Do These People F*ck: The Sex Symposium
Notes on my afternoon at a sex conference for women over 40.
My book needs more reporting. I don’t like to fashion myself a reporter — I’m a “writer!” — but I often forget that being out and actually observing things is critical to all this. I’m feeling as though I’m currently in the winter of my life, and as it is actually winter, that seems fair. I don’t want to leave my apartment much but new obligations are constantly requiring me to do so. That’s probably for the best. I tell myself I need two weeks of nothing on my calendar to write and refresh and hibernate but really all I’d probably do in that time is frustrate myself on Twitter and make in-app purchases on games on my phone that I will not name. But I’m “busy,” so much so that I can’t seem to keep up with publishing here as much as I want. Something always ends up dragging me out of the city. Some other assignment comes up. My book proposal, which I promise I’ve been devoted to, is essentially done. Except it needs more reporting.
Fortunately, earlier this month, I found myself with a last minute invitation to an event called The Sex Symposium. It was an event targeted toward women over 40 hosted by The Swell, an “elite, invitation-only club” for women “entering the second half of their lives.” This is a demographic not all that familiar to me, at least in the context of my work. Not only is it slightly older than I tend to focus, but the New York City private club of it all probably means it’s in an entirely different economic class, too. But more specifically, they are also probably a lot less online. I imagine these women have not yet heard of the term “gooning,” God willing. All the more reason for me to force myself from the comfort of my home office and out to the West Village on a snowy Friday afternoon to see what sexual problems were on the minds of this particular set.
The symposium featured talks from a range of doctors, researchers, writers and entrepreneurs. It was held in a small, modern event space that was somehow both sterile and intimate. It housed around 150 people, I’d guess, with one stage for one presentation at a time. I arrived in time to hear Dr. Emily Morse (author of Smart Sex: How to Boost Your Sex IQ and Own Your Pleasure), Emily Nagoski (author of Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life), Dr. Mohit Khera (urologist), Cindy Eckert (entrepreneur behind Addyi, dubbed the “female viagra”), Dr. Wednesday Martin (author of Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free) and more. A small vendor booth area was assembled featuring various powdered beverages, discrete sex toys and vaginal health products. By the coffee and water was a bowl filled with bars designed specifically for menopausal women. I ate one.
Throughout the three hours I spent at the symposium, I wrote everything down. I gave particular notice to the things speakers said that caused the audience to “woo” and excitedly clap. The idea that solo sex counts as sex was one. The statement that the audience was likely unanimously pro-choice was another. A talk by Dr. Mohit Khera about how male sexuality and dysfunction is a couple’s issue did not yield much of this, which isn’t to say it wasn’t well received. The audience simply was not invigorated by the idea that male pleasure is something to be concerned about, as women, despite the overall conceit of the speech being that treating male sexual dysfunction increases women’s pleasure, that sexual health is a barometer for overall health.
While male pleasure was of little interest, pleasure itself remained at the forefront. It was the primary theme. But pleasure also had an enemy. “The problem is always the patriarchy,” said Nagoski. One woman in the audience said she is not having sex because of the patriarchy. I’m unsure whether she meant she was intentionally not having sex as some sort of punishment the patriarchy should suffer, or because the patriarchy was preventing her from having sex. Regardless, she wasn’t having any.
Shame and trauma were antagonists here, too. It’s assumed we all have shame and all have trauma. At least in the case of the latter, I’m not totally sure that’s true. But shame, trauma and the patriarchy are all rather convenient enemies to have. They’re irrefutable. To either not have sex or, for example, to disrupt your entire life in pursuit of polyamory in order to work through shame, trauma and the patriarchy are both “valid.” While women in this demographic certainly do have a unique set of challenges in regards to sex — maybe they are still working through childhood shame, maybe they are entering a particularly vigorous period of their life and their body doesn’t quite cooperate as it used to — there’s also the argument to be made that this demographic is amongst the most free to have sex without hangups. They aren’t dealing with what the Internet has wrought upon younger generations. They have fewer concerns about pregnancy. Most have already done the marriage and kids thing, so nobody is going to accuse them of wasting their youth on frivolity before “hitting the wall.” These are people who should be in a period of sexual enjoyment and freedom.
Much of the symposium did seem to be aligned with that. The message remained that sex is good, and you should be having it, even if solo. But still I couldn’t help but notice these moments where discontentment was sowed, or where it felt like the talk was more about signaling how forward-thinking the speaker was.
When Dr. Wednesday Martin took the stage in a vulva-print skirt, she began by invoking two “African American sex researchers,” one alive and one deceased, Gail E. Wyatt and June Dobbs Butts). “I want these women in the room with us right now,” she said. Her slideshow included images of her Black friends with tenuous connection to the topic at hand, which was ostensibly about the joys of getting older and reclaiming pleasure. She encouraged older women to sleep and even live separately from their husbands, to date younger men, and to look upon Will and Jada Pinkett Smith as paragons of modern empowered relationships. At the end of this talk, I wrote one final note: “sexual novelty > everything.”
The symposium was obviously filled with people who care about sex. There were people who had made sex their entire career, and those who deemed it important enough to spend between $150-$450 a ticket and take a day off of work to attend. It’s good that they care. It’s good that they want to feel good. Still it all seemed to represent this particularly safe, medicalized, therapy-speak way of understanding sex today. It was all very safe, unwilling to challenge anything. At one point, an audience member brought up the fact that young, college-age people seem entirely disinterested in sex, but this was the only brief moment that it was suggested that our culture might have some other sexual problem beyond shame, trauma and the patriarchy. And again, this was a symposium specifically for older women — it didn’t need to cover the gamut of all our issues. But what shame, trauma and even the patriarchy all have in common is that they allow each of us to continue centering ourselves above everything. Shame and trauma are obviously highly individualized, and “the patriarchy” at present is vague enough to be unquestioned, too. Yes, there is community to be found in this, as the symposium highlights, but I wonder if more could have been accomplished by emphasizing something other than personal pleasure.
But even so, with the exception of those halted by the patriarchy, the majority of these women do fuck. I’m happy for them.
Tonight I’m going to a “sip and shop” event at a store called Contact Sports. It calls itself a boutique offering “curated sporting goods for the oldest sport in the world.” From what I can tell visually, it draws from those erotic Equinox ads — bodies in action, sweat, skin. Yet rather than use sex to suggest fitness, it uses fitness to suggest sex. It does, honestly, look a bit sexy, centering mutual pleasure and human connection over the self. That’s a lot to ask of a sex shop, though. Perhaps I’ll write about it here. Maybe it’ll make it into the book.