I’m going to tell you something few people will. In fact, it’s the final menopause taboo: something considered so private (or shameful?) that you’ll rarely – if ever – hear it discussed, even by your closest friends.
But it could change your life and improve your health. It is this: masturbation is medicine. And women, but particularly those who’ve gone through the menopause, should consider using sex toys, in my professional opinion.
You might be shocked. Or perhaps, if you think you’ve heard it all before, you’re even rolling your eyes. Not this claptrap again. But this isn’t about performing bedroom gymnastics. It’s about our overall health, because orgasms are good for us.
As Professor in Reproductive Science at University College London, my research involves all areas of women’s health, from menstrual cycles to fertility and menopause.
Most recently, I’ve been interviewing dozens of women over 50 for a book I’m writing about how to rediscover your mojo in later life. What I’ve found is that, while many are still sexually active – either alone or with a partner – some haven’t had an orgasm for a very long time. They’re not masturbating, nor are they having sex.
‘Women, but particularly those who’ve gone through the menopause, should consider using sex toys… in my professional opinion’
‘It’s easier, perhaps, to just put a lid on it all and scoff when they come across vibrators on the shelves in Boots and dismiss it as a young person’s game…’
One big study shows that, for some women, this happens because they’ve lost their partners through death or divorce. Others say their own ill health, or their partner’s, is a barrier to a healthy sex life. But for too many women, having an orgasm is simply no longer a priority, and it hasn’t been for years.
Outside my research I’ve had conversations with friends who shrug and confess they ‘haven’t been bothering with all that’, as they put it.
Even getting women to talk about this issue is difficult, as The Mail on Sunday’s resident GP, Dr Ellie Cannon, discovered. Last week she asked readers to write in about how important orgasms were to them, and whether – like Emma Thompson’s character in the movie Good Luck To You, Leo Grande – they had never had one.
Just two women got in touch – normally her postbag is bulging. One said that, aged 56, she loved her orgasms and hoped to continue them well into her old age. The other, a 79-year-old, admitted to using a sex toy for the past two years since her husband died.
I’m delighted for both of them. But I suspect they aren’t typical. So why didn’t more women write in? It’s unlikely that everyone else has zero interest in sex – in the last census, from 2021, just 28,000 people (0.046 per cent of the adult population of England and Wales) described themselves as asexual.
I suspect it’s that, for many women, getting rid of their periods means they move into what I describe as the ‘not giving a f***’ stage of their lives where they no longer feel they have to please anyone but themselves. Letting go of sex, and that pressure women feel throughout their lives to be desirable, can be a huge relief.
It’s easier, perhaps, to just put a lid on it all and scoff when they come across vibrators on the shelves in Boots and dismiss it as a young person’s game.
I understand how it feels – I really do – because I’ve been there myself. During my perimenopause, which started in my early 40s, I also had three small kids and sex was not high on my agenda. I didn’t really feel like it. But that’s a cruel trick of hormones, and for most women it isn’t true.
But you have to work a little harder at rediscovering it. Perimenopause, the state of hormonal flux most women go through before their periods finally stop and the menopause begins, throws a spanner in the works, both physically and emotionally.
It can last for up to a decade and is often a time…
Read More: All women should be having orgasms in midlife and beyond, and here’s how to do