Years ago I recall a Playboy Magazine cartoon by Erich Sokol I think. On it an elderly lady was sitting on a park bench talking to a young girl in a miniskirt (this was in like 1972 or so), and the elderly women says “Don’t make the mistake I did, Go out there and fuck your brains out.”
Of course in the day, it was a particularly jarring idea that old women had ever thought of recreational sex. That toon stuck in my head, and here 40 years later I still remember it.
I looked and looked for that cartoon online, but could not find it. So this is my version.
Life is a one-way street. One may project what one's future will be like or one might reminisce about what ones past was like; however, one may never go back and actually relive the past. I, like so many people, have tried to do the next best thing by recording in words and paper some of the most pleasant events. Why are weddings and birthdays and vacations so well documented in photos and videos? Because we like to relive in our minds those happy moments.
My home computer has a pair of large monitors hooked up to it. I use one for navigation and such and the other for word processing. One day I changed my Windows wallpaper collection to a directory called “beach fun”, it is a collection of about 400 of our family beach photos. Now, our family beach photos are more interesting than most, in about half of them Mom appears either topless or nude on the beach. These photos were primarily taken from 1998-2006 when the kids were in elementary school and mom was absolutely stunning looking. As I worked on my writing on the right screen, many of the photos that came up on the left screen I had not seen in years. Several times I just stopped and looked at how beautiful she looked. One in particular, was a waist-up photo on a bright sunny public beach. She was covered in coconut oil causing her bare breasts to shine. If I didn’t have the photo I’m not sure I would believe boring old me ever could have a wife that looked that amazing.
Perhaps the most striking thing is that in most of those photos she was in her 40’s, not her teens or 20’s. We, like many people, did not break free of the puritanical codes until we were in our late 30’s.
I got married at 24 as a virgin, and she at 25 had only one prior sexual partner before our wedding day. We were told that sex before marriage was a sin and so we both spent our most sexually potent years fighting our bodies. Sexuality was a curse and cause of pain and frustration in our teens all the way up to our wedding day. Even that didn’t end the frustration, for it was not too long after that the mismatch between her sex needs and mine frustrated both of us for the next 8 years until she took her first lover.
So for 20 years, we bought into the sex-negative approach that sex outside monogamous marriage was inherently wrong. Even after we got married, the differences in our sexual needs was a constant source of pain and conflict. For both of us, from our mid-teens to our mid-thirties our sexuality was a source of pain and frustration when it could have been a source of pleasure and fulfillment. Literally from the first month we were married, she felt short-changed. She’d limited herself to almost no sexual experience before she got married because of the promise of great sex once she was married; yet once she had that wedding ring, she found out that her husband (me) was not up to sex morning, noon, and night as she’d expected.
She began to ask herself, what was the big payoff for resisting her sexual desires?
Even still she had a hard time believing I was serious the first time I told her that if there was someone she was sexually attracted to, and an opportunity presented itself for her to act on that desire, she was free to have sex. Even after she finally believed I meant what I said, and she decided she would do it, it took her several years to arrange her first extra-marital sexual experience. She was nearly 35 before she, for the first time in her life, was getting her sexual needs fulfilled. She’d wasted the two decades that her body was the most ready to provide sexual pleasure on demand.
For both of us, the years she and I resisted our sexual desires, were the very years our bodies were at their peak of physical condition. Young people don’t consider how many physiological things must work to have an active sex life. Sure, the sex organs themselves can have problems, but just as important are knees, back, heart and other “non-sexual” parts; and they all are subject to problems that can limit or even end one’s sexual activity. When I wrote the first version of this essay over a decade ago, I was in the middle of five months of surgery/recovery on my feet. It had been two months since Paula and I had had sex. It was just impossible for me to get into sex when it hurt to move my legs. However, because we had an open marriage, she did not have to do without just because I was ill.
As I look back, I find it sad that we listened to the wrong people for so long. Over the years, I’ve talked to a lot of people (mostly women) at sex-positive venues about their sexual history. I’ve always identified with women better than men, and most of my close friends have been females. Talking to people at swing clubs and resorts, I find that our history is very common. I don’t think I’ve ever met someone at open-sex venues who had an active sex life in high school. From my experience, it appears that the girls who were the hot girls and cheerleaders don’t become swingers. I’m not sure why. I’ve met many who say they wanted to have sex in high school but were either prevented by parents/religion or they simply thought they were unattractive and guys wouldn’t want them, so they didn’t have sex. Or, like Paula, both things were at work. Paula’s story of “discovering” she was sexy in her late 30s/early 40s leading to exploring all the marvels of sex she’d missed is quite common.
I did get to know one woman who had been the hot cheerleader in high school and trusted me with her big secret. I knew her when she was in her early 40s, and she was still very pretty. She’d lived in the same town all her life and had gotten married right out of high school and had kids right off. She was very active in her Southern Baptist Church and was the picture of the “good” Christian wife. At the time, she had been a para-professional at the school where I worked for several years, but she was just starting college to become a teacher. Circumstances brought us into contact a lot and I suspect I am the first male (other than her husband) she’s ever been close to. We became close enough that I trusted her to tell her about my little glamour photography business. She was very interested that “good women” paid me money to shoot photos of them in the nude. Though we talked about her posing for me several times, she just couldn’t. I could tell she liked the idea, but it was simply not possible in her world. It was in the course of those conversations she revealed to me that she’d had a lot of sex all through her high school years. She brought it up several times and it seemed clear those were fond memories for her, but still it surprised me when one day, very quietly, she said “All the best sex in my life was when I was in high school.” There was pride in her words, but a great deal of sadness too. For her, good sex had ended when she was still eighteen years old.
Looking back, I’ve never had a woman tell me she regretted consensual sex in high school… well not in private. I have heard women in religious settings publicly express regret so as to get the approval of the group, but I’ve never had one say that one-on-one. I have had quite a few tell me they wished they’d known how pretty they really had been and had the courage to act on their sexual desires when they were in those high school years.
So Paula and I are not unique by any stretch. By the time we’d fully freed ourselves from our inhibitions, we were well into our forties. We couldn’t go back and reclaim our twenties and thirties. As much as we might have liked to be that twenty-something couple at the swinger resort who could sun all day, have a tryst before dinner, go to a party that night then fuck with friends halfway till dawn…. then do it again the next day fresh, and ready to go. Even as we entered our most sexually active years, we were already limited by our aging bodies.
I don’t bemoan that fact (very much).
All people should be free to enjoy their sexuality from their middle teen years forward. Paula and I can’t be twenty-somethings again, but we have for years encouraged those who are that age to wring out every pleasure their young bodies have to offer.
So ….. if you are younger than my wife and I, we endorse the advice in that cartoon, “Don’t make the mistake I did, go out and fuck your brains out.” …… and may we add, take pictures.