Touching the Button By H. Byron Ballard

    When my daughter was young, she asked me excitedly about the button in her yoni. When you touched it, apparently, it felt very good. Did I know about that? She seemed a little surprised that I did indeed know about the button and that most every woman has one. I am hopeful that it didn’t diminish her pleasure in her discovery--pun intended--to learn that it wasn’t unique to her.

    As I grow older, as the Crone time approaches, my thoughts don’t turn as often to this subject. While I was transitioning into menopause, there were many long months of non-interest. Not in a partner, not even in my button. I began to talk to my contemporaries and we traded some interesting observations about coming of age in the untamed 1970s, rearing children--especially girl-children--in the age of HIV/AIDS and what it means to move beyond child-bearing to a new land.

    What do you say about a generation of women, many of whom came of age sexually during a period of time that has come to be called The Sexual Revolution? We heard the harsh strictures of our mothers--the only time they talked to us about sex. Dire warnings of what should or shouldn’t be done, laced with a tinge of regret, spiced with a dash of longing for the freedom they felt during WWII, when the men were gone and the factory floors were filled by strong, happy women.

    We reinvented the notions around women and sex, found ways to grapple with issues of intimacy divorced from issues of pleasure. Some of us learned that our affections and lust lay in other women; some of us discovered that serial monogamy was best, some of us discovered that we took love and pleasure where we could find it and the gender of our partner mattered less than the connection.

    The Roe decision gave us more choices, birth control options blossomed before us. There were toys and lotions and whispered talk of tantra. We licked honey from our partners’ bodies and lay sated and alive. We read long-forgotten histories of how the world could be, how it was. There were blue curves of water and sandy shores, the smell of shellfish on our fingers. We were pioneers in a beautiful land.

    Then the Reagan years fell upon us, and some of our friends grew ill and died from a new disease. The mood of the country turned cold, as we grappled again with whom we were and how we were. Then Bush and Clinton and Bush. Sex slave trafficking and Internet porn and women who call themselves feminists getting boob jobs. We stand now on the edge of a new territory, with the ravages of another land behind us. In that land, sexuality has become again a commodity, a terror, a point of pain and argument and grief. We dream of those heady days and nights when we were powerful and free.

    As a writer, I process much of my thought and some of my feeling through the written word. As I heard more of my friend’s stories, I catalogued them in my writer’s-head and let it all stew around a bit.

    Then I hit on an idea.

    I’m going to write erotica for women over 50.

    I’ve sketched out the series of stories and several age-appropriate friends have graciously agreed to be readers. Market research is scanty, at best, and I have no idea if anyone will be remotely interested. And yet…and yet.

    Remember the France of Anais Nin’s stories? The long nights, the frisson of excitement and desire? What if we had that now? “At our age”? With a dash of humor and a cupful of hope, the mystery of new lands to be conquered and enjoyed is good for our woman-souls, our woman-bodies. There will be honey in this new land, and freedom and heat.

    I’ll keep you posted.