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Moody Bitches:



the Truth About the Drugs You're Taking, The Sleep You're Missing, The Sex You're Not Having and What's Making You Really Crazy







Dr Julie Holland



(London Times)

As I approach my 56th birthday and muse upon female friends of about the same age, I can't help feeling that we're not ready to draw a line under our sexual appetites quite yet. Hot flushes and profoundly inappropriate crushes can co-exist, you know. We never perceive ourselves as we really are - it's nature's way of getting us out of bed every morning and the reason why, when we catch ourselves in a mirror unawares, we get such an ugly shock. Yet when you compare us to our mothers at the same age, dayum, are we hot! I'm thinking as I write of three female contemporaries with whom I went to see Supertramp last week (the favourite band of people in their fifties) and how vibrant, vital and just plain sexy they all looked. And, sorry about this, chaps, how grey and spent their other halves looked in comparison.

Thanks to better hydration, coconut oil, hormones, modern medicine - you name it - we are looking better, and we aren't, technically speaking, that old. Although the average age of menopause, 51, has remained constant almost since the dawn of civilisation, over the past 115 years women's average life span has increased. At the turn of the last century we could expect to live until our late forties (meaning that many of us didn't make it to menopause). Today, a woman aged 50-55 can expect to live until 84. Just calculating here, if I underwent menopause at the age of 53 and I can expect to die at, say, 95, that's quite a long time to be considered 'past it'.

Sex and the fiftysomething girl. Speaking personally - look away, boys - I felt I was at my Personal Best, shall we say, between 47 and 50. Being a millennial is all very well, but there's something to be said for getting childbirth and kids out of the way, for being reasonably established in one's career, for feeling a hundred times more confident than I did in my lumpy late teens and anxiety-ridden early twenties, when we are all supposed to be having the best sex of our lives. Looking back, at that age I was in the best shape I'd been in and - let's not beat around the bush - at my sexual peak.

Now aged 55, if I look at myself in pictures at that time, I can't help but feel wistful. I was too gaunt, with a slightly hunted look about my eyes, but I was really living life, or so it seemed. There was a poignancy about knowing that very soon this feeling of being absolutely alive, as though I could feel 'the very edges of my body', as one friend put it, would vanish, dissolve. I remember seeing an acquaintance at a party who recognised that look in my eyes, that barely imperceptible wiggle in my walk and her smiling knowingly, being about two years farther on in the game than myself. 'Listen,' she said, 'if you're going to have an affair do it now, because two years from now sex will be the last thing on your mind, I guarantee.'

Well, folks, I didn't (and if I did, I'd hardly be telling you), but if I were going to, that would have been the time. I didn't know it then, but I was smack bang in the middle of peri-menopause, the time that we start gearing up for the big 'M' and our sexual hormones start to wane. Generally speaking, the first two to go are oestrogen and progesterone, leaving testosterone (the 'male' hormone that makes us randier, hairier and pushier) temporarily dominant. For a lot of women, myself included, it was during those one to two years before their periods ceased that they felt like climbing the walls because their libidos were raging.

Husbands and partners, look out for the signs: a sudden desire to be out on the town, dressed like a teenager; that weight loss of 7lb she's been going on about since she had the last child. One friend likened this stage to being in the last-chance saloon . She didn't want to be on her death bed, wishing like John Betjeman that she'd had more sex.

Pretty much all of us experienced this strange sexual surge just before 50. Some of us had mad crushes on, say, their teenagers' teachers, or even - gah! - their teenagers' friends; for others it manifested subconsciously (I remember the saucy dreams I had about Neil Diamond). All harmless fun, but some women I know acted out on their impulses. God, the cinq a septs that were going on in Premier Inns around west London at that time. The husbands who still have no idea.

Sarah, now 54, confides how she had several affairs, all of them with much younger men. Her husband, meanwhile, with whom she'd always enjoyed a comfortable, adequate sex life, left her cold. 'Suddenly I found myself repulsed by the way he ate, the way he breathed, even. I bought myself some of those wax earplugs they use for shooting and, after making a big show of putting those in, I'd erect a wall of pillows down the bed between us before flouncing off to sleep. In retrospect, it was much more cruel than sleeping in the spare room. God, I was graceless! But at the time I had zilch compassion for him. That really was my Mean Girls year.'

Our husbands, who have got moobier by the year, aren't doing it for us any more.

The word compassion, or rather the lack of it, came up a lot. After years of folding socks and putting supper on the table, of putting out (and with all the wretched sound effects, to boot) there's a f***-it button that seems to get pressed around this time. If oestrogen is the hormone of compliance, testosterone is the hormone of infidelity, according to Dr Julie Holland, the author of Moody Bitches: the Truth About the Drugs You're Taking, The Sleep You're Missing, The Sex You're Not Having and What's Making You Really Crazy. And guess what? With the right encouragement your body can produce it on its own at any age. 'People have this idea that hormones cause behaviour, and that may be true,' Dr Holland says. 'But just as often, environment and behaviour will actually trigger hormones.'

So then. Here we are in this perfect storm. Our husbands, whom we've lived with and loved and watched getting moobier by the year, aren't doing it for us any more. We are leading more and more parallel lives, often spending every night of the week out separately and conducting most of our relationship in that slot between waking up and saying goodbye for work. He's spending a lot of time away on business. (Is HE getting up to no good? Do we really care?) Our notion of unfaithfulness has mellowed somewhat since our children have become young adults - does it feel quite so evil and wanton and selfish if they are almost ready to leave the nest? And then, BOOM, in comes the cute personal trainer with the six-pack and the divine 'young smell' behind his ears.

'It's like, oh my God!' Dr Holland says. 'I'm aroused! Well, his hormones are triggering your testosterone . . . which is why I tell my patients - even though you aren't feeling horny, go ahead and start having sex. Sometimes, even though you don't think you are in the mood, once you get going things change.' As the French writer Rabelais once said: 'L'appetit vient en mangeant . . .' (appetite comes with eating). Which is all very well, but for a lot of us out there, once that loo door has been left open, once intimacy becomes conflated with familiarity, it may feel as if it's too late. It is interesting to note that, statistically, it is women who are most likely to want out once the children have left the nest; 66 per cent of us, American research suggests, rather than the other way round.

One writer friend very nearly left her husband at the age of 49, having fallen head over heels in lust with a semi- professional tennis player. 'It really was like a fix, like I'd been chemically taken over,' she recalls. After being found out, the affair ended. Thanks in part to a mixture of progesterone and the hormone DHEA (which promotes testosterone), she and her husband have sex. 'It's very different from affair sex - sometimes you climax, sometimes you don't - but it's always good,' she says.

Now aged 53, she's very grateful to the friend who told her that she would be mad to leave her husband and two sons, that it would have been crazy to give up her rambling home in Somerset for the tennis player's bohemian two-up, two-down in Shepherd's Bush. That doesn't mean to say that she looks back in repulsion. Not at all. 'There will always be part of me that rebels against monogamy and the notion that marriage ends a certain kind of ownership of our bodies and adventures.'

Look, if you managed to get through to the other side, the chances are that you hardly think about sex at all and look back with slight horror at the hurly-burly of the chaise longue. The chances are that those days of your other half worrying you, like a dog worries a sheep when he thinks it's his due, are well and truly over. (Men go through the menopause too.) How lovely for the pair of you to read your books at night without one iota of obligation.

As my mother told my sister and me, it's like giving up smoking. 'Suddenly you don't have to worry about running out, or whether you have remembered your lighter.' On the other hand, if you are, at age 50 or so, unfettered by the demands of kids, less forgiving of the moobs and the snoring, feel at your most daring and excited about life since before adolescence, I can promise you, you're not alone.

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