A listener production.
Hello, listeners, every fortnight.
I do love to talk about some stuff
that I've been thinking about.
Now, it might be something that's happened in my life.
It might be something that's happening in the news,
but it's something that I want to share with you
because you know I love to share so much.
So my big question this week is,
do you lose your sexy as you get older?
Now, this is a big one, especially for women like me,
women of a certain age, I'm 52 now,
and it's been something that I have been thinking about
for quite a while.
Now, there's a couple of things
that have brought this to my attention.
Most recently, I saw this amazing movie
called Good Luck to You, Leo Grand.
I really urge you to see it.
Now, I'm not gonna give you a movie review,
but I'm going to tell you it stars Dame Emma Thompson.
Anything that the Dame Emma is in, I just love.
But this particular film, she is at her finest.
You smell wonderful.
No, Jada Lawson wears it.
I was waiting for you to say for her age.
Most people say when a woman's over about 42,
that she's sexy for her age.
I was waiting for that.
No Nigella is empirically sexy at any age.
But why this movie really resonated with me
is that it focuses on a woman
who is at a point in her life
where she feels like what has happened to me.
I was once a young girl filled with desire.
I then settled down.
I got married and I've got my grownup children,
but I don't have a life.
And even apart from that bigger question of not having a life,
it was she didn't have an intimate life.
She didn't feel sexy.
She'd never had an orgasm in her life.
And so she was at a point where she was thinking,
surely there is more.
So what she does is that she hires
a very delicious young man who's an escort
and she wants to have an orgasm.
And what then happens is that there's this really beautiful
and revealing relationship between the two of them.
But I felt so emotional watching this older woman on screen
wanting to reclaim what was rightly hers
or something that she had denied herself all of her life.
And I do think as women, we do that sometimes.
So you've never had.
I want to very much.
I always have done.
I think about when I was younger, I had a ball.
I felt pretty great about myself
and I felt sexy and desirable and gorgeous.
And I was lucky that this was a time
when there was the pill and all sorts of wonderful things
that meant I could have this fabulous sex life
as a young woman.
And as an older woman, it does change.
I'm gonna talk generally because I'm mindful too
of not being too invasive about Petey
because he'll often go, oh, pussycat, please.
Why did you talk about that?
Why are you telling everyone that?
So this is me in general terms
talking about as women, we can lose ourselves.
We lose our sense of self
when caring responsibilities start to creep up on us.
We may have kids.
We may be caring for older relatives.
The sort of grind of daily life can wear us down.
And we long for that carefree woman
who embraced her sexuality,
who wasn't afraid to seek pleasure
and to just have pleasure as simply a means to an end.
You know, frankly, dare I say, there's no time these days.
I mean, I snore at night and I do wear a mouth guard.
So I'm not sure how attractive that is
because I wear my mouth guard to stop grinding my teeth.
But again, we lose that sort of sensual side of ourselves.
I'm sort of blushing as I talk about this
because I was trying to talk to Giselle who's 13
about the movie and how amazing I found it
and how important it was.
And I began by saying, well, it's about a woman
who's never had an orgasm.
And she just looks at me.
She's like, mom, why are you talking to me about this?
And then I say, well, I want to talk to you about this
because it's important that, you know, as women,
we talk about how we need to have pleasure
and there's nothing wrong with that.
And she's just looking at me like,
why are you turning school pickup into this lesson
that I didn't ask for?
And I don't want.
I mean, perhaps I didn't choose the right opportunity
to begin this discussion.
And I think what I want to have the discussion is
when I was growing up, my parents, they were pretty cool.
When I look back and I think about that era,
they knew that I was on the pill
and mom's view was very much,
I'd much rather you're on the pill
and being responsible than something happening.
But apart from that, we didn't talk to our parents
about sex, about what it was about.
Well, I suppose we knew the nuts and bolts, so to speak,
but we didn't talk about intimacy and what good sex is.
I mean, I suppose, do you talk to your parents about that?
But I suppose why I'm going in circles around this
is I don't have the language for it.
I don't have a good way or a good answer to this.
And it also struck me too about losing your sexy
when I did a show called The Real Dirty Dancing.
Now, this was a reality TV show set in Roanoke in America
where they filmed the movie Dirty Dancing.
And the premise was they took a bunch of women
and a bunch of blokes, well-known Aussies,
and we had to play the parts of Baby from the movie
and Johnny, and we had to go through different dances
and tests, and it was excruciating.
What happened though during this particular experiment
was I got very emotional.
And I suppose in that sense,
I might be a reality TV producer's dream
because I am very open, I am very vulnerable,
I do get teary, I wear my heart on my sleeve,
so they're probably thinking,
oh goody, look, here she comes.
But I couldn't be anyone but myself.
And I found myself getting so emotional
when I was confronted with the idea of being sexy,
of dancing in a sexy way, of dancing in my underwear,
and feeling in tune with who I was.
And I didn't think that would be as confronting as it was.
Jess's mental hurdle is that she needs to get out of,
I'm the mom, I shouldn't be here doing this,
I shouldn't be wearing skimpy clothes.
She really needs to let that go
and embrace the sexiness that she has,
which is a bombshell.
I think for me, why I'm finding it hard
is that I'm realising that there's almost a part of me
that's kind of shut down and being the mom
as opposed to the woman.
And I think it was confronting
because it made me realise I'd lost a part of myself
since becoming a mother, that I felt that I had to be,
if I was a mom, that other part of my life,
I had to shelve away or hide or just not think about,
that I had to be caring for people,
that I had to be responsible.
And I know that this doesn't make sense
in the sense of, well, you can be responsible
and also be sexy, but I hadn't fully appreciated
how much of myself, the essence of who I was,
how much of that I'd lost over time.
And what struck me too was when this show aired,
various clips of me getting quite emotional and teary,
was the number of women who reached out to me
and said, oh, that is me.
That is how I feel.
I feel a little lost and a little not sexy
and a little like, where am I in my life now?
And I don't know the answer to that.
I don't know how it is that we find ourselves again
when life bears down on us.
And also I think as well,
it's that kind of weird guilt thing of,
oh, no, we can't talk about sex
or if we own up too much to that part of our lives,
then, oh, that's not the right thing to do.
And that's why there's young women like Abby Chatfield
who I just love because I want to soak up
some of her fierceness over her sexuality
and the fierceness that she has over seeking pleasure
and not being embarrassed about that.
So I think that's what it is that do we lose our sexy
because we feel embarrassed that we're not sexy anymore,
that we look in the mirror
and we don't see that same person looking back at us.
But is that necessarily a bad thing?
Because I don't want to be that young woman again,
but there's a part of me that would like some of that
devil may care attitude
that that young woman inside of me had.
I'd like to maybe spray a bit of that on me
every now and then.
And that's what I think, beautiful listeners,
that if all of us can perhaps look in the mirror
and rather than see the flaws
and the things that we think, oh, that's not sexy,
or that's not the idea of sexy,
that we let go of that and realise that perhaps
it's about what is inside of us.
And to me, when I think now about what is sexy,
it's about being wise.
It's about being funny.
It's about being comfortable in your skin.
And it's also about being able to ask for what you want.
And it's about being able to ask for what you need.
Easier said than done, isn't it?
I'm not there yet.
I'd like to get there though.
We're never there yet, are we?
But we can't simply close the door by a certain age
and say, nah, that's it, no more.
No, because I do not want to go quietly into that good night.
I want to rage and be, you know, not crazy,
but I want to still embrace who I am
and embrace that wiser older woman
and realise that there is nothing to be embarrassed
or ashamed about feeling sexy
and saying pleasure is actually good
and desirable and essential for us.
Can you just imagine my daughters listening to this?
Hopefully they won't till they're older.
And now Petey, you just can breathe a sigh of relief
because please just know it was general discussion.
Okay, dear listeners, stay tuned.
What will the next fortnight hold?
I can't wait to have a talk with you again very soon.
Until then, look in the mirror and say, you are sexy.