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Sex and the Single Senior
By
Alex Witchel,
The
New York Times
April 27, 2003
Jane Juska undid a small-town
upbringing and has discovered the joys of
sex.
People smile at Jane Juska. There she is, on a rainy afternoon at the
Gramercy Tavern in her cheerful red jacket, white hair tucked behind her
ears, blue eyes bright behind her bifocals. "I'm agog at the
forsythia," she exclaimed, marveling at the enormous arrangements. At
70, she seems to be what she is, a proud new grandma enjoying a day on the
town. Though she clutched her lower back periodically — arthritis? —
she ordered some wine and chatted happily about her writing. Here's a
sample:
"Before I turn 67 — next March — I would like to have a lot of
sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for
me."
And how. Ms. Juska placed this personal ad in The New York Review of
Books in the fall of 1999. Over the course of a month, she received 63
responses and spent the better part of a year following them up, an
experience she recounts in her first book, "A Round-Heeled Woman: My
Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance" (Villard). It turns out that
Ms. Juska did indeed have a lot of sex with a lot of men she liked, and
still does, having seen one of them as recently as that morning. He's 35.
Which might explain the lower-back problem.
"I didn't want to think, `What if I never had sex with a man
again?' " Ms. Juska recalled of her decision to place the ad. "I
didn't want to just sit there and think, `Wouldn't it be nice, if?' "
Ms. Juska, a retired high school English teacher (round-heeled is an
antiquated slang expression for a promiscuous woman), was moved to action
after seeing Eric Rohmer's film "Autumn Tale." Its plot involves
a woman placing a personal ad in a newspaper on her middle-age friend's
behalf.
"Before I got home I had written my ad in my head," Ms. Juska
said. "But I did think, as if I were teaching a class and would ask
my students, `What harm might this decision cause other people?' The only
person that would be is my son. So I asked him, and he said: `Go get 'em,
Mom. It's your turn.' The night I sent the ad in I felt so great."
Feeling great has become a new hobby for Ms. Juska in the 10 years
since her retirement. She now lives in Berkeley and has lived in the Bay
Area since the mid-1950's. After her divorce in 1972, she raised her son,
Andy, now 38, as a single mother with no help from his father, she said.
"My ex-husband wanted me to just collapse intellectually," she
recalled. "Whether the topic was the weather, politics or rent
increases, he was always argumentative."
 Feeling great has been Jane Juska's hobby for 10
years.
She went through a bleak period during which she gained 70 pounds,
drank heavily and lived in constant turmoil when her son dropped out of
school and ran away from home. It took years of psychoanalysis, dieting
and exercise to take control of herself again, shaking off the lingering
effects of a Puritanical small-town Ohio childhood in the process.
For 27 years, she dated only sporadically. "Except for a couple of
unhappy skirmishes, my relationship with men was nonexistent," she
said. "I had enough trouble making a living, bringing up a son.
Romantic trouble? That was too much."
Her work, she said, was her salvation. "Teaching was a passion for
me," Ms. Juska said. "And when I left it, I just wasn't tired
enough." She smiled. "My grandmother used to say, `Don't borrow
trouble,' but I think borrowing trouble is a good idea. If you live your
life staying safe you're going to lose."
She ate her lunch with great appetite — beet salad, lamb shank,
sorbet — and finished every bite. She needed to keep up her strength;
after lunch she was headed to New England to meet another gentleman friend
she met through the ad.
Well, let's get down to basics. Some postmenopausal women feel a
lessening of sexual desire, or at least are said to. That was apparently
not her experience. "No," she said firmly. "I was probably
even more interested because I wasn't as afraid as when I was younger, of
not doing it right or, well, being thought randy."
But even women who are 20 years her junior might not feel keen to take
off their clothes in front of men they don't know. And Ms. Juska describes
her own imperfect body in exacting detail in her book. Was she not at all
self-conscious?
She smiled, sort of. "Men didn't mind," she said. "It
was always me pulling up the sheet and turning out the light. I never met
a man who was afraid to take his clothes off. That's healthy, I think.
They've forgiven themselves for sagging here and there." She took a
deep breath. "The other day, my publisher sent me for media coaching,
where they tape you so you learn how to speak on television," she
said. "I don't feel 70, but I look it. Television does not lie. I
went home after that and cried."
She cried over a few of the men, too, one in particular, with whom she
fell in love. "In the end, he was just lonely and wanted a
friend," she said. "So he strung me along, and I let him, I
guess." Some of the others weren't too swell, either; one stole her
underwear. And her Champagne flutes. But she seems remarkably sanguine
about the entire endeavor. There is so much of the teacher about her, you
can practically see her internal filing system for categorizing learning
experiences.
Her humor, however, helps lighten the load. When asked whether she
practiced safe sex, she said: "Well, not getting pregnant was part of
my popularity," though she added: "Yes, we took the precautions
we thought we needed to. After all, these men didn't know where I had
been, either."
Although Ms. Juska has never published a book before, she has published
articles on teaching, and for 20 years has been part of a writing group
that meets monthly to read each other's work. It was when she was making
piles of "yes," "no" and "maybe" with the
responses to her ad that the idea of writing about it came to her. "I
thought: `Jane, you don't want to forget this. It's too good to keep to
yourself.' " she said. "I thought I'd write it as a novel
because nobody would believe it. I took some vignettes to my group, and
after I read them they were silent. I was terribly uncomfortable. Finally,
there was a comment: `You changed point of view on Page 3.' They were just
fumbling for things to say."
One of the men Ms. Juska met through the ad asked to see her pages. (In
the book, all the men's names, occupations and home cities were changed to
protect their identities, which Ms. Juska still refuses to divulge). She
recalled: "After he read what I had written, he said, `There are two
things you must do. Get out of that writing group and write it as
nonfiction.' He gave me permission just to go."
Without any connections in publishing, Ms. Juska sent out the
manuscript on her own. At the William Morris Agency, Elyse Green, a
26-year-old assistant, fell in love with it. "I didn't know agents
had slush piles but they do," Ms. Juska said. Ms. Green passed the
book to Virginia Barber, who became Ms. Juska's agent.
Ms. Juska sent her son the chapter she had written about his troubled
youth and told him he could change his name if he wanted anonymity. He is
now a forester, and though he eventually returned to school he has never
shared his mother's love of words. "He said, `I would be proud if you
used my real name,' " Ms. Juska said. But wasn't she worried about
his reaction to the rest of the book? She laughed. "He said, `Oh,
this is just another book I'm not going to read,' so I'm safe."
She finished her second glass of sauvignon blanc. "The best part
of all this is that I have a writing life now," she said. She is
working on a second book, about teaching. "The other huge
surprise," she said, "was finding intellectual partners, which
is almost as exciting as the sex, in some cases more. To be able to talk
to a really smart man, who says, `I would value your opinion on this.'
Where I grew up you had to bow and scrape to the nearest man and keep your
mouth shut."
But it has been women, not men, whose responses to Ms. Juska's
adventure have been the most harsh. "I did a reading in Berkeley for
mostly women," Ms. Juska said. "I said that the age range of the
men in the book went from 84 to 32. And one woman said about the
32-year-old, `He must have been short and ugly.' I said, `Actually, he's
tall and handsome.' Another said, `Then what would he want with you?' She
shrugged. "When women in particular hear about what I've done, the
question which unbidden comes to them is, `What have I done with my life?'
" she continued. "And lots of people at my age don't want to go
back and look at it. That's why they're so nuts about their grandchildren.
It keeps the focus off them."
Ms. Juska said she knows other women her age or older who have tried
their luck online, at match.com.
"One woman I know is just infuriated because she met this very nice
man online who turned out to be 84 and he hadn't told her. I said she was
ageist and she said she was only mad that he lied. And I said, `Come on
now.' But most of the women insist on asking me, `Didn't you really do
this because you wanted to get married?' Ms. Juska shook her head.
"The institution of marriage does not interest me," she said
firmly. "I did get a marriage proposal, but I said no. I'd have to
give up the others, then. I'd have to give up too much."
Still, due to the luck of the draw, most of the men who interested Ms.
Juska did not live in Berkeley or anywhere nearby. When she first placed
the ad, she was so busy — teaching writing to prisoners at San Quentin,
teaching an education seminar at a local college, volunteering at Planned
Parenthood, hiking, singing in a chorale — it seemed incredible she had
time or energy for anything else. But, as she writes, by 7 each evening
she was home alone. "Yes, I was busy, but there's nobody touching
you," she said. "People don't pay attention to that part."
And that lack of local company persists. For all her enterprise, on
most days she still lives a solitary life. So does she feel cheated by her
search, in the end? She hooted her no.
"I had no hope of it turning out to be anything like this,"
she said. "I expected to be murdered, or made sad at the very least.
But I never expected to have intimate friendships with extraordinary men.
True, I've met some men who are not kind or thoughtful, but I've also met
men who are kind and thoughtful and funny and true." Her smile was
wry. "Which is to say, I guess I found out that men are people."
She leaned over then to pick up her napkin and said something that was
muffled. What was that? She sat up straight and spoke quite clearly.
"They're just the kind of people I like better naked," she said.
Summary: People smile at Jane Juska. At 70, she seems
to be what she is, a proud new grandma enjoying a day on the town. Though
she clutched her lower back periodically — arthritis? — she ordered
some wine and chatted happily about her writing.
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