Sex and the Older Woman: Self-Pleasure

Most of us picked up early that this was something boys did openly and girls did not admit to. Nobody sat you down and explained it. It arrived in what got laughed about, and in what did not get mentioned at all.

So a group of women sitting down to discuss self pleasure, in daylight, at normal volume, is still a slightly startling thing to come across.

Silver Tent TV, Sex and the Older Woman

In the second episode of the Silver Tent TV series Sex and the Older Woman, Melanie Knight puts four plain questions to her panel and then largely gets out of the way. What is self pleasure for you? How do you do it? How often? What does it feel like?

What follows is not what most people expect. The conversation spends its first twenty minutes refusing to stay in the bedroom, and by the end it has taken in candle wax, a paint fight at a festival, oestrogen cream, appalling school sex education, and the anatomy of the clitoris. It is funny more often than it is solemn.

Highlights from the Conversation

Sunde answered first, and immediately widened the question. She had been out on a bike ride that day, which she counts. So is work, because she likes being around people. So is food, music, and standing in front of a piece of art she would once have walked past. She noticed that the moment anyone says the words self pleasure, "a lot of people's focus goes straight onto orgasms and sex", and wondered aloud where sensual pleasure sits in relation to sexual pleasure, and whether one prepares the ground for the other.

Diane went to candle wax. There was a restaurant she used to go to where she would sit dropping melted wax over her fingers, half unaware she was doing it, while other people at the table watched. She talked about sound as well, gongs and drums and flutes, and then about her own voice. Humming and chanting, she said, send a vibration through the body that is remarkably healing, and cost nothing.

Gwen had come back from five days at a festival, sleeping outdoors and walking barefoot, and described a workshop that had clearly rearranged something. Thirteen women sat in a circle and talked about how they felt about their bodies. Then they took their clothes off and stood in the circle, with explicit permission to look at one another.

"You go to the swimming bath, somebody gets undressed, and you look away," she said. "And yet that's exactly what you want to do. You want to look at the different breasts and lady gardens and bellies and bums and all of that."

Afterwards they were handed containers of paint and squirted each other, then ran down through the field covered in it, squealing. "I just couldn't believe the transformation," Gwen said, "from wanting to hide my older body to being so freely able to enjoy it and express it." She was also honest that she had closed down considerably since a long relationship ended, and that the conversation had arrived at a useful moment, because what she wanted was a self pleasure practice that brought life back into her whole body rather than one part of it.

The practical half

Then the conversation turned, without ceremony, to the specifics. Lubricants, and the argument for natural oils. Coconut, almond, and castor oil for massage. Pharmaceutical grade olive oil from the chemist rather than the bottle by the hob. Vibrators, including a much loved rabbit on its last legs and the newer suction type shaped like a rose, and a brief detour through jet washes and shower hoses that the panel did not entirely recommend.

Underneath the laughing there was information that is genuinely hard to come by. Melanie raised the possibility that heavy vibrator use can dull sensation, and that thinning tissue in later life can make soreness more likely, so anyone experiencing that might experiment before assuming it is simply how things are now.

She also described spending a year or two believing she had persistent urinary infections, and only discovering by chance, at an appointment for something else, that the problem was thinning vaginal tissue. Oestrogen cream, and later a natural version of it, changed things substantially. She raised it because she had recently spoken to a woman who believed that area of her body was so dead that penetration would never be possible again. There are things that can be done, and it is not over.

What nobody was taught

Gwen put the underlying problem plainly. Sex education, she said, is "very biological, functional, and we need to talk about pleasure". Boys are expected to masturbate from an early age and girls are not, and that expectation does its work quietly. "Good girls don't do that. Boys could do as much as they want."

The panel also spent a while on the fact that pleasure is not confined to the obvious places. Sunde loves having her inner forearm stroked and cannot say how she found out. Diane discovered the same thing years ago, independently, and rates the back of her neck above anywhere more predictable. Melanie noted that the clitoris is still missing from a great many medical textbooks, and that most people have no idea it extends several inches into the body.

Melanie described her own practice changing over the years, away from intensity and towards slowness. More time with oils on her own skin, less reliance on toys, and less interest in arriving anywhere in particular. There is pleasure in the journey rather than the outcome, she said, and if an orgasm happens it is welcome, but it is no longer the point of the exercise.

The hour ended somewhere none of them expected, on orgasms that arrive during sleep, on whether arousal is possible with no touch at all, and on what the world might look like if a great many women walked around in that state rather than out of it.

Watch the Episode

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Key Topics Covered

• Self pleasure as something much broader than sex
• Body image, shame, and being seen by other women
• Lubricants, oils and choosing toys in later life
• Vaginal dryness and thinning tissue, and what actually helps
• Erogenous zones well away from the genitals

If you take one thing from this episode, take the width of it. Almost nobody on the panel began with sex, and none of them stayed there long.

About Silver Tent TV

Silver Tent TV is a live-streamed panel show created by The Silver Tent community, exploring topics that matter to women in midlife and beyond. In the Sex and the Older Woman series, Melanie Knight facilitates open, honest and often deeply personal conversations about sexuality, intimacy, consent and pleasure, topics that are too often left out of the conversation when it comes to women over 50.