SEXIS WRONG

Other expectations also entered my erotic likings. I began to
relish how easy and fierce penetration had become. I love
how he sinks into me, and I marvel at how much harder he
feels in that one initial push than he had in the several strokes
it used to take to penetrate me.
myself for battle. I’m filing away menopausal help tips—estrogen
suppositories! vegetable laxatives!—and I aim to preserve
my sex drive for as long as possible. I plan to be an
activist consumer, pestering my OB/GYN to assist me in my
crusade.
However Pavlovian, I find myself responding to these new
cues. I’ve learned to love the lube.
I have a new sense of sexual readiness, thanks
to this subtle acclimation-turned-eroticism. I
have a new mechanism on which to ping, and
it has retooled the act of—and the art of—fucking
for me. For now, those are enough new tricks to counter
dwindling abilities.
I know, too, that someday my middle will thicken, and my
wrinkles will crease deeper. Time will someday render me
older, then aged. But as long as I’m still capable of luring my
The lack of lubricant meant only one
thing: My cunt was getting old.
partner into bed, as long as we consume each other in love
and lust, I’ll consider life a frolic. A big, phat, naked frolic.
Time will, of course, continue its onward march. I won’t claim
to know what will come to me as perimenopause slides into
outright menopause or how I will react to it. But I am girding
And you know what? The rest of the world should just get
over it.
A MIDDLE-AGE MANIFESTO 49