Archive for July, 2009

The Cure for Loss of Confidence & Sexiness

I’m not sure how it all happened but I seem to spend an awful lot of time thinking about what makes a woman over forty sexy. It’s led me to the topic of confidence and an understanding of how they’re all intertwined. In other words, confidence is sexy.

How’d I figure that out, you’re maybe thinking. In a word, menopause. It ripped my confidence out of me and left me flapping helplessly in the wind. I got to experience what life was like without my usual bright-eyed-and-bushy-tailed-can-do attitude.

It was worse than I could have ever imagined.

It was like getting up one morning and realizing you’re out of milk. You saunter over to corner store and boom, find yourself in the middle of a hold-up.

Gun to your head, a growling voice barks, “Your confidence or you life, lady.”

You scream and lunge for cover. You’re not fast enough. By the time, you get out of there, you’re battered, bruised, and broken. You count your lucky stars though. It’s just your confidence that’s shot to shit.

Or so you think.

It wasn’t long before I realized I’d lost more than confidence. It hit me one morning when I couldn’t even get the old Greek waiter at my usual diner to flirt. I mean, the guy flirts with hamburger patties but suddenly I was invisible.

I knew I was in trouble.

Then I committed the ultimate confidence crusher. I pretended to be someone I wasn’t (a teenage sex kitten, if you can imagine) and got involved with a guy who was infatuated with that person-I-was-not. And then I hated myself for being not-me, but hated him more for liking not-me. (Logic only a woman could understand.)

Then, out of the blue, I got my rude awakening. A friend called me up one day explaining that this “so called boyfriend” of mine had just tried to solicit her for some group sex. And did I know about this?

I looked at the phone as though it had just turned into a rattlesnake. I nearly screamed.

That’s when I realized, after a certain age (ie, forty), you just can’t “fake it ’til you make it.”  In one fell swoop, I had lost my confidence and my sexiness along with it.

It was a fork-in-the-road moment when I got that the only way to get my confidence back was by accepting the new me—menopause warts and all.

You know the ol’ adage, “love the skin you’re in” (or is that a tagline for some product?). I had been trying to recreate the pre-pre-pre-menopause me and she just wasn’t there anymore.

I picked up the slightly worn purple snakeskin heels sitting side-by-side in their original box I had bought for my first date with the “so called boyfriend.” The strappy shoes looked so innocent, like two naughty schoolgirls sitting bolt upright, trying to cover up all the mischief they’d been doing.

The not-me had gone ga-ga over those shoes. But now the new-me, the real-me, knew better. They’d led me astray. They’d cost me a fortune. They hurt like hell.

And they were everything I wasn’t anymore.

I searched under a pile of dirty clothes and found the pair of eco-ergonomic-super-comfy-all-natural-orthopedic-type shoes my hippie girlfriend in San Francisco had convinced me to buy. I wouldn’t be caught dead in them.

Until now.

I slipped them on, a moan of comfort gurgling out of me. I bounced over to the mirror in big strides like I was doing a moon walk.

Strong look, I thought to myself, like I could command an army or walk a million miles without a whimper, or shop happily for three days.

Real shoes for a real woman, and damn-it-all, I’m that real woman! At which point, I began to feel pretty good about myself. And I even noticed a real-woman seductive swagger to my stride.

Which all goes to show you, if the shoe fits, wear it. Let yourself feel sexy all over again.

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Danger of Denying Menopause Signs

Most of us were raised to believe the right attitude is the key that can open any door. But come menopause, it’s a whole new whole world—one where no amount of positive thinking can compensate for the physical changes brought on by a plunge in estrogen.

A friend is going through menopause and instead of facing it, she wants to talk about it.

“I mean,” she said earnestly, “Why do we even have to go through it in the first place?”

“Uh, why do I walk into walks before my morning coffee?” I said. “Life’s a mystery.”

Believe me, I’m not criticizing her. She’s in denial and so was I—for years. Her approach to menopause is to hope that what naturally happens to the body during menopause can, well, be ignored since eventually, things will, sort of, hopefully, self-correct.

Said self-correction being facilitated, of course, by the power of one’s mind. We’re talking positive thinking, being in the moment, or failing all that, a miracle.

Hmmm, nice try.

You see, back on the ranch, the hormones are out of the barn and all hell has broke lose. The body is on a downward spiral and nothing can bring it back.

You can knock yourself out with talk therapy, visualizations, or meditation (and I tried). You can follow weird diets, go on vision quests, or travel the world (and I did). But in the end, the old adage holds true, one kind of repair (getting your head together) can’t fix another kind of damage (menopause).

You fix the body by fixing the body.

Menopause Is a Physical Change with Emotional Consequences

The only reason I know this is because I held to the notion that the right attitude can cure anything as tightly as my thighs hold onto cellulite.

It took me years of hanging out with denial and its best friend, physical decline, to finally get that the body has a mind of its own. That “mind” is controlled by hormones, especially estrogen.

Don’t get me wrong here. I’m not making a case for you taking hormones after menopause. You’ll need to figure that out on your own.

I’m only saying, just because the mind and the body are two sides of the same coin, doesn’t mean you can tend to your mind and trust the body will be okay, too. The body needs its own kind of care.

Revisiting Hormones

Okay, I know, I’m repeating myself. And you’re probably thinking, ‘Well, duh, Pam.’

But here’s the thing: with all the negative news and controversy out there about taking hormones after menopause, a lot of women ran screaming from them.

And for the most part they haven’t come back.

That means that the one thing that might actually be able to help them (hormones) is not even on their radar. In fact, it’s forever banished from the universe of options.

Many women today have this mindset of, I’ll try anything but hormones. When the “anything” (usually some bogus supplement or therapy) fails to help, they blame themselves for getting fatter, crazier, more depressed, or what have you. Which is as crazy as losing your voice and then wondering why the hell you can’t sing.

Stalking a Scientist To Find the “Truth”

When I finally hit a wall after years of this kind of thinking, I did something I don’t recommend you try on your own. I stalked a hormone scientist for two years. I was determined to get to the bottom of the hormone controversy.

Eventually, I found the answers I needed and got myself on hormones. That’s a whole other story—one that you’ll hopefully be able to read about one day since I wrote a book about it.

All I’m saying here is the next time you find yourself sobbing uncontrollably in your closet, or standing in a puddle of your own sweat, or wondering how life suddenly got so dark and confusing, consider the hormones.

They helped make me normal. Well, at least physically speaking.

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Is “Dirty” Sex Better?

A friend of a friend (otherwise known as a F.O.A.F.) read something about Johnny Depp online and then read between the lines.
“He’s really dirty, you know,” she said dreamily. “Dirty and dark, with the face of angel.” She sighed.
Then a few days later, in a bored moment, I asked a guy friend to choose whom he’d have sex with, Angelina Jolie or Jennifer Anniston.
“Sex with Angie,” he said instantly, like he’d thought about it for three decades. “You marry a Jenn.”
At the peril of logic, I asked him to elaborate.
“Angie’s dark and dirty. That’s sexy,” he said. “Jenn’s nice, the girl-next-door. Mom would like her. That’s not sexy.”
Just to break the tie, I asked a third friend, another guy. “Do you think sex is better when it’s dirty?” I said.
He paused for a nanofraction of a nanosecond and said, “That’s is the stupidest question anyone has ever asked me.” He went on. “If it’s not dirty, you’re not doing it right.”
Notice a trend here. Three people had connected the same dots in the same way: dirty, dark, and hot. Are my friends just a bunch of sex-crazed sickos? Or are they expressing a more universal, secret desire?
Who knows? One thing’s for sure though, if you’ve ever found yourself thinking something that you’re too embarrassed to say during sex (as in, ‘I’d wish he’d shove the butt plug in’…or some such thing), you may be repressing a key to better sex: keeping it edgey.
I once read this book about creativity. The author said you should do something new every day to open your mind. Well, I say, why not try something new every time you have sex? You never know what will happen, especially after you’ve exercised the obvious possibilities and you find yourself in a whole new realm of wild and weird.
If you do try this exercise, be sure to report back  to me on what you discover. (I don’t actually have seasoned sex, I just write about.)

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