French Women Have More Sex...?

An article by Pamela Druckerman in The Washington Post today, French Women Don't Get Fat and Do Get Lucky, bemoans an intriguing situation: apparently, American women past their 40s are just not getting lucky enough when it comes to sex. Yes, you read it right. American women past their 40s are just not as active sexually:

Through our 40s, we American women manage to arrange romps on a fairly regular basis. But the latest national statistics show that by our 50s, a third of us haven't had sex in the last year. By our 60s, nearly half have gone sexless in the previous year. Once we hit our 70s, most of us might as well hang up an "out of business" sign. (Needless to say, men fare much better.)

Apparently, This lack of sexual activity is not intentional. Among the reasons provided for this dilemma are: lack of partners (men die sooner), "sexual conservatism," an obsession with youth as equating sexyness (a dilemma that keeps putting younger and younger girls as sexual objects in our society), and a lack of seeing oneself as a potential sex partner.

Druckerman compares American women to their French counterparts and notes that in France, while all those other situations exist, women don't report this lack of sexual activity. It seems that French women flaunt it, get it, and love it. Not to mention that they might be less picky about their partners, and don't have a puritanical background that sees the flesh as temple of temptation and sinfulness as we might do on these shores.

Hmmm... provocative piece certainly.

I tend to believe that our obsession with sex in this society is so warped that it creates unhealthy attitudes and behaviors, if not downright nutcase perverse outcomes: witness how many folks seem to live repressed, hidden, angst-ridden secret sexual lives that then explode in public, middle-school teachers that seem to have no boundaries with young boys, coaches and music instructors who fail to see boundaries with their young charges, the belief that sexual congress must be the equivalent to mystical ecstatic bliss as presented in movies, the delegitimization of alternative sexual identities (and the irrational fear that they arouse in so many), the panic that drives so many to essentialize and objectify homosexual men only as sexual "vampires," and lesbians as threatening masculinity, and of course the increasing sexualization of younger and younger girls in media... So, it does not surprise me that in our society we're pretty screwy (excuse the pun!) about sexuality.

But I don't know if the notion that men are getting so much more sex than women is right either. Sure, men are considered elegant, suave, and attractive in their older years. Supposedly, a bit of gray and a handsomely weathered face still renders men more desirable. By all accounts men in their fifties seek and obtain younger sexual partners with far more ease than women in the same age-range. But I'm not sure it is as easy as all that. I have friends who would say that women are just getting their comeuppance. That in fact, they are paying for all those years that they denied sex to their husbands. Ask any of my 40-year old married friends about sex and I bet their response will be the same: they're not getting enough -- their wives don't seem to like it -- frequency is a problem. Heck, most studies or reports I've read on this issue agree that men suffer the lack of frequency in marriage (they expected otherwise), and that women just want to cuddle instead of doing the bunny hop. Hey, I've heard the cuddle thing also. I don't know how single middle-aged men fare, but married men (and women) seem to have similar complaints. Are we just wired differently? Men just have tons of testosterone driving them early on, only to lose it past their 40s? Perhaps women turn on later in life. Is it that simple?

The answer? Who knows. Well, it is probably fairer to say that any answers are complex. Unfortunately, judging by our media products we seem to believe that making more shows that hyper-obsess over sex (not intimacy), render women sex-crazed vamps, men sex zombies, and younger kids objects for sexual consumption is the way to go. The producers of those shows seem to believe that they are tapping a "healthy" sexuality just because it "opens" the gates of repression. Eliminating repression is a good thing, and those shows that portray women as sexual beings with control over their bodies, desires, and life choices might be a place to start... if they were more than just fodder for the usual heteronormativity of our society, the shallowness of the relationships depicted, the continuing pitting of women and men against each other, the fighting over the objectified prize of sexual conquest, the faux-liberation it sells young people (the audience for these shows) who are in effect just consumers of an advertising culture that feeds them inanity in heavy doses...

What is the alternative? Baudrillard might have told us that we live in a desert of the hyper-real, there is no "real" we can access. Sex has always been virtual, and all we have is simulacra, upon simulacra, upon simulacra. Like genuine faux leather, we've welcomed and embraced genuine faux sexuality which is more real than real precisely because it is a more intensely mediated virtual experience. I'm an optimist however, and I believe we can do better, even if it means learning to speak French, playing Edith Piaf singing La Vie en Rose, and taking our vacations in France. We might never escape the endless cycle of misrecognition that shapes our psychosexual personas, but we can learn to be mindful about our relationships, about what we consume, about the mediations and spectacles our media produce to facilitate our consumption of ourselves and others as objects, and the simplifications we make. Above all, we can learn to be more mindful about treating each others as ends and not just means.

Comments

[donna]

Perhaps it's the difference in a culture that values "women" vs. one that values "girls".

American men who want younger women simply have no idea what they are missing in an older, sexually experienced woman. ;^)