Visitors chez Belle who dip into my now-faded copy come out of the toilet red-faced with excitement, exclaiming for the rest of the night “Wrinkly sex!” Most certainly: by the last page of the book, Juska is starting a very sexual relationship with a man less than half her age (72). A man who is highly intelligent. And who has a great cock.

Wrinkly sex, indeed. That horror is the barrier that Juska has obliterated, first with Round-Heeled and now with her new memoir, Unaccompanied Women, which proves that she isn’t the only woman pensioner to want a little sexual healing. It’s a necessary lesson in a world where 60-year-old pop singers marry thirtyish models and people pretend to be shocked only when it ends, but a film about a thirtyish woman dating a man ten years her junior is viewed as comedy. We still do not expect women to have sexual urges past the first flush of youth — if at all — much less when they’re prime candidates for hip replacements.

Juska was born a Midwesterner, buttoned-up and virginal even after marriage and children, but her heart is truly on the coasts of America: in California, where she lives, and in New York, where her lovers live. She spends all her money on seeing these men, and with good reason. She wants the gift of the male gaze, which sees everything about a woman but is at the same time less judgmental than we are about ourselves. She relishes the vicarious confidence she gets from watching a flat-stomached lover leap naked out of her bed.

The book starts with a summary of the last memoir and covers what happened afterwards. Well, what did happen? Juska’s 32-year-old lover let her down, and her book could not find a publisher. Then it did and she became something of a celebrity to her neighbours and for older women.

Her experiences make her bolder. She sees how love and sex make a woman beautiful, even when the belly has long since descended past the pubic hair. She talks to people of all ages: a beautiful mistress in her fifties who had an orgasm only after she divorced; a 27-year-old who gets up before her lovers so that they never see her without make-up; a Nordic goddess who steals the man that Juska loves. The men who hang around after her book signings, hoping for a tryst with this newly minted “sexpert”. Mostly, instead of taking up their offers, Juska goes home alone and wonders why the men she wants live thousands of miles away. She begins to ask for what she really wants – lots of sex with a man she likes — rather than just accepting what she can get. Considering that most women think that they will have to “settle” if they are still single at 30, this is groundbreaking.

Juska, a retired teacher, has much to teach us. What she uncovers, among other things, is that men are always men: laughably bad at deception, playing games long past their sell-by date, and wonderfully loveable. When her young lover finally comes out of oblivion to apologise for the way that he treated her – having bloodlessly shattered her hopes with the most anonymous of e-mails – how can she not forgive him? But what she teaches about women is far more important. Anyone perusing contemporary nonfiction might think that postfeminism has decomposed into two camps: the sex workers and those who disapprove. Juska bridges the gap, not only with her love of literature and of other human beings, but also by being dead sexy. She proves, most emphatically, that good sex is not the preserve of the ultra-rich or the ultra-beautiful. (If it were, most of us would not be here.) Juska represents the silent majority of older women: late bloomers, perhaps, over-educated, definitely; but still vital and in need of a good shag. It’s easy to sneer at our hyper-sexualised culture, to call any public acknowledgment of physical needs degrading and traitorous to other women, but only if you grew up privileged enough to choose a different route. Women like Juska did not have a choice. They look at the world as it is now and, rather than judge, ask themselves, why can’t I have some of that? Haven’t I played by the rules long enough? If only Ariel Levy and Maureen Dowd could live a month in her body. As one of Juska’s neighbours in Berkeley says, don’t ever leave . . . we need you.

This is why Juska’s books will always be on public display at my home. Ageing gracefully is not about the sexless dementia-lite ramblings of so-called angry old women on television. Nor is it about taking your moral and intellectual superiority to the grave. Juska is living the final decades of her life with a true disregard for convention. This is what being a grown-up is about: learning how not to care what other people think. It gives me hope.

EXTRACT
from UNACCOMPANIED WOMEN
by Jane Juska

It is our generation — Meredith’s and mine — the one that grew up in the Fifties, that is silent about sex. Like girls of our time, we never even mentioned sex except obliquely, and Meredith was very good at oblique. She was a great literary gossip: She knew all the dirt of the literati, such as that Simone de Beauvoir shacked up with Nelson Algren in Chicago, then returned to her celibate life with Sartre. And she did it more than once, sort of like going to camp in the summer. I listened intently as Meredith told me that on his wedding night John Ruskin screamed in horror at the sight of his wife’s naked body, and that Dante Gabriel Rossetti dug up his wife’s body to reclaim the poems he had put into her coffin on her death. And that Tennessee Williams was gay. “He is not,” I said. “Look at all those manly men in his plays, look at Stanley Kowalski!” “Oh, Jane,” sighed Meredith, exasperated over my stubborn naiveté, “only a writer in love with other men could create those characters.” We giggled over the gossip and the people who lived in it, but we were careful never ever to connect anything they did to our own lives; we never explored what they did, we just guessed and kept our guesses to ourselves. For Meredith and me it was as if we weren’t having sex, though both of us were, Meredith with a married man, I with Jack, both relationships headed for disaster.
© 2006 Jane Juska

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