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Hi, folks,

People ask about dating as a Formerly, and I can’t speak to that from personal experience. So when Karen offered her perspective on love and sex as a Formerly, I was grateful. (Karen actually used to babysit me when I was around 6 and she was 12…remember when that few years was like a generational divide? Now it’s nothing.) Here’s her piece. Enjoy!

Sometime after dreading the inevitable 40^th birthday, I felt the onset of a strange optimism, a renewed confidence. It was just after 9/11. I remember the feeling of helplessness as I watched the tragic events of that day unfold like millions of others from a TV screen. I was living in DC, but as an ex-New Yorker, it was especially painful to not be there to help.

Those few hours would change everything for me; specifically my perspective on what really mattered in life. Time was suddenly precious. I felt as if my new life was just starting and this new outlook affected how I thought about dating. I no longer needed those barriers I had put up that suggested cynicism and insecurity. It was about approaching dating again with the same innocence and excitement of youth, and discarding as a load of crap that notion that your 40’s were considered middle age and all downhill. (more…)

And y’all better listen up, because he’s PISSED!  I posted his comment in its entirety here, but I couldn’t resist giving BB a bit more prominent a spot. One or two of you must have gone on a date with him back in the early ’90s and totally broken his heart, because he’s still smarting. He reserves special vitriol for Oprah–perhaps she’s the one who didn’t call him back or suggested they “just be friends.”

Seriously, though, I think it’s not a bad idea to listen to people like BB, if only to affirm your own truth. I’d refrain from calling him a “sexist pig,” (I have a feeling having women scream that at him is his Viagra) but I’d love to hear what YOU have to say about women and power and beauty. Here’s BB:

“Ladies, listen up because I’m about to drop some truth on your Oprah-obsessed minds. Please pay attention because you will rarely hear anyone tell you something so real and honest. Ahem.”

Totally listening, BB. Lay it on us. Oprah? You paying attention? Stop helping people and being a role model and making millions of dollars, because BB is speaking. (more…)

First of all, vomit. Did Time really have to headline this piece “The Science of Cougar Sex: Why Older Women Lust”?

It’s a report on a study by evolutionary psychologist David Buss, the guy at UT Austin who explains much of current human behavior in terms of our being programmed over time to seek out characteristics that reflect reproductive fitness in our partners. In the past, Buss’s work was used to explain how men are basically hardwired to be horndogs for younger, easily impregnateable women.

Now he’s wondering, why would “older” women–which in the study is defined as 27 to 45, just in case you were deluded in thinking you only recently left the category of young–be so sexual? His theory is that as our fertility wanes, we increase the frequency of our sexual encounters (or at least want to) in a last ditch effort to propagate the species before our eggs expire entirely. (more…)

So I’m up in Maine with the family and a group friends at a rented vacation home. The kids are sacked out and there’s about 25 minutes of puppetry of the pundits on MSNBC before the dulcet tones of Obama will woo the members of the Mile High club. So I grab a copy of Our Bodies in Menopause off the shelf and flip through it.

Photo Courtesy of Our bodies Ourselves

In case you never snuck a peek of Our Bodies, Ourselves when your the parents of the kid you were baby sitting for were out, it is the September Vogue-sized women’s health Bible, first published by a collective of feminists in the early ’70s. They rightfully resented the paternalistic leave-it-to-the-experts attitude of the medical establishment, and encouraged women to take charge of their bodies and their health. The original contained pictures of women with bad haircuts with their vaginas splayed open, giving birth naturally and with great and painful heroism. Inspiring, in a I-am-woman roaring kind of way.

Not so, Our Bodies in Menopause, issued presumably because those second wavers are now debating hormone replacement therapy.

(more…)