Ok, so it’s probably just me but I’ve been noticing lately that the narrative for non-very-young women is really starting to shift. As would be expected in a culture completely immersed in the mad fantasy that women are the “no-sex” class, women themselves are generally right at home with there sexuality whereas society is stuck trying to catch up with the concept.

How else to explain Chicago Sun-Times relationships writer Leslie Baldacci’s flustered outburst?

Women over 50 want sex. Lots of sex. Hot sex. And when they get it, they write about it so others, too, can learn how to get lots of hot sex.

What else to conclude from the new niche of sex-and-older-women books? Here are a few that have come out recently:

See Baldacci’s highly-scattershot set of book blurbs introduced here.

I say flustered in part because at least several of the authors she cites aren’t yet 50 and several books aren’t really about women over 50 either. (Aside: I’ve read two of the books in Baldacci’s list and highly, highly recommend both: Pepper Schwartz’s Prime: Adventures and Advice on Sex, Love, and the Sensual Years. Schwartz is 62 and her wonderful book is about her experiences since her mid 50s’. The other is Esther Perel’s Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic. Perel’s amazingly thought-provoking book is about relationships in general, and she herself seems quite young. Other books in the series include Cissy Wechter’s Sex & the 60s: How to Survive as a Senior Woman In Today’s Dating World, Gail Belsky’s Over the Hill and Between the Sheets: Sex, Love, and Lust in Middle Age, which look interesting and seem to be on the mark but there’s also Holly H. Hollenbeck’s Sex Lives of Wives: Reigniting the Passion fits only if you equate “wife” and “over 50.” But I digress…)

Also here in town the alt-weekly kiosks feature a splashy cover story about the “elusive northwest cougar”. Note: “cougar” seems to be an anxious euphemism for “women older than 22 who don’t have to be manipulated into enjoying sex.” (As opposed to…? Only “no-sex” class ideologues knows for sure. On the bright side nobody seems to call them victims of “mid-life crisis.”)

I dunno. This seems like another one of those areas where “evolutionary biology” is revealed more as a source of metaphor than of scientific utility. Growing up I was told that women lost interest in sex around menopause. In the early 1980s sociobiologists opined this loss of interest was “designed” to help those “dried out” women concentrate on the offspring of their younger, more desirable children. Others, acknowledged that older women have active sex lives but averred that their horniness was desperation-induced in order to compensate for being all old and wrinkly. And all that subtle genetic sophistication in a species that didn’t work out basic hygene till 1867!

Yeah, well. When different decades draw different conclusions from identical data…

Me? I’ve got my own theory: given time, motive, interest, opportunity and, most importatly, economic security and self-reliance, human beings are a lot more likely to actively seek sex for personal enjoyment instead of bottling it up due to economic pressure or the pressure of one’s peers and elders (especially when one one’s self becomes an “elder!”) I know. I know! Evolutionary psychology says there has to be a genetic explanation for that somewhere. And I agree: we evolved the genes for large brains.

Now call me a rebel. Even call me a victim of mid-life crisis. But I’ve got at least as many crushes on women in their 40s and 50s right now as I do women in their 20s or 30s. For that matter, while I don’t know very many in either group I’ve got more crushes on women in their 60s than in their teens. Which in a big way is a good thing — barring tragedy we’re all going to grow older and, again barring tragedy, we’re very likely to remain pretty much the same people we’ve always been… minus perhaps a few “told you so’s” here and there as we grow to know better.