14.9% of respondents who said they had it several times a week).
60.9% of respondents said they would like more sex.
My unscientific conclusion, taking into account that more than a third of respondents said they never have sex and nearly two-thirds said they wanted more sex, is that there are way too many of us (let’s move this into the present tense) who have let desire die or who don’t know where to put our desire. (Of course, the no-sex or too-little sex issue is not only an issue for people who are single: In written comments for the survey, both the coupled and uncoupled shared stories of desire thwarted, suppressed or dormant.)
There is a reason I come to examine my personal desert now: It is the love scenes – they topple me. The exquisite ending of episode 1, “Lanolin” ... Birdie and Joe go away for their first weekend together. (Yes, sorry, bear with me, for the uninitiated, I’m talking about the new TV series based on my book again 🤷♀️.) They go to Joe’s shack in the country (of course, it’s not really his). … The wine-glass clink, the orange-red glow of fire cast over their dance of intimacy, the laughter, the looks, the swelling music (April Stevens’ Teach me Tiger), the slow first kiss, the unbuttoning, the touch. It happened. It really happened. And I have wept at this scene. It happened. And it was so fine.
That first weekend we had away – the hope, the humour, the excitement. It happened. And I feel in my bones what one respondent to my survey noted; that the lack of it over years feels “so wasteful … wasteful of pleasure ...” All the pleasure and desire and anticipation and excitement that could have been. The absence of it can’t have been good for me?
Can the desire be rekindled? And if it can be, where should we put that desire if we don’t have a partner with whom to attempt to relight a flame, or don’t have $1650 to throw at an escort, or would rather stick pins in our eyes than return to the badlands of online dating?
When I see my friend Esmerelda, I quiz her vigorously, desperate for answers. She is, she says, an intensely tactile person. Her long-term partner was not. She believes that, for her, the long-term mental-health ramifications of that were catastrophic. “I think it’s incredibly unhealthy for men and women not to be honest about this space,” she says. “There is a new generation of women over 50 taking charge of their sexuality but I would suggest it’s a small percentage.”
She describes what unfolded when she left her relationship after nearly two decades: “It was like opening a cage, I was wild, I was like a kid in a lolly shop – and making sure everything was red and green. I was starved. And I had a huge amount of curiosity, that’s my nature, and I’m not risk averse. I’ll be honest, there was always drugs and alcohol ... I wouldn’t call it sober sex. I’d suggest that sober sex is relatively unusual in this space.” Esmerelda had a very great deal of un-sober sex. “You can’t count them on two hands or two feet, I can tell you that.”
I tell Esmerelda that she’s not helping me at all. That she is not me, that I am not her and risk-aversion might well have become my middle name. She reconsiders her approach. True, she says, “I do need to stop having sex with random people because it’s not working for me.”
So, Esmerelda goes on, one of the best moments she has had in each of her recently-more-sedate weeks is a massage – a non-sexual massage. The full 90 minutes, a high-quality massage. And she suggests then, running dangerously close to cliche, that I should think about self-care, self-love. Nice sheets on the bed, make that bed every morning, run a bath, light candles, throw around scents – build a boudoir, she seems to be telling me. But there’s more: “Find self-acceptance, compassion for who you are and where you are in life.”
I remember then a question another friend asked me over negronis a while back: “What’s your masturbation regime?” I blushed fiercely, stammered, refused to divulge. “It’s essential,” she insisted. Right, OK, as I try to remember to remind myself to find self-acceptance, I will try to remember to remind myself to build a masturbation regime. I will try to remember to remind myself to be more compassionate for who I am in this 50-something-year-old body … 😫
And, digging through the responses to that survey, I find another woman’s comment:
“I go through occasional spells of masturbating regularly. Most of the time though, I’m not a sexual being. And the longer the drought lasts, the more unappealing the idea of rain becomes. I’d rather feel the sun on my face, a cat’s soft flank under my hand, the rush of water on my body when I swim laps. Sensuality has replaced sexuality.”
Here now in this anonymous woman’s wonderful words, are seeds of thought and hope. Perhaps there will be another person’s body, perhaps there won’t be. I can watch for one, be ready for it (I am not ready for one in any way), prepare for it, but perhaps it should not be a search but a sense instead – of slow-burning optimism, an open-ness to possibility, and, in a human body’s absence, an eagerness to explore sensuality instead of desire.
* Not her real name; of course it’s not her real name. But yes, my breast.
The biggest thanks to you!
I’d like to offer an enormous thanks to all of you who have signed up to Vamp, including those of you who have been able to support my work with a paid subscription. I’m sorry I haven’t been able to individually respond to each of you … I’ve had a head-spinning, inbox-overflowing couple of weeks! But please know that your support means the world to me and has given me hope that I can prove there’s an alternative and sustainable way to have a career in writing and editing. I’m starting to feel optimistic that Vamp can become an independent, reader-funded product that also draws on Substack features (including Notes and Chat) to create community. A few bits of housekeeping:
If you missed last week’s edition of Vamp, in which I wrote about how it really feels to have fallen in love with a romantic con artist, you’ll find it here.
You can listen to my Good Weekend editor, the lovely Katrina Strickland, interview me about the experience of my book being turned into a television series on the “Good Weekend Talks” podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
FYI, I had a great group chat with a bunch of you Thursday night as we watched the second episode of Fake simultaneously … I’m thinking of doing it again in the next couple of weeks … perhaps with a later episode. Any interest?
And finally, please email me if you have any questions, thoughts or suggestions about the newsletter. It’s going to take me a while to get into my Substack groove … there’ll likely be typos and probably other issues (my team is me, myself and I!) and I’m happy to hear if there are elements of the newsletter that aren’t working for you. It’s an organic, evolving, dynamic thing!
🎵Mood
I built a playlist, a Fake playlist on Spotify! It’s a bit of fun and includes the cool ’50s song, Teach Me Tiger, which is on the Fake soundtrack. (NB: This is my playlist, not the soundtrack … some of my faves that feel right at the moment.) Plus, plus, plus … so much other good stuff! Enjoy!
Vamp view
“The closest thing to a human being is a book” … this is stupendous, Fran Lebowitz is wonderful, the Oscar Wilde reply to a fan is fabulous. Gushing over.
Reading
A note to start here today: I was communicating with a reader this week who commented that some of the links I post are behind paywalls. Just FYI, I do try to find stories that are free to read, but as I explain on my “about page” (where you can also watch a video of me in my messy study), I believe that, if we can afford to, we should all try to pay for good-quality journalism and writing (thanks to those of you who have paid for a subscription to Vamp! Eternally grateful!). All this is by way of saying that sometimes, I will post links here that are behind paywalls … but hopefully, from the description/context I’ll share about them, you’ll get a sense of what the story is about and be able to make a decision then whether you want to subscribe to the news outlet or not to read the article in full. (I always have a subscription with The New York Times; a quick look just now shows me they have an introductory offer of AUD$2 every four weeks for the first six months or AUD$20 a year. I’m also constantly subscribing and unsubscribing from things so I continue to get a wide view of what’s being published.)
To start this week’s reading suggestions then, and unapologetically, a link to The New York Times and its “The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century”, as judged by novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics, book lovers and New York Times staff (judges included Stephen King, James Patterson, Sarah Jessica Parker and Karl Ove Knausgaard). They’re counting down, day by day, and so far have included Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (loved what I read of but my poor concentration and inability to remember characters defeated me … I’ll have to return to it one day), Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (fantastic), The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (gripping but lost me towards the end), Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (brilliant!) and Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (started it, loving it, put it down, got to get back to it). Oh for more reading time: there’s just so much on the list so far that I want to devour.
The late Canadian author Alice Munro’s Runaway (number 53) and Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (number 23) are also on the list. Some may be questioning their inclusion given the revelation this week that Munro did nothing when her daughter revealed she had been molested by her stepfather; Munro stayed with the man, what happened to her daughter had nothing to do with her, she said. In The Atlantic now, a story headlined “Alice Munro was a terrible mother”. But that, says the author, shouldn’t mean she should be cancelled: “At this rate, we risk throwing away the art and culture that define us. In the gray and nauseating light of the Munro revelations, we can perhaps see a different answer to the question of how to separate the art from the artist: We can exalt the art without deifying the artist.”
Ann Friedman is an American writer who for some years has produced the newsletter, The Ann Friedman Weekly. Loved her missive last week: she asked her readers for their “list of over/underrated things, as well as the things that belong in the Goldilocks tier of juuuuust right”. The answers were wonderful: among “overrated” – crop tops (oh yes!), Presidents, optimising your whole life, living in cities; among “rated exactly right” – oat milk, meditation, morning walks no matter the weather, naps, vintage, Aperol spritzes; and “underrated” – weekly group calls with besties, solo walks, middle age, building community, wine at lunch. (Click through to the link for many more cool over, under and just right suggestions.)
This is a marvellous exposition on ageing in Jody Day’s Substack newsletter, Gateway Elderwomen. (First published in 2016.) “I’m nearly 52 and men don’t notice me any more and it turns out that I mind that quite a lot.” There’s so much here: grief at her childlessness, celibacy, the ebbing away of a woman’s identity as a woman, ageing pets and ailing parents and how we look (“Why should I have to be flamboyant as an older woman just to claim the right to take up space?”).
In The New Yorker, an interview with the creator of the comedy series Girls, Lena Dunham. “… she was reluctant to cast herself in another leading role, in part because, as she put it, ‘physically, I was just not up for having my body dissected again’.”
Food and drink
NEGRONIS: A most excellent educational video: Everything you wanted to know about how negronis were invented but were afraid to ask (via Instagram).😭😭
OMELETTE: If you’ve watched The Bear, you’ll know about the omelette. My brother, who is a lovely, if extremely pedantic a cook, made it for me recently. It’s insane. (You pipe creamy Boursin cheese into its centre.) In her Substack, culinary producer for the series, Courtney Storer, outlines how to make the omelette.
PARSNIPS: My brilliant friend Kerryn grew this agricultural-show-appropriate monster in her amazing garden in country Victoria. Her caption to this pic: “I tried to take a pic of this parsnip with my face for scale but I couldn’t fit everything in the frame. I see a LOT of parsnip soup in my future.” Given it’s parsnip season in supermarkets and fruit and veg stores across the land, I asked Kerryn how she might exactly make such a soup.
Her reply: “I don’t have any parsnip recipes worth passing on. Still experimenting. Still looking for inspiration. But it’s hard to beat mashed parsnip with loads of butter and cream (although it’s still surprisingly good made with milk alone. Cook the parsnip in plenty of very salty water. Drain and blend with a stick blender. Whiz in the butter and cream. At this time of year it’s precisely the right side to go with a simple piece of fish, or a thick sausage.” The monster in question? It ended up partly as mashed parsnip and partly in pea and ham soup but, moments before I hit “send” on this email I checked in for updates: “I’m having the last of the mash tonight with a fat pork and fennel sausage from the local butcher, and a rocket and hazelnut salad – rocket and nuts from the garden.” (Follow Kerryn on Instagram for a glimpse of her amazing, currently wintry, garden which she has created from scratch almost single-handedly over the past decade. Of that process, she says: “Establishing a garden from scratch is 99% digging and shovelling and 1% planting. It’s not glamorous.”)
Travel
SYDNEY: Newly for rent on Pittwater – The Cottage at Trincomalee (on Airbnb). For non-Sydneysiders, Pittwater is a drowned valley estuary 45 minutes north of Sydney lapping the stunning Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park. Some places on Pittwater, like this cottage, are only accessible by boat. (Pittwater map here.) If you’re visiting Sydney, I’d really recommend you try to fit in a couple of days on Pittwater. If you’d rather float, this chic houseboat, The Salty Dog, could be the thing. Or catch the ferry across to Great Mackerel Beach and stay at The Little Black Shack.
LONDON: Catching up on this, a bit of fun: Cygnus, The train carriage designed by the brilliant film director Wes Anderson for the British Pullman, a private luxury train that “that rumbles across the rails all over England. Whether a murder mystery lunch through the Kent countryside or a sparkling dinner hosted by an up-and-coming guest chef, a ticket in Cygnus means you can experience the Golden Age of Travel while appreciating the beauty of modern design”.
Home and garden
Via Instagram, Le Jardin Secret … Mariko’s private garden in Japan’s Kumagaya City, Saitama Prefecture … 1200 roses … exactly what comes to mind when I hear the words “secret garden”. Longer video here.
Via Instagram and also on The Design Files website, two fabulous apartments in the same South Yarra, Melbourne, building … adore “Gwynneth’s place … especially her art and her balcony. As one commenter notes: “I want to befriend Gwynneth immediately!”
And, via Instagram again, another superb northern hemisphere garden … and, swoon, the snail 💕
Oh … and this Danish architect’s house! Wonderful!
Fashion
I’m keen to catch this new documentary on the designer John Galliano. The Guardian writes: “… [it] chronicles Galliano’s rise and fall and rise with a more distanced, critical eye than you may expect from a film co-produced by Vogue publisher Condé Nast. There’s due appreciation of his distinctive design sensibility, but sharp scrutiny of personal flaws enabled by an unruly, permissive industry.” (The Guardian article also references other great fashion films; I can’t see where High & Low might be showing or streaming in Australia yet although the article says Mubi will have it. Let me know if you see it’s on or streaming somewhere.)
I can’t afford them, it’s nutty consumerism, but give me my moment: if I’d drunk too many glasses of wine on an empty stomach I’d be reaching for my credit card for these Dries Van Noten babies. (I’m a sucker for green; I’m a sucker for seude.)
Plus: The AUD$72,000/GBP37,800 bridesmaid’s dress: earlier this month at Christie’s auction house in London, the Sir Norman Hartnell frock worn by Lady Elizabeth Longman when she served as a bridesmaid at Queen Elizabeth II’s wedding in 1947 was sold. There’s a fab article on the Christie’s website about the dress: “… [the eight bridesmaids] wore bespoke ivory dresses featuring scoop necklines, ruched bodices and flowing tulle skirts. These were embellished with clusters of satin flowers designed by Flora Ballard and woven by Warner & Sons. Floral satin headdresses with ears of corn, lilies and silver lamé leaves complemented the look.” (But, ears of corn? Symbolism?)
Event
My god, if only I was in Melbourne this weekend (and, truth be told, where else but Melbourne would an event like this happen!?) … I’d be here in a flash: Travels in the Lands of Ephemera, Saturday, July 13, 12.45-5pm, Camberwell Uniting Church. … an Ephemera Symposium. It includes a journey through an illustrated cookbook collection (the kitsch, the vintage and the counterculture) with graphic designer Saskia Ericson (she has a great Insta account) and “Edwardian Burma in Postcards, 1901-1914” – “from government buildings to royal palaces, British churches to Burmese Buddhist temples, as well as snake charmers, local tattooists and Burmese princes” with Tim Glanville (presumably a Burmese ephemera fancier?). And head here for the Ephemera Society of Australia’s Instagram account.
Socials
(via Instagram Threads; story here)
(via Threads 🤬)
(via Instagram and, behold the comment from @honeyboom1015: “Is it not a universal experience for women to yearn to purchase land and build a matriarchal community with their friends?!”)
(via Instagram … I can’t urge you enough to click through to read the rest. … “Today I can finish a 500-page book in two days. If I smoke a blunt first, I swear to God I can picture the whole book like it’s a movie.”)
(via X; background and more here; in April, a complaints committee found that the lawyer representing Wilson’s rapist had abused his position. Wilson claimed that the lawyer had “failed to comply with rules designed to protect women in rape trials from inappropriate questioning about their sexual history and character”.)
(via Substack Notes – my own actually!)
(via X)
Stolen words
“I think that maybe if women and children were in charge we would get somewhere. It is almost impossible to have any faith at all in the adult male these days; he continues to boggle everything as he always has boggled it.”–American cartoonist, writer and humorist, James Thurber in a letter to Charlotte’s Web author E. B. White, January 20, 1938 (in The Thurber Letters: The Wit, Wisdom and Surprising Life of James Thurber).
I am very happy in my post-menopausal desire-less state. I always felt an underlying sadness about my perennial singleness but now I'm free of any interest in men other than as people who might be interesting to talk to. It's wonderful - like being a prepubescent child except grown up with my own house and money! What's not to like about that? The icing on the cake will be when I'm retired and can do whatever I want all the time - even better :)
thank you Stephanie for articulating what I, and probs a lot of women, feel about desire. I remember completing your survey. I put my disappearance of desire down to a menopause thing, don't really know, but it seems unfair to me that part of my body has "shut down" while men my age ( mid 50s) still have an active libido. sigh.