Ladies fuck too: why no one talks about how women enjoy sex after 40

• SARA POLO

  @sarapolo

  Madrid

• ILLUSTRATION: INMA HORTAS

Updated Monday,5June2023-21:22

• Share on Facebook
• Share on Twitter
• Send by email

Comment

"My sex life had a turning point when I left him with my boyfriend, at 35. It was an explosion: I discovered casual sex. I said to myself, 'This is my thing.' I don't know if with age I've become more or what, but now I'm not ashamed of it."

Veronica is not actually called Veronica, but she is 46 years old, single, has no children and lives in Barcelona. He goes from euphemisms to describe his sexuality, rediscovered when he gave it up for lost: "I like to feel a good tail inside."

If Veronica indulged in pleasure in her thirties, Salomé did it at 41 with a certain Pep, also after separating: "Before I met him I thought I could live without sex." Luz, on the other hand, has always considered herself "a sow and a", but at 44 she has decided to release her boy in the benefits of sodomy: "I think it is wonderful".

And so, up to 27 forty-somethings relate under pseudonyms how they live sex when they were supposed to live it no more; or at least, not so much; or not so good. The new book by Adaia Teruel does not mince words, not even in the title: Mujeres que fucking (Libros del KO). Short and at the foot.

This compendium of interviews was involuntarily conceived in a liberal club in Berlin on the day of the 40th birthday of Kalvo, "lover" of the author, father of her two children and who continues to "give her the best orgasms". There in the KitKat, under the slogan "high-level perversion" and to the rhythm of techno, Adaia Teruel realized that she still had a whole world to explore. "I started asking myself, 'Am I a sex addict? A? A pervert?'" And of those doubts, these pages.

"I started talking to people my age and noticed that there was still a lot of shame," she says over the phone. "We've been told that men have more desire than we do and I wasn't at that point. I wanted to know the stories of women like me, like my sister, like my neighbor."

Find out more

Why we don't know how to make love.

Philosophical guide to getting the perfect powder

• Writing: REBECA YANKE Madrid

Philosophical guide to getting the perfect powder

Have a 'squirt' and reach the supreme climax.

New myths and legends of orgasm in the XXI century

• Writing: REBECA YANKE Madrid

New myths and legends of orgasm in the XXI century

She started with her friends, expanded to the friends of her friends and when she wanted to realize she had been offered a stranger in a little note slipped on the table of a cafeteria: "In case you need someone else", and a phone number. It is one of 27.

From the comfort of the sofa of his house, at the epicenter of his intimacy, sprang the raw and tongueless stories, like life itself, which Teruel has transcribed almost as it is, with its "turkeys" and its "tails". "There were times when I didn't know if I was a journalist or a therapist." Recognizes. "With someone close you are embarrassed to open up so much, they can know your partner, but before a stranger it is like uncorking a bottle: everything sprouts." And what sprang up was liberation after the taboo was broken.

"This book is not an anthropological study on sexuality, nor a journalistic investigation, in it not all women or all realities are represented," warns the prologue, almost as in a prospectus. Also as an invitation to fill a gap. A lot of study on the sexuality of young women, some on old women... Why doesn't anyone talk about how the ladies fuck?

65% of women fake orgasm with their husbands, because they will no longer fake

Lara Ferreiro, psychologist

Lara Ferreiro calls it "the silent ghost". The psychologist expert in relationships rebels against the "biological model" that she detects too often on the couch: "It gives the impression that women are reproductive machines, and when sexuality has fulfilled its function we turn off." The two most repeated questions in her practice are "how do I know if I've fallen in love" and "how do I know if I've had an orgasm." We're going badly.

Ferreiro divides his patients over the age of 40 into two groups: active and voided. The first could star in the pages of Adaia Teruel's book: "They no longer hide who they are. 65% of women fake orgasm with their husbands, because they will not pretend anymore. They are assertive, know each other a lot and enter a time of sexual maturity with much more security. The pressure of being a mother has disappeared and the desire to experiment appears."

Adaia Teruel, author of 'Mujeres que fuck'Pau BarrenaAraba Press

Many start a new life after a divorce, not in vain separations grow every year at a rate that reaches two percentage figures, but others do not. Others just need to explore. "People think that open relationships are only considered by young people, and not at all." Word of Ashley Madison's advisor, for more inri.

The annulled, on the other hand, make the psychologist raise the tone to the phone: "I get bad," she says. "A lot of factors come together. From hating their bodies, often because their partners have taken care of it, to the fear of aging, the annulment in pursuit of dedication to others, children and grandchildren, and also a certain internalized ageism: sex is for young people.

Megan Maxwell, the best-selling Spanish novelist in the last decade, knows a lot about breaking sexual clichés, destroying them one after the other. By day she worked as a secretary, and by night she wrote romantic stories. For 12 years, nobody wanted to publish it, until in 2009 Planeta said yes. Three years later the phenomenon Ask me what you want arrived in bookstores: it had crossed the barrier of eroticism and opened the door to an army, the Maxwell Warriors, thousands of women willing to let their imagination fly... and to realize their innermost desires. The author was then 47 years old.

With age the shame is removed and you begin to ask for what you want without fear of what they may think of you

Megan Maxwell, writer

"Of course I feel a great responsibility," the writer admits on the phone. "When my protagonist wears a tattoo I know that many readers will do it, and when I describe a sex scene I have to be very careful because many will try to recreate it at home."

He knows because they tell him. The best-selling author sets aside several hours a day to chat directly with her Warriors: "In the morning, at noon and at night." And yes, of course, they also talk about sex. "For some time now, women know very well what we want, we no longer feel that shame of our mothers. My generation likes sex, we like to learn and talk about it. With age, your shame is removed and you start asking for what you want without fear of what they might think of you."

Science confirms Maxwell's empirical intuition. Women reach their climax of sexual pleasure in their second mid-thirties and maintain it until age 55, according to a study published in the Indian Journal of Psychiatry. Then, hormone levels drop and with them, desire, although sexuality continues active until death.

Lidia says in Mujeres que fuck: "It may sound like a cliché, but that the sexual fullness of women arrives when they turn 40 is a truth like a temple." She shares the affirmation of Monica Branni, psychologist and sexologist of the online store of erotic toys Platanomelón, and goes further: the over 40 generation is more open than the under 20. "The elderly have experienced in their youth a greater social mobilization that in recent decades has been extinguished. Despite the stigma, they have been much more unleashed when it comes to building their sexuality, but now they are eager to learn, to change their way of understanding sex and to indulge in more lax practices.

The CIS dedicated three surveys to analyzing social and affective relationships in Spain after the pandemic, and in the third, published this spring, some data pointed to a paradigm shift: 41.4% of Spaniards agree that sex can be maintained outside the couple and a slightly higher percentage, 47.4% believe that a person can maintain two or more affective-sexual relationships at the same time. In both questions, the age group between 35 and 54 years was above average. There was no difference between men and women.

"There is a moment in life when we let go of the obsession with having very stable partners with sexual dynamics focused on performance and we give ourselves to enjoyment. A much more fun idea of sex is reborn in us," says Branni.

More and more patients pass through Lara Ferreiro's office looking for advice to open their relationship. Many face the famous empty nest syndrome, which also has consequences for the couple: "When the children leave home, the parents have to regain intimacy. Many attempts end in divorce because the main link was upbringing, but others are oriented to the reconquest of the other, now that they have been left alone again, "says the psychologist. "Many women love their partner, but it represents home, comfort, and they need new incentives. More, after the pandemic, which has provided us with a unique moment to reflect."

I fuck much better now than when I was 20 because now I decide, this is the crux of the matter

Claudia, 47 years old

We wondered a few lines above why no one talked about how ladies fuck. A little over a year ago Jordi Évole tried to respond by bringing a group of readers of Megan Maxwell to his program. It was difficult for him to find anyone who wanted to "show his face" because there was "a point of shame" in publicly acknowledging that they liked the erotic novel.

"I feel like judged, I can't talk about these things because people think you're reading porn, not a romantic story," said one of the Warriors. "I was the same, I didn't talk either, but since I started meeting people it has become a very natural subject, as if we were talking about recipes," added another. It seems that there is someone who addresses the sexuality of mature women without taboos: themselves.

"Of course, we talk a lot about sex," confirms Maxwell, "Maybe not as explicitly as they do, we don't have to look like machotes, but among my friends it's always a topic of conversation." Her novels have opened new horizons in the lives of thousands of women. "Humanitarian work," he jokes. "They fantasize about what I write, they are encouraged to try new things, to go to swingers' clubs, some even read as a couple."

"I fuck much better now than when I was 20 because now I decide, this is the crux of the matter." It is very clear Claudia, the woman who fucks number 23, 47 years old, divorced, three children. "My ideal powder? Opening the door of the house, having an uncle push me against the wall, tear off my panties and fuck me with my hands immobilized. Now that I have discovered rough sex, when I practice it I not only enjoy, but I feel a total liberation."

Claudia, Veronica, Salome, Luz and the others have peaked in their intimate enjoyment past youth. So do Maxwell's characters: "If I write a sex scene of a twenty-year-old and another of a forty-year-old, the second is always going to be more uninhibited."

And he resorts to popular wisdom, to that of his grandmother, in particular. One day they were walking down the street and came across a handsome. The grandmother turned to look at him without disguise: "I am old enough to say what I want and I don't give a damn what others say." Good summary of that "ghost" that we have tried to make visible.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Learn more

• Sex
• practice
• society