What’s wrong with paying for good sex?

You of a certain age – you know who you are! You spent your teenage years fumbling having sex in the back of cars or hastily at home when the folks were out. Thank God you grew up in the era of the pill or many of you would have spent a fair bit of your life with more children and, dare I say, be a bit more worn out as a result.

Nowadays to explain to our grown-up children how things were in our adolescence is seemingly to talk about a foreign country and one that is so strange, so barren and repressive as to be in the realms of the imagination. Sex was available but generally hidden. The late `60s supposedly brought free love, with slogans of ‘make love not war’ booming from Woodstock and American television news. But somehow change was slow in Australia and, of course, just being able to finally openly have sex does not equate with good sex.

I have watched with interest two movies released into mainstream movieland. The first is How to Please a Women and the second Good Luck to You Leo Grande. Both deal with the potentially taboo subject of hiring a sex worker – a male sex worker for women.

The women are of a certain age, dissatisfied with the quality of the sex they have had or the lack of it in general. Lack of communication or poor communication impedes their lives. But they still want pleasure.

They speak to the need for desire and passion in their lives. They speak to a lack of effort on the part of their male counterparts. Poor body image, feeling no longer pert, beautiful or desirable also comes into play. Shades of Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth come to mind.

Society’s take on sex and older people

Society does not tend to speak of sex and older people. The young tell their story. Their passion and their beautiful bodies have dominated our screens and our advertising for eons. It will be like this for years to come.

Many people wrongly assume that the old no longer have sex or want it – let alone pay for it. Especially women. We rarely see older women in raunchy sex scenes. It is still often the older male with the nubile younger woman getting down and dirty.

But why not pay for good sex? Why is it that we tout the benefits of massages and pay quite a good deal of money for a total stranger to rub our bodies with oil, to touch us in such a sensuous way and accept that that is fine, while scorning the desire of some for paid sex?

Is it a coincidence that these films were produced at a time when baby boomers are ageing and facing the final downhill plunge into old age and decrepitude? Many find themselves alone through death or divorce. Through various circumstances, they may miss the pleasures of touching another and being touched. I hope these films spawn a raft of discussions about desire, pleasure and old age.

Should older women living alone feel awkward about wanting to be touched? Is that okay for older men but not older women? Why not share your thoughts in the comments section below?

Also read: What were you really thinking about at that school reunion?