{"product_id":"sex-and-the-seasoned-woman-isbn-9780812972740","title":"Sex and the Seasoned Woman","description":"A seasoned woman is spicy. She has been marinated in life experience. . . . She can be alternately sweet, tart, bubbly, mellow. She can be maternal and playful. Bossy and submissive. Strong and soft. . . . The seasoned woman knows who she is. She could be any one of us, as long as she is committed to living fully and passionately in the second half of life.\u003cbr\u003eIn her most groundbreaking work since \u003ci\u003ePassages\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Silent Passage\u003c\/i\u003e, bestselling author Gail Sheehy reveals a hidden cultural phenomenon–increased vitality in women’s sex and love lives after fifty. Sex and the Seasoned Woman is the story of an intimate revolution taking place under our very noses. \u003cbr\u003eBoomer generation women in midlife are open to sex, love, dating, new dreams, exploring spirituality, and revitalizing their marriages as never before. This is a new universe of passionate, liberated women–married and single–who are unwilling to settle for the stereotypical roles of middle age and are now realizing they don’t have to. As life spans grow longer and as societal constraints continue to loosen, older women–once free of the exhausting demands of young children, needy husbands, and demanding careers–find themselves ready to pursue the passionate life. They embrace their “second adulthood” as a period of reawakening.\u003cbr\u003eWritten in Sheehy’s singularly compelling style, combining interviews and research, this book gives voice to more than a hundred fascinating and colorful women. The inspiring stories tell of wives who reinvigorate their marriages after their children leave the nest as well as divorced, widowed, and long-single women who find new dreams and new loves. Sheehy delineates a crucial link between cultivating a new dream and reopening the pathway to intimacy and sexual pleasure. She also examines the latest medical breakthroughs addressing symptoms that have unnecessarily curtailed women’s sex lives.\u003cbr\u003eFrom women who find their sexuality reawakened by a younger lover, to couples whose marriages survive health crises and grow stronger, to women who finally find a soulmate in their sixties, to stories from seasoned sirens in their seventies, eighties, and even nineties, these portraits cover an enormous range of experience. In them, Sheehy locates the universal patterns that enable us all to recognize and understand our own lives.Bestselling author and cultural observer Gail Sheehy made history with the publication of Passages, which was an international bestseller, appearing in twenty-eight languages. She followed up with The Silent Passage, New Passages, and Understanding Men’s Passages. Sheehy is also the author of Hillary’s Choice, a biography of Hillary Clinton, and Middletown, America, about a New Jersey town devastated by the World Trade Center attack. A contributing editor to Vanity Fair since 1984, Sheehy is the recipient of the Washington Journalism Review Award for Best Magazine Writer in America.  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eTo schedule a speaking engagement, please contact American Program Bureau\u003c\/i\u003e at \u003cu\u003ewww.apbspeakers.com\u003c\/u\u003e  Chapter 1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    When Is It My Time?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      My first glimpse of what I came to recognize as a seasoned woman came in a  chance encounter at an Oakland restaurant. A popular entertainer who was  seated at the next table overheard me talking with my husband about my  book. She leaned over to ask what it would be about. “It’s about sex,  love, and dating among women over fifty,” I blurted out.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The entertainer’s dinner companion rolled her eyes: “She’s the poster girl  for dating and sex after fifty!”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The entertainer, whom we’ll call Bebe to protect her anonymity, was eager  to elaborate. Bebe had been raised in the South with parents who were in  love until the day they died. She had fully expected that she, like they,  would marry for life. And happily, she had enjoyed an extended sexual  honeymoon with the man she married in her twenties. It was in her forties  that Bebe began to notice the cracks in their marriage. “But it’s like you  see a hairline crack in the wall in your California house and you say,  ‘Not to worry.’ A couple of years later, you notice the crack is now a  quarter inch wide—don’t panic, it’s a plaster thing. Then one big shake  and the whole house tumbles down and you say, ‘Wow, how did that happen?’ ”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In retrospect, she understands. Her frustration with her marriage was an  echo of the complaint that fortyish husbands used before feminism went  mainstream: “I’ve grown and, unfortunately, she hasn’t.” In Bebe’s  marriage, as in many more today, it was the husband who resisted taking  risks to grow. It took her five years to get up the courage to ask for a  divorce. She took that final step a few months before her fiftieth  birthday.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “You must be crazy,” she told herself. “You’re going to spend the rest of  your life home alone watching reruns of The Brady Bunch.” But it wasn’t  like that at all. Quite the opposite, she says; it’s been the greatest  adventure of her life.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The sociologist in me cast about for a context into which to fit this  revelation. In fact, even while Bebe was settled into staid married life,  a new public square of midlife singles was being flooded with divorced and  never-married women and men. All the old rules were up for renegotiation.  What was it like out there? I prodded.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In the first couple of years after her divorce, Bebe said, she had felt  shell-shocked. “I went through a stage of mourning and learning to be  alone. But people kept coming into my path. I met men at the airport, the  grocery store, at church. Because once I started opening my eyes, there  were really men everywhere. It wasn’t like I was shopping, but they were  flirting with me, talking to me, asking me out.” Her therapist told her,  “You have a neon sign on your forehead that blares: Available.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Pretty young women with firm bodies scared me as long as I saw myself as  having to compete with them,” she explained. “But what I found is I’m not  in the same pool as they are. The older men who are looking for twenty- or  thirty-something hard bodies are not the men who would look at me to begin  with. These are two different universes.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Bebe’s first dating experience turned the usual calculations on their  head. He was a young man she met in church—and not just a little younger,  fifteen years younger than she. “I was flabbergasted,” said Bebe. “I was  thinking, ‘This gorgeous young man wants to go out with me?’ ” She bit the  bullet and asked him, “Do you really know how old I am?” He said he didn’t  care. She told him anyway: fifty. He didn’t seem fazed.   He said she was smart and interesting and he just liked talking to her; he  wanted to pursue it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I asked Bebe if it was a revelation to her to have sex with somebody that  young after living so many years with her husband. Her eyes danced and her  voice jumped an octave.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Oh, yeah! It was quite wonderful.” Bebe quickly qualified her  expectations. “I never looked at him as somebody I was going to spend the  rest of my life with. I don’t think he looked at me in that way, either.  For six months we enjoyed each other’s company and had a lot of fun. I  believe people come into your life for a reason. He was the one who came  into my life to say, ‘It’s gonna be okay, you can do this.’ Getting over  that hurdle was the big one.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Most of our grandmothers would find this a strange conversation. Half a  century ago, there were certainly exceptional 50-year-old women who had  lovers, and married people in their sixties and seventies who still  enjoyed each other sexually. But it wasn’t the norm. As the boundaries of  our life span continue to expand in startling ways, the social definitions  of age have shifted with the force of tectonic plates, altering just about  everything.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Not all of us are as flashy as Bebe, nor do we all want to be, but I soon  found that she is at the forefront of a trend. She is honest enough to  admit that she misses some things about marriage. “When it was going well,  we had great companionship.” But like most women over 50 who can afford to  walk away from a relationship if it has become a safe but hollow shell,  Bebe savors her independence. She may have a neon sign on her forehead  blinking Available, but it doesn’t advertise Looking for Husband. She is  looking for fun, companionship, maybe intimacy, but definitely satisfying  sex.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    •••\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Sex and the Seasoned Woman is a book about a new universe of lusty,  liberated women, some married and some not, who are unwilling to settle  for the stereotypical roles of middle age. We are rediscovering who we  are, or who we’d set out to be before we became wrapped up in the roles of  our First Adulthood, when our primary focus was on nurturing children,  husbands, or careers—or all three.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Millions of women today have struggled through all the predictable crises  of their Tryout Twenties, Turbulent Thirties, and Forlorn Forties, and are  bursting out into a whole new territory. Men, as they approach their  fifties and sixties and start feeling the push to retire, often get a  little shaky, wondering, Who will I be once stripped of the robes and  powers of my position in the workplace? Women have changed robes so many  times, they’re ready to strip down and start fresh, feeling a boost of  independence, exhilaration about what could lie ahead, and a surge of new  powers.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    What makes a seasoned woman?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Time.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    A seasoned woman is spicy. She has been marinated in life experience. Like  a complex wine, she can be alternately sweet, tart, sparkling, mellow. She  is both maternal and playful. Assured, alluring, and resourceful. She is  less likely to have an agenda than a young woman—no biological clock  tick-tocking beside her lover’s bed, no campaign to lead him to the altar,  no rescue fantasies. The seasoned woman knows who she is. She could be any  one of us, as long as she is committed to living fully and passionately in  the second half of her life, despite failures and false starts.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Single boomer women like Bebe are not the only ones who are actively, even  aggressively, seeking romance again, declaring their right to sexual  satisfaction, and dreaming new dreams. Their boldness has caught on with  “ladies” of earlier generations who were taught that their role was only  to oblige their husbands and pick up after their children.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Margaret, an old friend and former radical who was still married to her  only husband and living in rural New Hampshire, confided to me how shocked  she was to hear stories from her contemporary female friends who are  divorced or widowed in their sixties or seventies. “They’re having  romantic escapades with young guys, they talk about erotic discoveries, a  couple of them have fallen in love again, but they want relationships  beyond conventional marriage.” Margaret still thought of herself as the  free spirit who had walked the wild side in the 1960s. “I was the rebel,  and they were the stick-in-the-muds. Now I’m the old married fuddy-duddy.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But you do not have to break up your marriage to change your life.  Long-married women are also waking up to the possibilities of  postmenopausal sensuality and proposing new contracts to shake the  staleness out of their relationships and release their deferred creative  energies. I met a California couple in which the husband had given up a  stressful career as an attorney to help his wife pursue her dream: opening  her own bookstore. Life partners who help each other feed and grow their  passions can enjoy the magnified rewards of a marriage revitalized in  middle life.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Counting Backward\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Just how old is a seasoned woman? I define it very much the way Auntie  Mame’s friend Vera did when asked, “How old are you, anyway?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Somewhere between forty and death.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It’s not over at 45 or 50, “it” being sex, intimacy, discovery of a new  identity and a new passion in life. On the contrary, it begins all over  again. Today, 50 is the start of a whole new cycle. You may have already  lived an entire adulthood, but now you are at the beginning of another  one—a portion of the life span that I identified in 1995 as our Second  Adulthood.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Women’s lives are long and have many seasons. As contemporary women, if  we’re healthy, we will likely be around longer than our mothers were. As I  first reported in New Passages, epidemiologists say that a woman who  reaches the age of 50 free of cancer and heart disease can expect to see  her ninety-second birthday.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In our First Adulthood, we are consumed with just getting from A to B to  C: pulling up roots from our parents, testing and proving ourselves as  provisional adults, developing the capacity for intimacy, gaining the  skills and credentials to support ourselves, and putting down our own  roots. Given the prolonged American postadolescence—which for many  middle-class women and men now stretches to the end of the Tryout  Twenties—the First Adulthood today runs roughly from the age of 30 to 50.  The years from 50 to 80 or 90 represent an even longer span. What to do  with all the time left? People who try to hang on for dear life to what  they had in their First Adulthood—the same dewy looks, the same  high-energy job, the same steamy sex—may become their own worst enemies. A  positive anticipation of our Second Adulthood allows for much less anxiety  and greater flexibility.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    A seasoned woman is not defined merely by her chronological age. Her inner  image, including the ability to shed many of the roles that defined and  confined her in earlier life, is equally important.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    By the time you are 50, you have probably come to know yourself pretty  well. You are better at separating possibilities from illusions. It’s  possible to learn to fly or start medical school or launch a cable TV  show—we’ll read about women who did—but illusory to assume that you can  keep winning air shows or delivering babies or looking as foxy on TV as  younger competitors. At some point you will probably want to change the  emphasis of your work and take on the additional role of teacher, mentor,  or guru.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Time is perceived differently after 50. People begin counting backward,  thinking in terms of years left to live. But that may be forty years or  more, and we can elect to make something magnificent of it. This is a huge  cultural shift, making possible what I call the Pursuit of the Passionate  Life.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    When you stop to think about it, you probably know a seasoned woman who  has embarked on a new life. Maybe it’s an old college friend. Or perhaps  it’s your own mother and you’re having a “Mom’s run wild!” reverse-roles  reaction. I’ve interviewed enough women whom I describe as WMDs—Women  Married, Dammit!—to know that many wrestle with a rhetorical question  almost as vexing as Hamlet’s dilemma: to leap or not to leap? Is it nobler  for a woman to stick with a stultifying marriage or better to step off  into the unknown? Or perhaps you’re widowed or divorced but not really  “out there”—and wondering what it’s like for women who do take the leap.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The Wild-Haired Years\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The widow who first came to my mind was Peggy, a professor of political  science at a prestigious college, whose story I told in New Passages. A  flaming redhead with an infectious laugh, Peggy waged five years of a  gallant battle with her husband, Chuck, against his prostate cancer. Once  widowed, Peggy was forced to learn to be alone. Her first solo vacation  she spent in the Canadian Gulf Islands, plunging into the chilly sea every  morning at dawn and rising, refreshed and tingling with life, like Venus  from the sea. “It made me feel like I could be a spicy woman again,” she  told me. “It’s ironic. When nothing bigger can happen to you in a negative  sense, you feel invulnerable. Since he’s gone, I’m more me than I ever  was. I dare more. My first question now is always ‘Well, why not?’ I call  it my wild hair. When I don’t have my wild hair, I’m sad. But when I have  it, there’s a certain elation.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    After passing her sixty-fifth birthday, Peggy met an interesting man at a  political rally. They saw each other a few times for dinner and  conversation, though “having another romance was the furthest thing from  my mind,” she told me. “But one day the fun-loving Peggy in me picked up  the phone on the spur of the moment and invited this man to go to Big Sur  for a weekend. I thought, ‘Well, why not?’ ”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    When Jack pulled up at her house in his dashing black Lexus, Peggy was in  jeans at her sink doing dishes. At the last moment, hearing her mother’s  censorious voice in her ears, she couldn’t step over the line. She kept  her hands plunged into hot soapy water and mumbled, “I can’t do this, I’m  sorry.” Jack suggested that it would be just a relaxing getaway weekend.  Peggy demurred: “I know, but we both know where this is going.” Jack kept  gently filibustering. She asked him to wait in the car.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “In a wild-haired moment, I grabbed the first thing I could find—a big  black garbage bag—and stuffed some clothes inside before I could change my  mind again.” When Peggy emerged from her kitchen, Jack wondered, No  suitcase? Had she chickened out after all? He just hadn’t noticed what she  was dragging behind her.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Jack laughed. He caught her spirit of spontaneity, and on their arrival at  the exclusive waterfront inn, he handed the garbage bag to the doorman  with a flourish. He watched with a sexy gleam in his eye as Peggy swept  into the lobby with the light-footed grandeur of a duchess.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Less than a year later Peggy agreed to marry Jack, provided they both  accepted an agreement: she would continue teaching, and each of them would  keep their own home and sense of community. Peggy shifted her emphasis  into creating reentry programs at local colleges for women who have been  divorced, abandoned, or widowed and have to start over again, as she had.  In their eight years together, she and her adoring new husband have  traveled just about every continent and shared adventures. Most recently,  they sailed the Croatian coast with Jack skippering and Peggy and her  children as the crew.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The most indelible change has been in Peggy herself: she hasn’t lost her  wild hair again, not for a moment.New York Times bestseller; Author of the classic bestseller Passages [quote]--The Washington Post","brand":"Ballantine Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46299921350885,"sku":"NP9780812972740","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780812972740.jpg?v=1767736403","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/sex-and-the-seasoned-woman-isbn-9780812972740","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}