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There’s an old maxim — “few things are more boring than
hearing about other people’s sex lives” — that book publishers seem
determined to confirm with this year’s offering. Sexually correct attitudes
replaced politically correct ones as authors — the ones who weren’t blurting
out their own intimate adventures — tried to fit some kind of genital
template over all of Western civilization. First came Camille Paglia, with
her latest meditation on estrogen, fast-food restaurants and their
connection with the later poetry of Gertrude Stein. A more traditional
collection of dirty secrets, Wendy Dennis’s Hot And Bothered,
followed. Dennis apparently plied some of her suburban neighbors with
off-market Sodium Pentothal, interrogated them about their sex lives, and
sold the result as pop psychology. Germaine Greer’s latest excursion into
sexual politics, The Change, has, in true Greer fashion, taken her through
another 180-degree turn. First, she told us that families were bad. Then
they were great. Then everyone else’s family was great, but hers was bad.
Next, Greer decreed, sex and love were wonderfully liberating. Now Greer has
published an entire book crowing that menopause has freed her from the
pointless tyranny of her hormones.
Valerie Gibson is not ready to give up so easily. The
author of a “humorous and instructive look at [the] increasingly popular
trend” of older women dating younger men, Gibson is perhaps the oddest
entrant in the season’s sex-book sweepstakes. Her own experience is germane.
“After winning (and losing) a million dollars in a lottery and having the
latest relationship disintegrate,” her dust jacket biography reads, “she
returned, broke and defiant, to journalism, as fashion editor of the Toronto
Sun.” As if that weren’t triumph enough, Gibson recently married a man she
proudly points out is fourteen years her junior. Before settling down to her
current (fifth) bout of matrimonial bliss, Gibson had found that most of her
male contemporaries weren’t up to what she, at fifty-three, expected of them
in the sack. Younger men, by comparison, were capable of having more sex in
more places with less preparation, less coaxing and fewer emotional
attachments.
Gibson figured she could save other women countless
minutes of grappling with these problems if she distilled her own experience
into a helpful little volume, titled The OLDER Woman’s Guide To YOUNGER
Men. (Notice the use of upper-case words to give the cover that folksy,
non-threatening touch usually found only on hand-lettered signs posted in
junkyards and very cheap motels: PLEASE! Do “not” FLUSH paper TOWELLS down
they will “CLOG” toilet! “PARK” and “LOCK” it. Not Responsible Thank-You The
Management.)
Sex is universal, but you could charge Paglia, Dennis
and Greer with viewing as the sole preserve of wealthy, college-educated
white folks. Gibson makes no such mistake. She knows there are younger men
whose experience and background differ from her own. She claims to have had
sex with most of them. And being a thoroughly modern, plugged-in type — a
journalist, after all — she’s tried to include every kind in her brief
survey of consenting grandmothers and men half their age.
There are, to be precise, fourteen different types of
younger men, according to Gibson. For example, the New Age Man “could be
more into Mind than Sex,” she writes. The best place to meet this type is at
the library by talking about “your out-of-body experiences (even if you only
really know about the in-bed, in-body ones), shedding the yoke of earthly
inhibitions and your Elizabethan herb garden.” Sadly, Gibson never really
tells the reader how to shed the yoke of an Elizabethan herb garden.
Instead, she moves on to consider the other thirteen varieties of younger
men deemed suitable quarry for elderly females on the make, covering a
couple of different political philosophies, two income brackets, both sexual
orientations, and something called The Non-WASP.
It’s under this last heading that Gibson demonstrates
that she’s “with it,” that she’s kept up with the times, that she can “rap”
with the youth of today in their own kooky argot, man. She knows you’re not
supposed to make fun of people on the basis of their nationalities or racial
origins. “The first thing you do when dating a non-WASP,” she advises, “is
buy the relevant cookbook . . . . You’ll show a willingness to communicate
beyond the bedroom and at least he can go home and praise your cooking.” (Or
he could, if she hadn’t told us one paragraph earlier that “young non-WASPs
are skilled at keeping facts hidden that will give their families heart
attacks. Dating an Older Woman is one of them.”)
We learn that “non-WASPs have customs. This can mean
anything from having the bed facing Mecca, to him sprinkling holy water over
the sheets before sex.” There are other disadvantages to non-WASPs: they
drink too much of their “national beverage” and then depend on you for a
lift home, and many “are dark and hairy. This means having enough hairs in
your bed to knit a sweater.” On the positive side, non-WASPs are
good-looking when they’re young, and “are often very interesting in bed.
They have never read Masters and Johnson and often have some very unusual
ideas as to what turns a woman on. They’re often right.” In summary, writes
Gibson, “you could say that dating young non-WASPs helps world togetherness
— a noble New Age ideal. Short term. Could be shorter if his father is a
member of the Chinese triads.”
Paglia,
Dennis and Greer may have grabbed all the headlines, but, according to its
publisher, The OLDER Woman’s Guide To YOUNGER Men has sold briskly.
In many ways, Gibson’s book is the most reassuring, the most cosmopolitan,
of them all. We’re now so comfortable with sex that we can snigger about it
and blurt out clumsy innuendos, just like those fancy-pants Europeans. And
we’re so tolerant of our friends from foreign lands that we can actually
consider dating them, but only under certain conditions. If, for example, we
figure the relationship might lead to something more lasting. Like a book. |
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