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4play See other 4play Articles Title: Round Heeled Woman ROUND-HEELED WOMAN: MY LATE-LIFE ADVENTURES IN SEX AND ROMANCE By Jane Juska Chatto & Windus, $34.95 "Before I turn 67 - next March - I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me." Jane Juska, a retired high-school teacher and divorced mother of an adult son, placed this ad in The New York Review of Books. She was inspired by Eric Rohmer's movie Autumn Tale, in which a widowed woman finds a suitor through the machinations of her best friend who places a petite annonce in the local newspaper. Unlike Juska, I did not enjoy this movie about disagreeable, bored bourgeoisie manipulating each other. But then I did not go for most of the eight (of a total 63 in her Yes/No/Maybe triage) respondents Juska decided to take her chances with. Too many of them humiliate her: one is a voyeur; one has sex with her once, she falls in love with him and he plays cruel games with her; another steals her underwear; another has email and phone sex but refuses to meet. Thankfully, charming 33-year-old Graham is still going strong at the end of the book. Juska comes across as lively, warm, needy, sensual and, above all, honest. Born in small-town Ohio into a dysfunctional puritanical family where no one talked about sex, overweight at school and college, Juska mostly learnt to connect sex with humiliation. She spent years with Jack, putting up with his drunkenness and vomiting in bed, before he rejected her. She got pregnant and married loveless Tom, who soon withheld sex from her until, fat and filled with uppers and downers, she left and drove herself and five-year-old Andy to start again in Berkeley, California. Thirty fulfilling years of teaching followed. But isolated as a single mother and convinced that her liking for sex made her a slut, meant she got little or none of it. She decided celibacy was better than disappointment. In her 60s an unbidden thought would leap into her mind: "What if I never have sex with a man again?" Juska's other motivation was the therapy she had thrice weekly for five years from the age of 60. She finally accepted that pleasure was OK (and fell in love with Dr V). These sessions fuelled her self-awareness that she was ready for this transformative experience. It is no accident that her courting was through words: from the spicy ad to the endless email exchanges and late night phone calls she held before actually meeting Mr (Un)Likely. It is endearing to read, "Don't you love the passive voice when it's used right?" or "a varied syntax sends shivers up and down my spine". Juska is seduced by conversations about Rachmaninoff, George Eliot and her favourite, Trollope. Juska does not want to miss out on being "touched" - a lot. Having sex with multiple men is her way to rage against the dying of the light. She does not like the habits of old people around her, she is not "growing old gracefully"; on the contrary she is making up for lost time (she had slept with only four men until the ad); now she cannot get enough. About living alone and living with loneliness, Juska is intelligent, self-deprecatingly humorous, occasionally sad and insecure. She is always frank: she has nothing to lose and nothing to hide. That a nearly 70-year-old woman is telling us she is horny is not necessarily what might make you feel awkward, it is her gutsy warts and all account. She reveals that as an adult she used to send porn to her father and accompany him to strip shows, that she neglected her young son when she lay on the couch every evening after school, grossly overweight and out of it on whisky and valium. This may be too much information for some prudish readers, but surely it is fine for her to admit "I'm an easy lay" and that she is easily aroused and masturbates a lot. In fact this memoir does not provide us with the kind of explicit detail that one gets in a Catherine Millet-style sexual odyssey. Nor does she pretend she is "anonymous". "Round heeled" is an old-fashioned term for a prostitute. Juska is "old fashioned" only because her romantic values were formed in the 1950s and she does not go in for internet dating or singles bars. She is definitely not a trollop: not only does she not earn any money from being with these men, she pays most of the expenses (hotels, champagne, air fares). But, more importantly, she does not embark on this adventure to please men, although she likes pleasuring them and is clearly pretty good at it, and is fond of men's bums and legs ("They do wonderful things for me and I do wonderful things for them"). She also wants to please herself: "A great deal of pleasure has come my way, not just physical but intellectual." The best parts of this warm memoir are when Juska tells us about her love affair with New York City, where some of her men live, and her love of language, of teaching English to the inmates of San Quentin Prison and about the anecdotal highs and lows of her career in high schools: this is where her passion went. She is also wise. On the penultimate page of her book she concludes: "What is just as far away as ever is the contentment of old age. I doubt that it comes, ever . . . I think we just get tired, and people who write junk about us, because contentment makes better greeting cards, mistake fatigue for serenity. I'm not tired hardly at all." Juska does not need the ad any more: during her US publicity tour she coyly claimed to have no less than three current sexual partners. Give this book to any woman over 40 and ask her, "Would you do it?"
Poster Comment: Any woman who likes the films of Eric Rohmer can't be all bad. :P
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#1. To: Peetie Wheatstraw (#0)
Fat, old women need it too I guess.
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