It's the fact of life they rarely teach you when you're growing up: the slow, inevitable cooling of desire that creeps up on us with age. Should we welcome it – or rage against the dying of sexual intoxication? Thomas Sutcliffe reflects on love and time
Friday, 26 September 2008
Two memories from childhood – both of them related to the descending curve that would result if you were to plot the sharpness of sexual desire against advancing age. The first memory is, I suppose, my first intimation that there's a conventional wisdom about such matters at all, though it takes years for that fact to become clear.
I am six or seven, at a Sunday lunch that has pulled together three or four young families, and suddenly the children become aware that the grown-ups are talking about putting coins into a bottle. We know that grown-ups don't have piggy banks, so we ask what they're talking about and they laugh and say we're too young to understand and – more laughter – that we'll find out one day. And, as it happens, I remember the incident a few years on and ask whether I'm old enough now for an explanation. What was being talked about, it turns out, was the idea that if a married couple put a coin into a bottle for every time they have sex in the first year of their marriage, and take a coin out for every subsequent occasion, they'll never get round to emptying the bottle. This wasn't a joke, exactly, or an accepted truth, but the kind of received opinion that is generally covered by the phrase "You know what they say, don't you?" And the merriness of that first gathering, their shout of laughter at the idea, suggests that they were all still young enough to think themselves exempt from "their" law of waning sexual desire.
The second memory – one of my own personal plot points on that universal graph – dates from a few years later. I am doodling on an exercise book, on which I draw a pudendal triangle, its apex pointing downwards. I fill it in with black ink and draw a line directly downwards from the point, and then – a little above the horizontal line of the top of the triangle two small round dots, placed roughly where the nipples should be. The pictogram I have produced bears about the same relation to a real naked woman as a red dot on a yellow stick bears to the beak of a maternal herring gull, but, as Niko Tinbergen famously discovered, the sophistication of a stimulus may be immaterial when it comes to certain biological imperatives.
And a 14-year-old boy is as helplessly in thrall to his hormones as a herring gull chick is to its innate instincts. The pictogram does the trick. I have to shift a little awkwardly in my chair. Had I known at the time how long it was going to be before I could move from theory to practice I would probably have hung myself – but even so this strikes me as a good candidate for an apogee of sexual responsiveness. If an equilateral triangle can get you going, it's fair to say that you're on a hair trigger.
It wouldn't work now, I suppose I should be glad to say. And not just because the real thing leaves an equilateral triangle looking decidedly flat. Blood chemistry has done its bit too, I take it – leaching the spikes of testosterone out of the system – not to mention the body's increasing indifference to your desires once it's got what it really wants from you – which is much younger bodies to carry the process on. Most men of a certain age carry about their own impudent marker of advancing age, a fuel-gauge pointer that steadily falls towards empty.
What pointed skyward in youth, as taut as a whippet's hamstring, gets a little more heavy-headed in age as the suspensory ligament loses its elastic zip. There's life in the old dog yet, they'll reassure you hastily, but there's no gainsaying that it's an older dog than it was – it's obedience to command just a little more sluggish. And I say, "I suppose I should be glad" because the collective wisdom has it that there is a compensatory trade-off for such slackening. Vigour and readiness may decline but as it does so increasing wisdom notionally stands a fighting chance against the importunities of the flesh. As Hamlet puts it to Gertrude: "You can't call it love; for at your age/ The hey-day in the blood is tame, it's humble/ And waits upon the judgement".
It's a very young man's remark that – likely to be received with a rueful snort by those old enough to know that the blood remains perfectly capable of surprise insurrections until very late in life. But it's also a designedly cruel remark, which works only because it touches on a half-acknowledged and uncomfortable truth. Who really wants to be called tame, however much wisdom or serenity comes with it?
What Hamlet is saying – and goes on to say more bitterly and more pointedly, is that Gertrude is past it, that appetite in her has become unseemly and, more terrifying still, redundant. And while there is no shortage of consolations in the proverbial armoury for this alteration, many of them betray an ambivalence about what's been lost.
Take "settled down", for one – that unnerving cliché for those who have withdrawn from sexual contest. What settles is silt in a tank. And settling – as the joke underlines – is the deflated deal you do with reality when you can't get what you first asked for. When you hear indisputable truths about waning sexual urgency – the relief from the hurly-burly of the chaise-longue, the quieter pleasures of companionable sex, the extra reading time – you should also be able to hear a faint whistling in the dark – the sound of people who know that they are being sidelined from where the action is.
This is because we correctly understand desire to be reciprocal thing, only truly meaningful when it is reflected back at us. Otherwise, it's just hopeless pining. And to put it crudely, as you grow older you sense that you're steadily fading from the realm of the conceivable shag – growing a little more transparent with every passing day, until you're barely visible at all in the mirror of desirable people's eyes.
It isn't just the age you are that has a bearing on this, of course, it's also the age you're in. And the received opinion on that would seem to be that we've never had it better – or for longer, or more often. The men among us (and men may need it more than women) even have a solution for those who require chemical assistance to restore the "hey-day in the blood". Coleman Silk, the protagonist of Philip Roth's The Human Stain, sings a hymn of praise to it when he explains how he's been rescued from the sexual diminuendo that would, as a matter of course, been the lot of a 71-year-old man born 50 years earlier.
"Without Viagra I would have the dignity of an elderly gentleman free from desire who behaves correctly. I would not be doing something that makes no sense... Without Viagra I could continue, in my declining years, to develop the broad impersonal perspective of an experienced and educated honourably discharged man who has long ago given up the sensual enjoyment of life... instead of having put myself back into the perpetual state of emergency that is sexual intoxication."
In his polite sarcasms Silk neatly skewers the fantasies of "dignity", but he then misplaces the credit for his transformation: what's actually given him desire again is his 34-year-old mistress (a cure for flagging ardour that even the Romans knew about). Viagra – a mechanical aid, not an aphrodisiac – merely enables him to act upon it a lot more often than he would otherwise be able to do. And Roth understands that it is really appetite rather than consummation that is singing in the blood of his character – what makes him declaim, with a giddy collapse in articulacy, "I'm back in the tornado. Because this is what it is with a capital isness".
I can't help wondering whether exclusion from the tornado now hits harder than at any time in human history, in part because our expectations of sexual lifespan have expanded so enormously. Everything in the culture now enjoins us to postpone sexual retirement or sexual rallantando. We know we're expected to be swinging from the retirement home bed-lifts with the twinkly-eyed lady down the corridor and that there will come no firm close-of-season on the universal duty to be sexually satisfied. That's fine as far as it goes – and since we haven't yet moved from gentle encouragement to compulsion it goes just as far as you want it to. But there is still a difficulty. Because we remember that sex wasn't once about control and cosiness yet we're still working with bodies that thousands of years of evolution have designed to wind down from the crescendo of reproduction, so that we get out of the way of younger, healthier breeders.
The result is, undeniably, a mismatch between the urgent advertising for sex we encounter every day and what you might call our capacity to consume. As you get older there won't necessarily be any problem with the availability of sex or – I'm relieved to say – with its quality when you get it. The problem – foolishly or not – lies in the sharpness of the appetite. As a 14-year-old male you long to be fed. As a 50-year-old you long to be hungry again.
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