Sexual Discovery and Finding Love: A #GirlBoner Chat with Joan Price

(Much of) My Chat with Joan Price on Girl Boner Radio: Sexual Discovery and Finding True Love

August: I’d love to hear about your personal background. What did you learn about sex and sexuality when you were a kid?

Joan: Oh my God! [laughs] Almost nothing. When I was growing up—and this was in the 1950s, I’m 74 now—my sex education consisted of, ‘This is how girls get pregnant and here’s why you shouldn’t do it.’ My father was a gynecologist and this is what he thought was all of sex education for me.

August: How interesting.

Joan: I know. There was nothing about pleasure. There was nothing about arousal. There was nothing to let me know why on earth anyone would want to do such a silly thing.

August: There was nothing in school?

Joan: School was about menstruation. We were divided, the boys and the girls. I’m not sure what the boys learned. I should ask. [Laughs] What the girls learned was about menstruation and how the egg travels from the ovaries to the uterus and if it gets there and so on. It wasn’t sex education. It was sex fear. It was sex lack of information. To make it even worse, if it could get worse than that, I knew there had to be something more to sex so I went looking in my father’s medical books. You know something that was not in any of my father’s medical books? The clitoris.

August: When you had your first sexual experience and you’d only learned negative things, did you expect it to be pleasurable? I know by that time, the hormones are at least giving you some clue.

Joan: Well there is a context to this because my boyfriend and I had been what we called ‘necking and petting’ for two years already. We thought we were going to wait until marriage because of course we were going to get married, otherwise we wouldn’t be doing any of this. But from tenth grade into twelfth grade, we were having these make out sessions in his car and I was getting very excited, but there was never an orgasm. We didn’t really know how to do that for me. It was a little more obvious for him.

I thought, ‘When we finally have intercourse, all will be revealed. ‘ But instead I had been very excited to that point and then it was, ‘I’m still excited, although most of it has died down.’

August: Anti-climactic, in a couple of different ways.

Joan: Yes, a-climatic, actually. And I felt, ‘Well if this is all there is, why is it such a big fuss? I loved the intimacy of it. I liked the excitement of our ‘foreplay’… But I didn’t know what it would take for me to have more than that. Women who did not have a climax through intercourse then were considered ‘frigid.’ It’s an awful word.

August: I thought it meant you weren’t interested in sex, which also is not a positive term. But wow.

Joan: ‘Orgasm’ was one of those dirty words we didn’t say. We did not climax during intercourse, so we were ‘frigid.’ We were defective, in other words.

August: Which surely only made matters worse, adding stress which interferes with arousal.

Joan: Right. And we know now, in this day and age and being sex educators, that about 75 percent of women do not reach orgasm that way—but we didn’t know any better. [pauses] Should we be revealing all this? We should.

August: We should! Let’s take it all in.

Joan: I remember at one point having a hot and heavy time with my boyfriend. I was in my freshman year of college and I still didn’t understand where it would take us and neither did he. I was his first, although he was a little older. I was getting so excited, I started rubbing my own clitoris and he brushed my hand away, like, ‘No. I’m the one pleasuring you.’ He wasn’t touching me. He was just screwing me.

August: Because he thought that that’s what sex was. He was supposed to penetrate you. And there was probably no conversation.

Joan: We never seemed to know how to talk about it. We didn’t have the words and if we went looking, who would we ask? You don’t ask your guidance counselor…and certainly not parents. Parents weren’t supposed to know we were doing it.

August: It’s interesting to me how a lot has changed and a lot has stayed the same.

Joan: Yes… It took a boy, a classmate when I was in my second year in college and had broken up with the other boyfriend for other reasons… He said, ‘So let me give you an orgasm.’ I said, ‘I don’t have them.’ It was still about the men and what they could do to you or for you, but at least he had it right in how to do it. [After pleasurable sex] I thought, ‘Okay, I want to keep doing it. I want to do this a lot. I want to do this with a lot of people. I want to see who else knows this.’

August: He found the clitoris.

Joan: Yes. He already knew somehow, he had learned. I’m 74 now, feeling quite happy sexually and enjoying it very much. But I’ve talked to other people in my age group who are not, who grew up as I did but never unlearned that or whose partners never unlearned that. It was a very repressive era. Fortunately, we can unlearn our upbringing. We can teach those messages to people of your generation so that you don’t have to go through what we did.

August: And so we have something to look forward to, because there’s still this idea that if we have a vulva, our eggs shrivel up and then it’s all over.

Joan: Well you know, the eggs don’t have much to do with orgasm anyway.

August: [laughing] Very good point.

Joan: So our eggs may shrivel up, but our responses don’t have to. Different kinds of blossoms when we were 20 or 30, so we have to enjoy having the whole floral bouquet.

[Here we chatted about safer sex practices and ways to make them spicy and fun as well as stand up for our boundaries—beautifully empowering stuff! I also shared information on fluid bonding.]

August: So tell us a bit about your progression and some of the turning points that led you to do this work.

Joan: Well, I learned a lot about myself over the years, during and after college, and then truly through my 40s became quite a wild child in experiencing everything that my parents didn’t want me to experience… During the time I was growing up, my father separated the ‘good girls’ from the ‘bad girls,’ because he saw the ‘bad girls’ in his office when they got pregnant. There wasn’t reliable birth control. So eventually ‘bad girls’ got pregnant ended up in his office… This was the 50s. I was early in college when the pill appeared. Before that, it was condoms or diaphragms.

August: What did you think when you heard of the pill?

Joan: ‘Wow! Really? I can have sex without the fear getting pregnant? Bring it on.’ There were problems with the pill, but I didn’t care. The pill really equaled sexual freedom for my generation.

August: It’s huge, having control over your own reproductive system.

Joan: Yes… So onward and onward, I became in love with my sexual self, in love with all the people I cared to enjoy that with and it’s funny that maybe at that time, there was this idea: ‘What’s the difference between sexually free and promiscuous? Promiscuous is someone who’s having more partners than you are.’

August: Terms like that are so arbitrary.

Joan: I know. So in a way, that was a sexual revolution. I was a little ahead of the boomers, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t benefit from what they did. I thought, ‘I can be part of the sexual revolution. I can be a foot soldier in sexual revolution.’ Then as the whole idea of the sexual revolution grew, it was more for men than women. Because now instead of us being expected not to have sex, we were expected to have sex with anyone who wanted to have sex with us.

August: So was the pill arguably created for men then?

Joan: No, but we didn’t know how to use it for ourselves. We had to learn not just that we could have sex with anyone we wanted. We had to learn we didn’t have to have sex with anyone we didn’t want to.

August: So you’d have autonomy.

Joan: Yes. We [learned that] sexual pleasure could be our demand… It became sort of, you to have sex with someone and then if they were good sexually for you then you have sex with that person again. If not, you go on to someone else. What didn’t work was the assumption that our pleasure as vulva owners was secondary to the pleasure of penis owners.

So now here comes feminism… I think it’s amazing I’ve lived through all the years, don’t you think? I’m just realizing all the eras I lived through: the 50s, the 60s now we’re getting through the 70s. So now feminism is saying that our pleasure can come first, not as an afterthought, not ‘maybe, if our partner doesn’t mind.’ It can come first and we can reach that on our own. We can be our own agents of orgasm.

[Here we talked about Joan’s first Magic Wand, and what a sexy little wink-wink-secret most everyone knew about!]

August: How do you define being sexually empowered?

Joan: I define it as understanding my sexuality, celebrating my sexuality and being and choosing my sexual partners carefully.

August: I like that. You radiate that.

Joan: Another thing that was happening at that point was an understanding of open relationships… And we learned how to talk about sex.

August: So through all of this, you were all having sexual adventures, but not really talking about sex?

Joan: We were learning how to educate ourselves and how to talk to each other, not just to a sex partner, but how to talk to other people who might have more information than we did. And you know I’m talking about my personal journey. That doesn’t mean everyone of our generation marched into that same journey. I hear from people all the time who say I was in a monogamous relationship for the past 45 years, I divorced or I lost my spouse and I’m trying to learn [about sex] now. I’m spreading my wings for the first time.

August: I still hear that from a lot of people in their 20s, who think they’re bad people for having sex.

Joan: Yes. I’m not saying my way is the only way, that you have to go in this kind of journey and discover yourself, but it can’t hurt.

[Here I talked to Joan about her experiencing feeling “invisible” as she approached menopause, and shared recent study findings that debunk common myths about sex, attraction and aging. This led into a chat about a turning point in her journey, which had us both reaching for tissues. It involved an extraordinary relationship with a very special man.]

Joan: His name was Robert Rice, my last name and his, off by one letter… We became a couple, but we took a long time. Between meeting and first kiss, it was nine months. Not by my wish! You’re talking to someone who’s idea of instant gratification is that it takes too long. I was powerfully attracted to this man. I was 57, he was 64. He was an artist, a very contemplative quiet man who believed that anything worth doing was worth taking plenty of time. In many ways, we would not have merged.

August: So you had the yin and yang thing going on.

Joan: I pursued him for nine months. Finally, once we had our first kiss, we didn’t stop kissing. We became a couple, we eventually married and we were together for seven years to the day, first kiss to last kiss. Yes, to the day. Until I lost him to cancer.

August: I’m so sorry.

Joan: It was during the time we were together that I changed careers. I had been a high school English teacher, then a health and fitness writer and instructor… When Robert and I were together, particularly in the first couple of years of our relationship, our sexual interaction was so hot, so exhilarating, so ‘Oh my God. Why didn’t anyone tell us it could be like this?’ I’d already written books about health and fitness and I was looking for books about this kind of experience. There weren’t any then.

So Robert said, ‘Well, you’re the writer. Write your own.’ I said, ‘All right, I will.’ I had no idea that this would become my life from then on. So at age 61, Better Than I Ever Expected was published and since then, for 13 years, I’ve been writing and speaking out loud about senior sex. This is my beat and I love it.

When Robert knew he was dying, he said to me, ‘Your work is so important. Promise me you’ll keep doing your work.’ And I said, ‘I’ll promise you anything you want, if you just don’t die.’ He said, ‘I don’t have control over that, but you have control over whether you keep doing your work.’ I’ll always remember that conversation.

August: I will too.

Joan: Oh, thank you. We’re both crying now.

[Joan said everything she does now is in Robert’s honor. Thankfully, he lived to see the publication of her first book, Better Than I Ever Expected, in which he and their love story are featured. But the book’s release was, well, different, than she expected.]

Joan: When the book first came out, I was very excited because it was going to be reviewed in San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, which was part of the big newspaper in the area on Sundays. It was going to be reviewed. I was so thrilled that we waited until midnight Saturday, when the paper deliveries came, so we could buy the first issue. I opened it and it said, ‘Now that the Boomers have discovered their sex after 60, could they please stop writing about it?’

August: How dare they. How did that feel?

Joan: I was devastated and Robert was, too. He said, ‘I just realized how important this is.’

August: The validation that this is necessary.

Joan: This is necessary… The next day, I was scheduled to give a book talk at Book Passage…a wonderful independent bookstore. And I thought, ‘Everybody gets the Chronicle. What’s going to happen when they read this? No one will show up!’ So I get to my event. It’s packed. They keep pulling in chairs, then they have people sitting in the hallway because there are no more chairs that fit in the room. I held up the magazine and said, ‘How many of you read this?’ Everybody had.

August: And there they were.

Joan: There they were. And I said, ‘So I have an answer for [the journalist]. Now that the Boomers have discovered sex after 60, will they please stop writing about it? Hell no. We’ve just begun to talk.’

August: Fuel for the fire.

Joan: And I didn’t know how true that was. I thought I would write that one book… I’ve now written three senior sex books and edited a senior sex erotica anthology. I do a column on Senior Planet. I have a blog that’s been going for the full 13 years. I have webinars.

August: You’ve built an empire. What is one thing that you want younger generations to understand about sexuality?

Joan: You are seniors in training, if you’re lucky. There are two ways you can go. You can get older or you can die young. I don’t know another option. If there is one, let me know…. I have a webinar called 12 Steps to Sexy Aging and this is about what you can do now, whether you’re 20 or 30 or 40 to ensure they you age with a vivacious and voracious sexuality. And I have learned so much. Every week, I learn something more. I learn from my readers. I learn from my colleagues. I learned from the people who support me and wonderful people like you who do podcasts and articles. I am very proud to be sitting on this empire.

Learn more about Joan Price here and follow her on Twitter: @JoanPrice.