As people age, sex shifts from obligation to pleasure. Women often feel relief from procreation pressure; men face erection difficulties, women struggle with orgasm and dryness. The speaker describes learning to focus on the journey rather than reaching a specific endpoint, a mindset shift many find hard when their younger bodies made sex effortless.
Chapters
How do you think about sexual pleasure as an older person? I suspect, and I know, that there's lots of people, women especially, that feel quite relieved that they are no longer able to procreate and have to put out, as they saw it, because they never associated sex and pleasure. It was just something that was a responsibility. And as we get older and as our bodies change, things happen. You know, men can struggle to maintain an erection. Women can find it difficult to orgasm. There's all sorts of issues around dryness as well that can take place. So how we think about pleasure and what we do about it has to change. I know for myself that everything just takes a lot longer, and so I'm much more relaxed about everything, really. I'm not thinking about, you know, getting to that finish line. I'm just kind of taking sex as a pleasurable activity that we can do without having to think about what's at the end, or if there even is an end. It's just some journey, nice journey that you go on. But I think for a lot of older people, those changes that take place in our body do take some getting used to. And for some people, it's just difficult for them to do that because so much of the way they thought about sex was informed by being a younger person when perhaps everything was just a hell of a lot easier.
