Yeah, you go for it, Zimmer swingers
As a 12-year-old rebel without a cause in the 1970s, I thought that the best way to wind up the headmistress of my girls’ school was to demand sex education lessons. I organised a petition signed by large numbers of little girls in kilts and took it to the headmistress’s study. I handed it over with a rebellious flourish, pleased with my own audacity, but Mrs Fierz took one look and beamed widely: “Of course you must have all the sex education you want, my dear. Anything you want to know, just come and ask me.”
The result, of course, was that I remained profoundly ignorant of anything remotely concerned with “doing it” until I got some hands-on experience. Fierz, who at the age of ninetysomething is still happily married, was probably rather a good person to ask about the secrets of a happy sex life, but the idea of the woman who taught me maths explaining the finer points of 69 sent me straight back to the virginal pages of Bunty.
The outcry last week over the sex education DVD made by Janice Langley, a 66-year-old grandmother, for the Women’s Institute reminds me of my 12-year-old revulsion at the idea that grown-ups, especially teachers, actually took their clothes off and fiddled with each other.
Poor Langley, who has gamely offered up her time, pastel-coloured bedroom and sex toys to educate fellow members of the institute about the pleasures of masturbation, sex toys and porn, has been ridiculed and told by the Daily Mail to get back to jam-making. The retired sex therapist has been criticised for being an exhibitionist, for having a crinkly cleavage and for suggesting that couples who have run out of steam in the bedroom department might try a French maid’s outfit to rekindle passion. And yet isn’t it time that we got over our sniggers and celebrated the likes of Langley, who are trying to take the stigma out of overage sex?
Any newsagent is full of magazines such as Pink, aimed at girls in their teens or younger, which tell them “10 things to do with your tongue to drive him wild” or the “seven routes to your best orgasm ever”, but there aren’t many publications out there with headlines screaming about “10 ways to drive him wild without giving him a heart attack” or nominating easy-to-use sex toys for arthritic fingers or the best large-print erotic fiction.
So where are women and men of a certain age, who are not ready to swap sex for the Antiques Roadshow just yet, to get advice on these vital topics? After all, there are plenty of them: a study by Swedish researchers, published this summer, found that 68% of married men in their seventies and 56% of married women in their seventies were still having sex. Almost a third of those surveyed (31% of men and 26% of women) were having it once a week.
Langley’s DVD even contains a demonstration of the best way to coax a condom onto an elderly member – redundant advice, perhaps, for couples for whom contraception is no longer an issue, were it not for the fact that the group with the fastest growing numbers of sexually transmitted diseases is the overfifties. Between 2004 and 2006 there was a 37% rise in cases of chlamydia in the oversixties. And Langley’s “Never use a condom twice” is good advice at any age.
As the mother of teen and preteen daughters I am much more worried about a world where Woolworths sells Lolita beds and you can buy matching bra-and-panties sets for children as young as seven than I am about Zimmer swingers. Why do we smile at little girls in crop tops and protest when grandmothers go on YouTube to praise the benefits of a lunchtime quickie? Bratz dolls dressed like hookers are on sale in every toy shop, but we get all squeamish about an elderly lady in a white cardigan telling us that sex toys can be fun.
Helen Mirren caused a sensation this year when photographs appeared of her looking smokin’ in a bikini. No one expects her to have given up sex for Strictly Come Dancing simply because she has a bus pass. Tony Curtis is on his sixth wife, Winston Churchill’s mother Jennie married a man who was her son’s age at 45 and another who was three years younger than Winston when she was 64. Charles and Camilla are clearly having more than a cuddle.
Only in Britain, I suspect, are people considered dirty old men and women if they show any sign of friskiness after being handed their pension book. In France they have literary role models such as Colette, the first female member of the Académie française, whose novel Chéri, which is being made into a film with Michelle Pfeiffer, is a celebration of mature sexuality; in America the baby boomer generation is ageing disgracefully with Viagra, and Diane Sawyer, the television news anchor, is still voted onto the list of America’s sexiest women at the age of 62.
No, I think we should applaud Langley for talking us through the optimum sexual position to adopt if we have a paralysed arm after a stroke, for reminding us that masturbation does not give you hairs on the palms of your hands and that French maid outfits really do exist outside the world of the Carry On films.
There may be another – still more practical – use for the WI guide to sexual health, now that politicians are agitating for sex education to be compulsory in primary schools. There is probably some sense in trying to teach the facts of life to a group of bright seven-year-olds rather than to hormonal adolescents, although the potential for confusion is high. My seven-year-old was recently taken aboard the sex education bus at her school and shown a video. When that evening I said I was going to have a bath, she implored me not to: “I don’t want you to be sexy, Mummy.” It turned out the video had been full of brightly coloured couples in . . . bubble baths.
So if I were Ed Balls or whoever is responsible for the disgracefully high teenage pregnancy rates in this country, I would make Langley’s DVD compulsory viewing for the 12s and under – on the basis that it will put them off sex if not for life, then at least for the few years that it will take to erase the image of Langley and her “erotic powder” puff from their sensitive young minds.
In Dubai, sex on the beach is a criminal offence involving jail time; in Britain, sex on the beach is the stuff of delirious fantasy. Last week guidelines issued by the Association of Chief Police Officers suggested that its members should turn a blind eye to public sex unless a member of the public actually complains.
Instead of arresting couples enjoying themselves alfresco, the police are encouraged to “inform and dissuade” them. This is excellent news for fading resorts such as Blackpool or Skegness: what better way to spend a holiday with your loved one than by indulging in some public nookie under the pier with the added erotic frisson of being “informed and dissuaded” by a nice young man in uniform?
Presumably the chief police officers’ suggestion is simply a case of bringing the law into line with Big Brother. Entire television schedules have been built around the BB contestants fumbling under duvets. Indeed, in telly land the first two BBs were considered a rather poor show because there was no on-screen bonking. (The French BB got there faster,comme toujours.)
