My entire existence I’ve been told “a woman’s sexual prime is in her 40’s…I looked forward to feeling that rush, that high, of being there. Feeling more myself than ever. Having a confidence I couldn’t have imagined before. Of being seen by others in a light I never had.
In many ways most of those things have come to pass. Well, most. But what they don’t tell you is that you remain the same inside. Sort of. It’s really damn odd to know I’m the same person who needed to be liked so much that I lost myself for eleven years in a marriage I should never have been in. Who drank so much because I was miserable in the cult I was raised in. Who chose the marriage and cult over and over again until my body chose for me and said ENOUGH.
Similar to when my body chose sobriety after pouring my last drink and looking at it and knowing I could never swallow that poison again. I didn’t choose the struggle and I didn’t choose almost dying from withdrawals. My body did. It knew when to stop, and didn’t let me go further.
It’s doing it again. It’s choosing what it should have so long ago. As my concerns about the thoughts of others fall away my body is deciding what it really needs and wants, and after so many years of being over-sexualized it’s choosing the opposite.
Instead of falling into bed and having raucous tumbles a woman in her sexual prime should have I’m turning within. In the almost three years since leaving the woman I saw as my Stardust I’ve pulled farther and farther from desiring to be seen as someone highly sexual. Even being in the kink world doesn’t change things. For me kink has never had anything to do with sex anyway. My intimacy is of a different breed entirely.
This change of self stems, I think, from a lifetime of being nothing more than a plaything for men. Of dressing for the male gaze. Of keeping my hair long because I once overheard my father lamenting that “it’s so sad that women cut their hair when they grow older”. I had sworn to keep my hair long from that day and didn’t cut it until 30 years later. Then started to grow it back out the year I turned 40. Then shaved the sides again.
No longer do I wear shoes that kill my feet just because they’re high-heeled and elegant. The decades of wearing panty-hose to church meetings four days a week are far behind me. My bras aren’t the terribly uncomfortable lacy contraptions that make my breasts perky and unweildy and impossible to ignore.
Makeup has stuck with me, though. It’s my war paint of choosing and makes me feel powerful. I line my blue eyes with black and streak my lips and cheeks red because they make me feel strong and honor my grandmothers, many generations back. Red to remember my fallen and taken sisters. Red like the blood of the men whose necks I’d open if they ever laid hands on me again.
I dress as I please, in fabrics that don’t offend my skin and make me want to claw them away because they’re too bright and colorful and make it impossible to fade into the background. Wildcats don’t like to be seen.
I mark my skin with art and pierce it when and where I please because it is mine and mine alone. At last. And I don’t have to listen to anyone saying “men don’t like girls with lots of tattoos and piercings”, and if they dare say it I laugh with my eyes wide open and teeth bared to frighten them back into their shells because how dare they even pretend they are more than the snails I know them to be.
My body is my own and I will not share it with anyone again unless it is MY idea and MY desire and it all originates with ME, not someone else’s attraction telling me what I “should” do.
Instead of reaching out and having encounters with humans and the “best sex of my life” I’m reclaiming what envelops me and inspires me. This beautiful, odd, one-of-a-kind existence in this body that has never been and never will again, yet is made up of all the life that came before. The person my ancestors didn’t know to dream of because they simply couldn’t.
I am remarkable and I am mine and my body doesn’t exist to please others by doing what it “should do” in my 40’s, because I’m in the prime of my life and that means I am finally my own.
A Burd in Flight 