It Starts with Thinking

My last blog post, about thinking about sex as we think about exercise to encourage us to keep our sexuality alive, reminded me of another article I saw a while back.

In “Men Don’t Think about Sex Every Seven Seconds,” Dr. Laura Berman set out to debunk the urban legend alluded to in the headline. She cited a study done at Ohio State University, which concluded that men think about sex, on average, 19 times a day; women think about sex about 10 times a day.

That’s a far cry from every seven seconds, which works out to somewhere over 8,000 times per day, if my math is right and assuming eight hours of sleep.

Now, that research was done with college-age men and women, and I’m willing to cross-reference the National Surveys of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (NATSAL), recently completed in Britain, to guess that by midlife, the rate is reduced by as much as 60 percent. For women like me, that means thinking about sex three or four times a day.

I don’t know how that strikes you—as too much or too little! Laura made another comment in her article that resonates with what I’ve seen in my practice: Researchers “found that incidence of sexual thoughts were most highly governed by one’s own sexual belief system. …People who had anxiety, shame, or guilt around their sexuality were less likely to have sexual thoughts, while people who were comfortable and secure in their sexuality were more likely to have sexual thoughts.”

That’s especially important to us as midlife women. We get lots of messages that conflict with the reality that we are still vital, complete, sensual, sexual creatures. As we watch our bodies change—through childbearing, decades, illness, losing and gaining (and losing and gaining) weight, new wrinkles—we ourselves sometimes question whether we are still sexual, attractive to ourselves as well as to our partners.

Dissatisfaction with our bodies is hardly exclusive to us midlife women, sadly. But when it affects what we decide to do or not to do, it begins to matter more to us. You’ve no doubt seen articles about staying active, because the more active you remain as you grow older, the more active you’re able to remain. You keep muscle tone, bone mass, and balance only as you exert yourself.

The same is true of our sexual selves. Physically, being sexually engaged increases circulation to vaginal tissues, which naturally thin and become more fragile as we lose estrogen. It’s equally important that we’re attuned to the mental part of the equation.

Remember Stuart Smalley on Saturday Night Live? The nerdy guy with the affirmations? “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.” What if we midlife women had affirmations for ourselves? Could we use them to both reclaim our bodies and nurture our sexual selves?

I’ll have to give that some thought. Possibly up to ten times a day.