{"id":67148,"date":"2023-09-14T00:45:00","date_gmt":"2023-09-14T00:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rapidcelnews.com\/?p=67148"},"modified":"2023-09-14T00:45:00","modified_gmt":"2023-09-14T00:45:00","slug":"stacey-duguid-almost-50-and-im-finally-having-mind-blowing-sex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rapidcelnews.com\/lifestyle\/stacey-duguid-almost-50-and-im-finally-having-mind-blowing-sex\/","title":{"rendered":"Stacey Duguid: Almost 50 and I'm finally having mind-blowing sex"},"content":{"rendered":"
Buying back-to-school essentials last week, the shops were crowded like a train during rush-hour.<\/p>\n
A long list in hand, our No 1 priority, according to my 12-year-old, was to buy an iPhone\u00a0screen protector.\u00a0<\/p>\n
We found one, and as the assistant laboriously polished the glass of my son’s phone, from the corner of my left eye I spotted the shop I didn’t know I needed.<\/p>\n
‘I’m just going in there,’ I gestured toward Ann Summers as though I were off to buy a pint of milk.\u00a0<\/p>\n
‘For a joke present,’ I continued, pointing in vaguely the right direction, and managing to walk in three circles before I was propelled through the door like a woman possessed.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
New lease of life: Stacey Duguid has revealed how hormone replacement therapy has unlocked her imagination, desire and inhibitions\u00a0<\/p>\n
I must have looked frazzled and confused, and no bloody wonder \u2014 zero orgasms and a long summer can do that to a 49-year-old single mum of two.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Yet within the garish, low-lit interior of Ann Summers, I knew I would find what I needed.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I settled on a Womanizer (the type of sex toy I firmly believe should be prescribed on the\u00a0NHS).<\/p>\n
The truth is that, in the past few years I have often felt a similar, disorienting compulsion \u2014 a pulse of sexual energy that hits me at the most random of times and feels, frankly, untameable.<\/p>\n
It is, of course, quite unexpected behaviour in a middle-aged mum. But no, I am not hooked on the female version of Viagra, although sometimes feel like it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Instead, my libido skyrocketed thanks to the hormonal surge associated with the perimenopause \u2014 and has steadily grown even more combustible thanks to HRT.<\/p>\n
I had felt my mood begin to lower as my 40s rolled on, so I began treatment at the age of 46.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I had no other symptoms or hot flushes, but I had witnessed my mother’s hellish menopause and assumed all that was to come thundering down the track at me.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Stacey says her libido went through the roof due to the hormonal surge associated with the perimenopause. The hormone replacement treatment EstroGel increased it even further (Stock Image)<\/p>\n
So I went to the doctor as soon as I could for the HRT elixir. At last, I felt calmer \u2014 but my sex drive, which had been on an incline anyway, increased even more.<\/p>\n
Not to put too fine a point on it, my clitoris became a veritable alarm bell, sounding loudly at every opportunity and most often when a random, half-decent-looking passer-by caught my attention. Awkward in the queue at Sainsbury’s.<\/p>\n
I had no idea that fake hormones could have this effect on some women.\u00a0That my daily dose of oestrogen \u2014 a single pump of EstroGel on each thigh \u2014 would result in a rabid sexual awakening of the kind I’d never experienced before. (And if you’re one of those women who knew, how come you kept that nugget of info to yourself?)<\/p>\n
There are many listed side-effects on packages containing HRT but, as far as I’m concerned, the one they forgot to mention was: ‘High chance of making you feel so sexy you’ll want to sleep with the postman.’<\/p>\n
It is honestly the best-kept secret of midlife womanhood, as though we’ve all stumbled on a female Viagra by accident.<\/p>\n
I had been living away from the family home for six months when I began taking HRT, and in some ways it was a balm, allowing me to express myself sexually amid the terrible pain of my separation.<\/p>\n
Like most girls who grew up in the 1980s, I spent my teens and 20s resolutely believing in ‘The One’.\u00a0<\/p>\n
My safe harbour, keeper of secrets, saviour and all-round prince, this was the man who would sweep me off my feet and then stay with me for life.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Stacey admits that she was drawn to the website Toyboy Warehouse because she had reached a point in her life where she wanted sex without any long-winded build-up (Stock Image)<\/p>\n
When it came to The One and sex, I couldn’t care less if it was good, bad or frankly indifferent \u2014 I just wanted the fairy tale I’d inhaled as a child to come true.<\/p>\n
Now, however, whether it was The One or simply the one for tonight, I was ready to find someone.<\/p>\n
It was how I found myself alone in a rented house one night, separated from my husband for just over a year and on my weekend without the children, logging on to a website called Toyboy Warehouse. A ridiculous name for a ridiculous site, I thought, even as I clicked on it.<\/p>\n
Sure, I told myself, this will make for some funny banter with girlfriends later, especially when paired with wine. Yet secretly, I was intrigued for other reasons.<\/p>\n
I was single and fancied a date or two, but why, really, would I log on to Toyboy Warehouse when there’s Hinge, Tinder and a plethora of other dating sites out there packed with more appropriate, like-minded men?\u00a0<\/p>\n
The truth is that I didn’t want to meet another life partner. I wanted sex without the boring build-up.<\/p>\n
Was this what it felt like to be a hot-blooded young man, I wondered?\u00a0<\/p>\n
For a couple of days, I ogled profiles of ‘cubs looking for cougars’ and realised with a shudder that I was now classed as a potential ‘sugar momma’ in the online dating vernacular.\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
She found sex with her new French toyboy, who was 13 years her junior, hot, wild and truly liberating (Stock Image)<\/p>\n
The site began to feel a little ominous and dark, and I began to feel grubby for looking at it.<\/p>\n
But then, just as I was planning to delete my profile, I happened upon the profile of a Frenchman 13 years younger than me whom I quickly nicknamed Napoleon, despite him being 6 ft 2 in.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He looked ‘normal’ enough, with gorgeous lips, nice clothes, and no axes peeking out from cupboards in the background of his profile images. We arranged to meet.<\/p>\n
He came to visit me, and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to pounce on first, my Deliveroo Lebanese or my tall, gorgeous Frenchman.<\/p>\n
Around lunchtime on day two, a glimpse at our naked reflections in the mirror told me all I needed to know. This was fun. It was hot, wild and truly liberating.<\/p>\n
Society suggests it’s practically a crime for women to be up for sex in middle age.<\/p>\n
How revolting we must look in bed, compared with young 20-somethings with their perfectly toned physiques.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But such a view not only consigns half the world’s population to an arid sexlessness almost as soon as they’re past 30, but fails to recognise how real women really feel.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Stacey explains she has been sexually active since the age of 17 but, playing along and not enjoying it, she didn’t experience an orgasm until she was 25 (Stock Image)<\/p>\n
I’d rather be the woman I am today, rippling belly from birthing two large babies, upper arms that wobble, and a dimpled bottom that I know Napoleon finds sexy \u2014 all the imperfections that come with midlife, in other words \u2014 than the younger woman I once was who lay there like a sex doll with rigor mortis.<\/p>\n
Newsflash: the idea that women mostly go off sex post-40 is a myth.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Some perimenopausal and menopausal women, even those not on HRT, are experiencing a surge in hormones and confidence that is seeing them enjoy sex much more in their 40s and 50s than they did in their vulnerable 20s.<\/p>\n
I swear if this were a male midlife phenomenon, it would be front page news every single day.<\/p>\n
Indeed, despite the silver fox images of the earlier James Bond movies, some middle-aged men experience a decrease in libido just as their wives enjoy the opposite. He’s sloping around in tartan slippers while she’s raring to go. Oh dear.<\/p>\n
Napoleon and I have a committed (and recently monogamous) relationship, and it’s an unconventional one that works wonders for us.\u00a0<\/p>\n
We have spent long periods spanning many months apart, and during one of our ‘apart’ moments, we both enjoyed sex with other people.<\/p>\n
Except, as we both discovered, it wasn’t as absolutely fabulous as we are together, and so, a little dramatically, we got back together again.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And yes, you guessed it, the sex on that occasion was better than ever.<\/p>\n
Clearly, I haven’t always been this confident or experimental. Far from it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Stacey started dressing differently, swapping the voluminous dresses of her early 40s for an array of short skirts, and she felt seen again (Stock Image)<\/p>\n
Sexually active since the age of 17, I didn’t experience an orgasm until the age of 25, and that was with a toy, not a man.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In fact, it was during a series of short relationships in my 20s that I perfected my inert sex doll act, playing along but never feeling or enjoying it myself.<\/p>\n
I suspected that great lovemaking was out there, and I hoped against hope it would happen with someone I was in a relationship with, but it never really seemed to. Perhaps, I thought, that too was a myth.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ten years after we walked down the aisle and by now 44, I resigned myself to settling into a traditional marriage where motherhood took priority over my passions and desires. I wasn’t a young bride and yet in some ways I barely knew myself.<\/p>\n
Fast forward a few years, and I bumped into an old school friend I hadn’t seen since the age of 17 outside a pub.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He asked for my phone number and in the days that followed, despite being married with children himself, the school friend pursued me.<\/p>\n
You don’t need to be a genius to work out what happened next. For a while, we exchanged missives long into the night detailing how unhappy and unloved we felt in our marriages, and then one day, meeting for a drink at The Groucho Club in central London, we had sex.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The sex was not rocket-launch brilliant, but it wasn’t about that. It wasn’t about him either. It was about me feeling desired and sexy.<\/p>\n
And I really did feel sexy. At 46, turbo-charged by HRT, I began to dress differently.<\/p>\n
With a long career in fashion under my Valentino belt, I know all about the power of clothes, and now I chucked out the voluminous dresses and sensible flat shoes of my early 40s and replaced them with an array of short skirts, 10 denier tights and stiletto heels.<\/p>\n
I felt seen again \u2014 by my friends, by men and by myself, and suddenly it felt as though the last hurrah of my ovaries was all I had to live for.<\/p>\n
‘There’s nothing lonelier than feeling alone in a marriage,’ I’d tell myself to justify the fling \u2014 four weeks of texting and a single night in a hotel.\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In Pursuit Of Happiness: Mating, Marriage, Motherhood, Money, Mayhem, Stacey makes the point that for years women’s bodies are dedicated to the duties of motherhood, until the late 40s when that’s no longer the case (Stock Image)<\/p>\n
But it was enough, and, of course, my husband discovered it, filed for divorce, and I really was now utterly alone.<\/p>\n
Alone, but still in possession of all this newfound sexuality. Ditching the old school friend but keeping up with the HRT, I started to date.<\/p>\n
I met men in nightclubs and hot new restaurants. There were some spectacular howlers \u2014 the rich man I met in a flat with a gold console table and piles of expensive art books who reminded me of the lead character in American Psycho.<\/p>\n
The men with the beefcake, fake-tanned bodies, which seem a male requisite nowadays but are so alien to women my age.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The narrow escape from the man outside a hotel who put his hands around my neck.<\/p>\n
The men who spent the entire date talking about their wives. And yet I was amazed to find myself the opposite of self-conscious in those early days of separation.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Once, on the dance floor at a private members’ club, my eye even caught that of another woman, and tugging her long, blonde Rapunzel plait towards me, I started kissing her there and then.<\/p>\n
Emboldened, on another night, I ended up with a gorgeous woman in a black corset in the loos at celebrity hangout Chiltern Firehouse. It felt a long way from polite coffee mornings.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I even went to a fetish night, only to discover it wasn’t really my thing.<\/p>\n
The truth was, I was, slowly but surely, beginning to find myself. And it wasn’t about the sex \u2014 though that was an enjoyable pastime.\u00a0<\/p>\n
No, it was about meeting the woman I truly am \u2014 for the first time.<\/p>\n
So now here I am, three years after the end of my marriage. I’d be lying if I said the pain of divorce does not still linger around the edges of life. It does.<\/p>\n
And some may question why I pursued my own happiness to what might have proved the detriment of my family life.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But in doing so, I’ve discovered I am now a far more patient and present parent, a better friend and I am more understanding of other people’s needs.<\/p>\n
I am also at last sexually fulfilled. Or at least I am when I’m with either Napoleon or my latest purchase from Ann Summers.<\/p>\n
That post-school drop-off ritual is now well-established. Sunglasses off, car keys down on table, dogs popped into the kitchen, back to bed, explosive orgasm within five minutes, coffee, cigarette and I’m ready to start the day. (Joking. I don’t smoke.)<\/p>\n
Is it all thanks to HRT? Perhaps not all \u2014 five years of therapy have made a major contribution too \u2014 but the magic of EstroGel certainly plays its part.<\/p>\n
For so long, it feels, women’s bodies are dedicated to the duties of motherhood, and then comes these years in the late 40s when they’re not.<\/p>\n
For me, one year off 50, HRT has unlocked something \u2014 my imagination, my desire, my inhibitions.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The real reason I’m finally having the mind-blowing sex I always hoped for? It’s not the men, not even the lovely Napoleon. It’s me.<\/p>\n