Jane Juska on the Body

I suppose I discovered Jane Juska in 2017 when Maggie Jones wrote about her in The New York Times. Here’s how she opened her profile:

You are a 66-year-old mother and retired high-school English teacher, bred in a small, puritanical Ohio town. Though you’ve been divorced for 30 years and celibate for almost that long, your life is full in many ways, teaching a college education course, volunteering as a writing instructor at San Quentin State Prison, escorting women for abortions at Planned Parenthood.

None of it compensates for the lack of a man’s touch. The conventional avenues for dating at your age — senior hikes, senior bird-watching, senior mixers (you even hang out in hardware stores) — have netted little. Online dating is not yet commonplace. So, one October day in 1999, you write 30 words that will appear as a personal ad in The New York Review of Books. “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.”

Within weeks, the letters begin to arrive from the Review of Books to your Berkeley, Calif., cottage. In total, you will receive 63, in seven manila envelopes.

Once I’d decided to write about sex for 3 Quarks Daily I picked up a copy of Juska’s memoire, A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance (2003), and used it to end the piece, Redeeming Pleasure: Women Lead A Second Sexual Revolution. Juska’s book was successful. I don’t know whether or not it made any best-seller lists, but she did readings and signings and became someone people recognized on sight. And so she wrote a sequel, Unaccompanied Woman: Late-Life Adventures in Love, Sex, and Real Estate (2007), which I am currently reading. Is it better, the same, or not so good as the first? I don’t know, haven’t made up my mind, does it matter?

Whatever.

Here’s two passages from Chapter 12, “The Body Electric.” This is about her own body:

Yet, at another reading, during the question-and-answer period, I am asked the age range of the men I got naked with. “Eighty-four to thirty-two,” I answer, and there is a gasp. Then, from a woman who looks directly at my torso, “What would a thirty-two-year-old want with you?” Again and again, wherever I go to read, to sign books, the question or a variation of it arises: “How do you get undressed in front of those men?” My answer, which always brings laughter, is, “Fast.” But it’s true. Faster than a speeding bullet I have covered myself from top to toe in, if I’m lucky, 400-thread-count linens while he was still wrestling with the top button of his shirt. More powerful than a locomotive, I have dived beneath bedclothes while he’s still pulling at his socks. “Where did you go?” he asks, and, half-hoping he won’t find me, I whisper from the depths of sheets and blankets and pillows, “Here I am.” (pp. 127-128)

And this is about the bodies of her male lovers:

When I think about the bodies of the men I have come to know, when I recall the enjoyment I took from a body that was seventyfive years old, a body that was thirty-two, and a few in between, I remind myself that much of the pleasure came because I liked, even loved, the person who inhabited that body. I remember unhappy encounters with men whose bodies became repellent to me, not because they were ugly or old, but because the men who wore them were selfish or greedy or ill-tempered. (p. 131)