You can have the best sex of your life in your 40s and beyond. After all, you have plenty of experience, you know what you like, and you’re probably not as shy about expressing your desires. But even practiced lovers can make some pre- and postsex mistakes that may foul an otherwise beautiful coupling.
Don’t let these 7 silly things get in the way of a rockin’ romp.
While a glass of vino may help put you in the mood, drinking too much can make sex unsatisfying. In one study at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, 11% of alcohol users reported problems achieving orgasm. Compared with nondrinkers, men who drank had a harder time ejaculating while women needed to be stimulated more in order to climax. The reason: Alcohol depresses parts of your nervous system that are important for arousal and orgasm. (Need help navigating sex during menopause? Then check out The Natural Menopause Solution today.)
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The Story: President Barack Obama issued a memorandum announcing the White House Task Force to Protect Students From Sexual Assault on January 22, 2014. Three months later, the task force unveiled their report and recommendations. That same day, the White House launched a new website, NotAlone.gov, aimed at providing the public with information and resources.
Why This Matters: Last year, it was revealed that an unprecedented number of colleges were being investigated for mishandling reported rapes on campus (a fact that topped our 2013 worst sex list). This still didn’t stop numerous school officials and politicians from making idiotic public statements this year blaming the victim or minimizing the problem. The people who think rape culture isn’t a real issue are part of the problem. Luckily this new task force provides real solutions.
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The Story: In response to the misogynistic videos Elliot Rodger made before his shooting rampage (see our worst sex list), the hashtag #YesAllWomen was created on Twitter as an online storehouse for personal stories of sexual harassment. Within the first few days the hashtag had been tweeted with intimate shares over 1 million times.
Why This Matters: This viral mass response to sexual harassment in May was one of the first of many tipping points throughout 2014 where spontaneous groundswells of righteous anger swept the airwaves. A majority of women en masse decided enough was enough and voiced their truths of living with sexism. It may have been only armchair activism, but the collective passion was unprecedented.
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The Story: In March, the Senate voted 97-0 to approve a bipartisan plan that would implement a half-dozen changes to combat rape and sexual offenses in the ranks of the military. “Unanimous agreement in the U.S. Senate is pretty rare,†stated U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Missouri), a co-author of the bill, after the vote, “but rarer still is the kind of sweeping, historic change we’ve achieved over the past year in the military justice system.â€
Why This Matters: This legislation is a long time coming, but despite bipartisan unanimity, its ability to clear Congress is on hold. A similar but stronger measure was defeated in the Senate the previous week. Based on an anonymous survey, the Pentagon estimates that over 26,000 military members may have been sexually assaulted in 2012. This matters.
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The Story: Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, publicly came out of the closet in an essay for Bloomberg Businessweek in October with the words “[L]et me be clear: I’m proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me.†He becomes the first openly gay executive of a corporation on the Fortune 500, the annual list of the highest-ranking firms by gross revenue published by Fortune magazine.
Why This Matters: Some 83 percent of gay, lesbian and bisexual people hide aspects of their sexual orientation at work, according to a Deloitte report. A May article on the subject in The New York Times noted, “The same insular culture that has made it hard for women and minorities to reach the executive ranks also keeps out gay people.†We applaud Cook’s courage in coming out at the highest level of business.
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The Story: In May, a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services review board struck down a 30-year rule that barred Medicare from providing transgender people with coverage for sex-reassignment surgeries.
Why This Matters: The recognition at the federal level that transgender issues require medical treatments is an important step in the evolution of transgender rights. Since private insurers and state-run programs often take their cues from the federal government on what is considered medically necessary, elective or experimental, this decision could eventually pave the way for sex-reassignment surgeries to be a routinely covered benefit.
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The Story: President Obama signed an executive order in July making it illegal to fire or harass employees of the federal government or federal contractors based on sexual orientation or gender identity. About 24,000 companies make up the nation’s federal contractors, employing roughly 28 million workers.
Why This Matters: It’s still legal in 32 states to fire or harass someone at work for being LGBT. Congress has been slow to bring the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which already passed the Senate last year, to a vote, and it’s doubtful that legislation will see the light of day anytime soon, unfortunately. Until then, this executive action is the next best thing.
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The Story: California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a new law in September mandating that California universities that receive public funding require students to get “affirmative, conscious, and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity.†According to the new law, “lack of protest or resistance does not mean consent, nor does silence mean consent.â€
Why This Matters: As with much California legislation, this bill, referred to as the “Yes Means Yes†bill, is the first of its kind. It will be an interesting experiment, and the nation is watching. Critics have complained that the requirement to seek explicit consent will destroy the mood, thus destroying sex. But years of experience in sex therapy show us definitively that such communication improves sexual relations, lessening sexual confusion.
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The Story: There are currently 400,000 untested rape kits across the nation, according to the U.S. Justice Department. Each kit costs about $1,500 to examine, and this desperately needed funding boost only covers costs to process roughly one third of the rape kits.
Why This Matters: According to Vice President Joe Biden, when testing 1,600 of the backlogged rape kits in Detroit, the evidence led to the identification of 87 suspected serial rapists and 14 convictions. Clearly this technology is much-needed if the powers that be seriously want to get serial rapists off the streets.
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The Story: Four college students at North Carolina State University created a nail polish called “Undercover Colors.†When a finger is used to stir a drink, the polish changes color in the presence of common date-rape drugs like Rohypnol, Xanax and GHB.
Why This Matters: True, it’s not exactly feasible for the majority of women to test every drink for date-rape drugs, and there are hundreds of benzodiazepines and sedatives that still wouldn’t show up, but when students of diverse scholastic backgrounds focus on solving difficult issues in inventive ways, it can only lead to a more inspired and informed social discourse on the dangers of date rape.
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The Story: In September 2014, Emma Sulkowicz started carrying an extra-long twin-sized mattress around campus in protest of the way Columbia University handled and ultimately dismissed her complaint against an alleged rapist — along with complaints filed by two other women against the same individual. Within the week, other students started helping her carry the mattress, and on October 29 hundreds of students around the world carried mattresses in a show of solidarity.
Why This Matters: It’s a bold act to reveal rape to authorities. And when those authorities can’t adequately handle such complaints due to politics and/or incompetence, it’s an unbelievable act of bravery to go public in such a big way. And the public clearly has stood up for Emma Sulkowicz. She conceptualized this protest as part of her senior thesis — an art project called “Mattress Performance: Carry That Weight†— for which she has already received the National Organization for Women’s Susan B. Anthony Award and the Ms. Wonder Award from the Feminist Majority Foundation.
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The Story: Bill Cosby is a beloved family comedian and mentor to so many, so when long-simmering allegations that he sexually assaulted women dominated the news, it had a devastating effect on many levels. To date over 20 women have claimed he drugged and raped them during the heyday of his career.
Why This Matters: We don’t know all the details of what really happened, but we do know that any predator’s instinct to commit an act of sexual violence is always deeply psychological. Somnophilia is the term for an obsession with sex with unconscious or sleeping people. Such paraphilias are not negative in and of themselves, but when they involve illegal, especially nonconsensual, activity, it’s a dangerous problem. Due to social stigma and lack of sex education, it can be very difficult for an individual to acknowledge and seek out treatment, often leading to lawsuits, imprisonment, or public disgrace.
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The Story: Twenty-two-year-old Elliot Rodger killed six people and injured 13 others outside a sorority house in Isla Vista before committing suicide in a shooting spree on May 23, 2014. In a YouTube video and a 107,000-page manifesto, he announced his plans to attack a sorority house in retribution for having “been forced to endure an existence of loneliness, rejection and unfulfilled desires all because girls have never been attracted to me.â€
Why This Matters: One of the more shocking aspects of this horrendous tragedy was all the unheeded warning signs. Rodger regularly posted sexist rants online and uploaded YouTube videos detailing how he would punish women for denying him sex. Are we so desensitized to sexual violence and misogyny that these red flags can increasingly go unnoticed? There are well-known resources for suicide prevention, but people need to be equally familiar with resources trained to prevent sexual violence in the early stages.
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The Story: In April 2014, the militant Islamist movement Boko Haram (“Western education is forbiddenâ€) kidnapped 276 female students in Nigeria. The leader announced plans to sell the girls into sex slavery in a video of the hostages. In October, the media reported a peace agreement, but a few days later the Boko Haram leader denied this, stating that the girls had already been married off.
Why This Matters: Although kidnappings are routine in sub-Saharan Africa, this abduction of hundreds of schoolgirls captured the emotions of the world. First Lady Michelle Obama posed for a photo with the viral hashtag #BringBackOurGirls. According to experts, sexual trafficking would be as terrible a fate as returning home to communities quick to punish women who are raped, pregnant out of wedlock, or infected with HIV. These might seem like impossible issues, but the longer we politicize sex education and sexual health in America, the longer our foreign policies will fail to protect anyone.
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The Story: The Gamergate controversy technically began in August, when multiple women in the video-game industry came under attack for speaking out against sexism in video-game culture. The response from male gamers to accusations of sexual harassment was to publish the home addresses (called “doxingâ€) of the key women involved, calling for them to be raped and murdered. This forced the women to leave their homes and call off speaking engagements. In addition, rampant anti-feminist and misogynistic hate speech cluttered the Twitter hashtag #Gamergate.
Why This Matters: Sexism is clearly a problem in the video-game industry. Female characters are underrepresented in games, where negative stereotypes dominate. In a 2012 survey, 63 percent of women and 16 percent of men reported experiencing sexual harassment when playing video games. In response to Gamergate, Twitter announced a collaboration with the nonprofit group Women, Action the Media (WAM) in November to develop strategies for handling sexual harassment.
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The Story: In April, a civil lawsuit was filed alleging a child-sex-abuse ring hosted by film-industry professionals including director Bryan Singer. According to the plaintiff, his mother filed a police report when he was 17, but no action was taken. The FBI did pursue allegations against Marc Collins-Rector, described in the lawsuit as the resident of the Encino estate where the drugging and rapes occurred. Collins-Rector pleaded guilty in 2004 on charges of luring minors over state lines for sexual acts. The 2014 lawsuit was dropped without explanation in August.
Why This Matters: There’s a reason we have an age of consent: It’s a recognition of the fact that minors are children at heart, with underdeveloped brains, making it impossible for them to fully understand sexual consequences. It’s no surprise that adults tasked with turning underage teens into sex symbols might take their work one step further and abuse them. Abuse is cyclical, and it can be physical, emotional or intellectual. Only when personal sexuality is healed from any trauma will adults possess the instinct to protect the children in their care.
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The Story: When popular NFL running back Ray Rice was arrested with his soon-to-be wife Janay Rice for simple assault in February, no one could’ve known how much this story would blow up throughout the year. A few days later video surfaced showing him dragging her out of an elevator. Assault charges were shiftily dropped after Rice agreed to a pretrial intervention program, and he was slapped on the wrist with a mild two-game suspension, until further video surfaced showing him punching her in the face in September. He was kicked off the Ravens and then banned from the NFL — a decision later reversed by federal court.
Why This Matters: This incident forced the NFL to update its domestic-violence policy, but the larger outcome was the intense discussion that provoked everyone from the football league to sports news to fans. Many people minimized domestic violence on the airwaves and then were held accountable for the blind sexism of their statements. Only time will tell whether this turning point will successfully combat the rampant misogyny of the sports world and many of its role models.
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The Story: In June, the Supreme Court voted 5-4 in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby to strike down the contraceptive mandate of the Affordable Care Act, for the first time allowing closely held for-profit corporations to join religious institutions in refusing to provide comprehensive contraception coverage for female employees on the basis of religious beliefs.
Why This Matters: It’s been cleverly noted that if the burden of contraception care were on men, birth control would be available for free in gumball machines in flavors like “BBQ†and “cool ranch.†It shouldn’t have to be so difficult for American women to manage their health. This ruling has further stoked concerns that it could be a precursor to allowing corporations to claim religious exemptions from federal laws that safeguard the rights of minorities.
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The Story: The Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 (PREA) is the first United States federal law passed to address the sexual assault of prisoners, but it has yet to be enforced. The Justice Department gave states until May 15, 2014, to comply with new national standards established in 2012 or lose grant money. Governors in seven states — Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Nebraska, Texas and Utah — are either ignoring or refusing to comply with the law.
Why This Matters: A 2006 Justice Department report including information obtained from about 1.3 million prisoners cited 60,500 admitted cases of sexual violence, ranging from unwanted touching to rape. But given the shame, stigma and coercion in prison, who knows the real number? Though prison rape still remains a joke for too many people, hopefully most ethical people would agree that sexual assault constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.
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The Story: In September, a Pennsylvania woman was sentenced for 12 to 18 months in prison for obtaining the abortion pill Mifepristone online for her teenage daughter to terminate a pregnancy. Since the closest abortion clinic was 75 miles away and Pennsylvania law unnecessarily mandates counseling followed by a 24-hour waiting period, the procedure would have cost between $300 and $600 plus travel and hotel fees and loss wages from time off work. The mother had tried to save time and money by purchasing the $45 pill for her daughter, claiming she didn’t realize she was committing a crime.
Why This Matters: This is what happens when states enact anti-abortion laws: Women are forced to go to desperate means to handle their health. No one should have to make tough choices for a procedure the Supreme Court has deemed unquestionably legal. We need to make comprehensive women’s health care, including abortion, more accessible, and when a state’s law clearly prevents this, it’s up to the federal government to intervene on behalf of women.
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The Story: The bill, H.R. 7, or the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, cancels income-tax deductions for medical insurance if the policy includes coverage for family planning, which is standard with most healthcare plans. The bill does allow a sexual-assault victim to take the medical deduction for abortion care in a case of rape, but only after an IRS auditor verifies that the victim was really sexually assaulted, and that her rapist fathered the fetus. This bill actually passed Congress with 16 Democrats joining Republicans for a vote of 251-175, but it has yet to clear the Senate.
Why This Matters: With the major issues that all Americans care about, such as jobs or the economy, it’s almost unthinkable that the House chose this misogynistic bill as their inaugural legislation to start off 2014. Frankly, it’s bizarre. Sexual assault is vastly underreported as it is; the last thing a rape survivor needs is an IRS audit. And IRS agents are hardly qualified to investigate rape claims for “legitimacy.†The whole thing stinks to high heaven.
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The Story: Soon after Woody Allen received the Cecil B. DeMille award at the Golden Globes, his estranged daughter Dylan Farrow penned a devastating open letter in February that detailed, again, her claims of child sexual abuse at Allen’s hands. Although a police medical team maintained his innocence in 1992, public sentiment remained sharply divided, and this new communication further polarized his defenders and detractors, some of whom equated the support of a person’s art with supporting their personal actions.
Why This Matters: Does the public ever have the right to question a victim’s claim? Is it possible to consider someone’s private and public life separately? These are important questions in any situation, and there are no easy answers, although certainly many people vehemently believe the answers are obvious. When there’s such an emotional charge to a conversation, it’s important to locate where the intensity is coming from. How does this correlate with any experience in one’s personal history? Often in sex therapy this type of consideration can reveal even more about a person’s psychological state than true facts.
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The Story: Mandated reporters include teachers, doctors, therapists and caregivers. They are required by California state law to report certain criminal acts to police: the abuse of children, senior citizens or disabled persons, as well as suicide or death threats. Note that adult rape is not on the list, even though it’s a “direct harm†offense. But California’s new law adds to the list anyone who confesses to viewing child porn, on the basis that such an act indirectly harms the children involved.
Why This Matters: The problem is that a common side effect of porn addiction is escalation, where addicts find themselves seeking out more illicit forms of porn. This stimulation-seeking is how non-pedophiles can find themselves looking at child porn. So the upside of this new law is that there’s a slim chance that it will lead to arrests of sex traffickers. The downside is that people who would seek therapy to address such escalating porn-addiction issues in private no longer have that option.
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The Story: In March, Gwyneth Paltrow announced an amicable breakup from her husband Chris Martin on her website, under the heading “Conscious Uncoupling.†The Internet went a little crazy, mocking the term at every turn.
Why This Matters: The viral backlash against so-called pretentious yet healthy love language was interesting. I wonder how many people had a problem with the messenger, and how many people unconsciously had a problem with her healthy message?
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The Story: When TV star and writer Lena Dunham confessed in her 2014 autobiography to exploring her younger sister’s genitalia as a child, she provoked criticism by the conservative news site National Review, which condemned the act as sexual abuse. This sent Lena Dunham into a self-confessed “rage spiral†in a flurry of tweets that went viral, with a corresponding variety of responses from the public.
Why This Matters: First of all, it’s absurd for a conservative journalist to conflate childhood sexual exploration with incestuous abuse while also minimizing campus rape in countless articles. Secondly, experts agree that childhood sexual exploration is a perfectly normal aspect of sexual development. It may be considered inappropriate, but so are a lot of other things children do. With understanding and healthy boundaries articulated in a loving and attentive manner, such incidents become learning experiences for children.
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The Story: Foria is the world’s first cannabis lube designed to enhance sexual pleasure. A small bottle costs $88 and, for now, is only available to California residents with a recommendation letter from a valid physician. With four to eight sprays to the clitoris, labia and inner vagina or inner anus 30 minutes before vaginal or anal sex, the lube promises the possibility of “multiple orgasms over a 15-minute span†for some.
Why This Matters: Note that there haven’t been any FDA studies on using a marijuana lubricant vaginally or anally, and some people will have allergies. We’re definitely not advocating the use of this product. But innovation certainly breeds new adventures. Here’s to healthy sex in 2015!