EROTIC ELDER
or
MY "DIRTY GODDESS" SELF

by Jeanne Shaw, Ph. D.

As I inventory the developments of my 7th decade the evolution of "Dirty Goddess" materializes first. This ripening occurs in me as shifting values and intense sensory awareness. I acknowledge and accept my crow's feet, drooping skin, full belly, liver spots, thinning public hair, graying head hair, and eyelashes pointing at my nose. Increasing nose hair is another story altogether. My willingness to be seen naked with a sagging abdomen seems easier now than when I was a firm 34-22-36. I look in the mirror each morning with increasingly less surprise at my maturing crone-self. However, I continue to note the incongruence between how I appear and how I feel alongside my decreasing ambivalence about aging.

"Dirty Goddess" energy (see Chapter 11 of Clarissa Estes's book, Women Who Run with the Wolves, Ballantine, New York, 1992), sexual energy, sometimes manifests in me as relational, sometimes as solitary. One time I want to play, engage, dance. Another time I want to connect only inside or with myself in nature. My current passion is bedrock desert and rocks. Being alone with my Dirty Goddess self or being with another person, I experience arousal with delight and exhilaration or with peace and serenity, depending on the context and my disposition of the moment.

When I refer to my sexuality I mean my internal experience of being alive. Although this experience may or may not include a genital component, it always includes a feeling, an energy for which I have no vocabulary. The closest I can come is referring to a re-creating and/or reclaiming my own aliveness in everyday living.

Feeling sexual may or may not include a partner for me unless I consider myself as a permanent, beloved best friend. The lack of readily available partners bothers me less than ever; I surprise myself by preferring my own company much of the time. I presently desire solitude more than I desire a partner. For me, being sexual does not depend on having a partner, it depends on my willingness to live my life fully. I spent a long time learning this.

I am still a bit surprised, at this stage of my life, how comfortable I feel with my own sexual behavior and sensory experiences. My sexuality this decade is without the familiar feelings of embarrassment, self-consciousness, propriety, awkwardness, inhibition. Primitive, self-full, and erotic energy seem natural and necessary. My sexuality no longer requires assessment, evaluation, or validation of a partner, although I do not discount the beauty of security and tranquillity in relationship.

As a young woman I felt inhibited sexually--meaning I often chose to be proper instead of alive--I believed I needed approval and whatever rewards being a good girl promised. My models were parents, movies, and music in the 1940s and 1950s which portrayed the ideal female as proper, young, naive, and heterosexual (e.g., June Allyson, Ginger Rogers) trying to be a non-sexual, dependent, good girl for Mr. Right(eous). Two divorces later I put to rest the belief that approval from others is necessary to my survival.

My decision to avoid "needing" approval from others was a major mid-life turning point. As a result, I began to feel increasingly alive and sexual. In my late 50s I felt unapologetically sexual. I still feel this way in my late 60s. Accepting that there is no longer any survival value to me of external approval frees me of unnecessary, deadening effort.

Ten or fifteen years ago as I was fussing with my hair and worrying about my appearance, one of my young adult children said, "Mom, at your age, what difference does it make?" The insinuation was that nobody would notice me, anyway. That was the day I realized I could get away with almost anything! Adolescent rebelliousness in the elderly dies hard, but nonconforming Crone energy lasts--and laughs--last). I now observe my Crone image in the mirror with relish, knowing that at my age, nobody suspects me of lewd, lascivious thinking (except others like me). Nobody notices me watching crotches and having inappropriate sexual fantasies.

Going unnoticed, when it first happened in my mid-50s, distressed me for several years. I now understand and take advantage of this mostly American phenomenon of ageism (seeing old women as unimportant and relegating us to an unused back closet). Not being noticed gets me in lots of places without getting me in trouble; and, if I get caught, well, I use to my own advantage the politic of being old in America.

Although I abhor the invisibility with which our culture endows us, and the negative values reflected in this fear-based attitude, I am working it to my advantage, and working it through for myself. For example, one of my favorite childhood fantasies was to be invisible at will. I dearly wanted to go to off-limit places, to see and do things I was "too young" to know about. After 50 or 60, opportunities for invisibility abound: I visit hospitalized friends hours past visiting time, nobody notices me. OK, it might be because I also wear a white lab coat, sometimes with a stethoscope hanging around my neck, but still, I get in there. Once I showed a sex film to a hospitalized old friend and his anxious wife, who told me later that they subsequently got their first good night's sleep in weeks (I didn't ask what they did after I left). Donning a white lab coat, I go into newborn nurseries and new mother's rooms to welcome my newest relatives and grandchildren. When apprehended, I simply say, "I am Dr. Shaw." However, even without a doctoral degree I would say this.

I occasionally use the men's room, not only because I am desperate, but because using available men's toilets makes more sense to me than waiting in a long line to the women's toilet. People in men's rooms seem to ignore me when I enter or exit from behind the closed door of a stall. I may, on occasion, go through a door marked "Authorized Personnel Only" just to see if I can still invoke my invisibility shield. I have carried on, unnoticed, with 100 people around me. I happily skinny-dip late at night in hotel hot tubs and pools where, most of the time, nobody notices or cares. I never ask permission when I know the answer. I prefer to risk doing it and getting away with it. The difference, however, between my crone energy and my 19-year-old grandson's energy is that my judgment is better. I rarely get caught and nobody ever gets hurt, injured or pregnant.

I am often inspired to reflect on the unlived aspects of my life by seeing my grown daughters living more self-respectfully than I did at their age. I had none of their brand of courage, aliveness, and self-regard at their age (30s and 40s), but I have it now (to their chagrin, sometimes). Although I do not regret my youthful mistakes, I appreciate being a hardy learner. I chose, long before I knew about choice--just as I chose to be a mother long before I learned about mothering--how to live my life. Age has rewarded me with an ability to live comfortably with not knowing what might have been or what might be. I mourn my uncreated and unused opportunities, and I miss some of the destinations to which I did not travel then and would not travel now.

The experience of reaching sexual potential happens, I believe, after a successful midlife, whatever that is.

You can reach Jeanne Shaw at forcouples@mindspring.com.