Monica Porter’s year of dating dangerously

SINGLE again at 60, Monica Porter rediscovered her mojo – with a series of much, much younger lovers.

140719 TWAM NO REUSE FEE APPLIES Feb 27, 2014 - London, England, UK - SILVER VIXEN: Adventurous Adventurous Monica last week HE WAS waiting for me in my local London pub, The Bells, in his tight jeans, T-shirt and trainers, looking a little apprehensive. He offered to buy me a drink but that didn't seem right, so I went to the bar and got my own glass of wine. As he warmed to our conversation about his work (in accountancy) and his family (from Lancaster), and I told him something of my own life, his shyness began to fade and he smiled more. Pictured MONICA PORTER (Credit Image: Les Wilson/Mail on Sunday/SOLO Syndication) Picture: Captioned As

AFTER making love on a Sunday afternoon, Monica Porter gave her new lover a little quiz.

Who was the drummer for The Beatles? “Er … pass.” The name of the mega pop star from Wales who sang It’s Not Unusual? “Dunno.” Which American President was shot in 1963? “Was it… Nixon?” asked the young accountant whom she had met on the internet only weeks earlier. Monica laughed, and tugged his hair. What else should she expect? He was only 23; she was 40 years his senior. So they spent the rest of the afternoon in bed before she cooked him dinner and sat him down to watch The Graduate. Then he went home to his flat in South London and she went back onto the internet to see what other young carnal delights were out there.

A few months earlier, Porter had woken lonely, sad and depressed about the future. Her long-term partner had recently left and she was struggling to reconcile herself to the single life, even considering moving in with one of her grown-up sons and his family. (“We could be like The Waltons,” she told herself, only half joking). Now, as she lay in the bed she used to share with her partner, she contemplated the idea of facing old age alone. It was her 60th birthday.

Scroll forward to a few weeks after her birthday. This time, Porter woke in an entirely different frame of mind after a night of uninhibited sex with a 26-year-old she had met at a friend’s party. She realised she could still attract men, very young men at that – and so decided to savour the return of the mojo she thought she had lost long ago. It was the beginning of a year-long sexual adventure that began with her joining a dating website (after knocking a few years off her age), included having sex with two men under 30 on the same day, and ended after a string of extremely young men had passed through her bedroom doors. Over those 12 months Porter had 15 lovers (a number of them younger than her two sons, then aged 35 and 29), indulging in adventurous and often risky sex. She taught them new sexual tricks, bought them drinks, cooked them the occasional ­dinner and listened indulgently to their callow pillow talk. Then she wrote about them – and opened the lid on a fascinating and controversial social dynamic.

In her book she details the young men who came and went, usually invited back to her house in an exclusive gated estate after a drink in a nearby pub. There was Simon, 25, who lived with his mum but told her that if his friends found out he was “dating” an older woman, “it would be a big mark in my favour”. There was Max, a 30-year-old graphic designer who had no idea what she was talking about when she said jokingly, “Wanna come up and see my etchings?” but who was the only one to turn nasty in the bedroom, gripping her by the throat and demanding, “Are you enjoying this, Mummy?” and then squeezing even harder when she told him to let go.

And there was Pup. Of all the young men she met it was with this 23-year-old blond, blue-eyed accountant that she came the closest to having a real relationship. Pup and Porter shared no cultural references. He had no idea who Ringo Starr or Tom Jones were, he’d never read Catcher in the Rye, and the movie The Graduate was a revelation to him. Despite this, he and Porter formed a relationship of equals that seemed to cross the four-decade age difference effortlessly.

“Pup surprised me,” she tells me when I ring her one evening. “He astonished me. He was 23 and he was so much better a lover than men twice his age with twice his experience.” Until then my conversation with Porter had centred on the physical; the pleasure of having sex with “hot young dudes”, their energy and enthusiasm. But she softened when she spoke of Pup.

When Porter, a British journalist and established author, published her book Raven: My Year of Dating Dangerously, it caused the predictable stir. Here was a grandmother admitting to having an active sex life and describing casual sex with strangers she met on the internet. She was called tawdry and tacky, a Mrs Robinson of the internet whose behaviour demeaned women everywhere. But her book not only quite spectacularly put the sex back into sexagenarian, it shone a light on a new sexual paradigm – the young man and the much, much older woman.

“After the book came out I had so many emails from women my age and older who said they were also involved with very young men,” Porter tells me. “I used to think that what I was doing was some kind of a niche thing. But during that year I met more and more young guys who were ­interested in older women and then I heard from older women who have all been doing this and I began to see that it is much more ­common than I’d realised – it’s just that no one has ­written about it before.”

Little research has been carried out into the sex lives of sexagenarians (and older), but ­statistics show that the number of women divorcing in their later years has increased markedly over the past two decades. In Australia, ABS data shows that in 1991, the number of women aged over 50 instigating divorces made up 6.3 per 1000 of the population. By 2011, that figure had more than doubled to 15.2. Afterwards, these “silver splitters”, as they have been dubbed, refuse to disappear into the night with their cups of cocoa.

“Sex between younger men and older women has been around for a long time, but the whole cougar thing is much more acceptable than it used to be,” says Serena Cauchi, a psychologist in Sydney’s eastern suburbs who specialises in sexual issues. “It appears to be more common. I’m not sure if it’s a kind of sexual-cultural fashion in vogue or just that people are talking more openly about it because people now are more confident about disclosing intimate details. It certainly seems to be happening more frequently and more visibly than it used to.”

When I canvass the opinions of friends and acquaintances I find most are unfazed by Porter’s tales. Zoe, a 55-year-old Sydneysider, tells me that she and her friends have all had a number of younger lovers. Like Porter, Zoe has had a series of casual relationships with very young men after the end of her own long-term relationship, although she met her lovers in real-life scenarios rather than via the internet. Her young lovers provide her with the straightforward sex life that is all she wants right now. “I’m not ready for another commitment yet, I just want fun,” she says. “That’s all these boys want too and for me, the fact that there is no longevity is a great attraction. There’s no going forward, and there’s a great freedom in that.”

The advantage of Zoe’s preference for young lovers was brought home recently when a more “age-­appropriate” man whom she had been ­seeing for a few weeks called out of the blue to tell her he couldn’t see her again, only to text her two days later saying he’d changed his mind. “He’s going through a divorce and is really depressed about it,” she says. “I worry for him but I really don’t need this. You don’t get these complications with the young men. They live for the moment with no curtains, no fog.”

Annike, 57, sends a blunt email. “Great sex and no strings with lean, fit young guys,” she writes. “It made me realise what I’d been missing for the last 25 years. What is there not to like?”

For their part, young men are attracted by the sexual confidence of older women and their passion in bed; they are less inhibited than girls their own age and more honest about what they want. “I asked one of my guys, a 25-year-old physio, why he was attracted to older women, and he said, ‘I find it sexy that they know what they want in bed’,” says Zoe.

Porter says she was repeatedly told it was the fact that she was so much more experienced that brought the young men to her bed. “I can’t tell you how many times I was told, ‘I bet you could teach me a thing or two in bed’,” she says. “These young guys are enthusiastic and energetic but they don’t have a great deal of finesse. The fact that they feel you can bring them along in the finesse stakes is important.”

Cauchi is unsurprised. “Men often fantasise about having sex with older women,” she says. “They’re more experienced and more confident sexually, and they don’t make the same demands that younger women make. They [older women] are also past their child-bearing years so there’s no worry about contraception. You can see the attraction.” When I point out that the cougar phenomenon generally refers to women in their 40s, not those in their 60s, Cauchi replies: “Younger women who are looking after children are preoccupied and exhausted, but these older women have time to pamper themselves. They look good and some can pass for 10 years younger.”

Mark, a 21-year-old who met Porter through Tinder (the app that puts people within a certain radius in touch for casual sex), told one interviewer: “I’ve been with six or seven older women and I have friends who have had similar experiences. Older women are much more interesting and sophisticated than girls my age, and their experience makes them sexy.”

Harry, a 22-year-old New Zealander who confided in me about a fling he had with a 49-year-old recently, agreed it was “what she could teach me” that first attracted him to the woman. “I learnt quite a lot from her,” he says. “I’m better at [making love] now.”

Porter did not go out in search of young men but found that they seemed more interested in her than men her own age. Twenty years earlier, when, newly divorced after a 17-year marriage, she found herself single again in her 40s, the dating scene was a different world. “There was no internet, and the only men who were ­interested in me then were married,” she says. This time around, the internet gave her a more ­varied smorgasbord. But when she began her adventures, Porter’s objective was as conventional as that of most people; to meet people close to her age with whom she might have some fun. “Maybe have sex, too,” she says, “but it wasn’t just that.”

However, the men she met of her age group left her uninspired. “You get so easily bored with older guys,” she says. “Because they’ve had a whole, big, long life with lots of baggage, they do like talking about it. The health scares, the divorce, the problems with their relationships with their grownup children, all these dysfunctional family things. There’s something a bit dreary about it. You have your own dealings with divorce or being a single parent so you can sympathise and understand, but you don’t want to hear about it all the time.”

I have known Porter for years; we worked together on the same British newspaper and I know her not to be some blowsy old strumpet but an intelligent, thoughtful woman and an adoring mother and grandmother. (Admittedly, I always thought she was 15 years younger than she is.) What was it that drove her to such ­sexual exertions at this stage of her life? Why, when she was still, underneath it all, hoping to find a settled relationship, was she behaving like a promiscuous 20-year-old?

Cauchi, the psychologist, points out that, contrary to popular wisdom, women do not lose their sexuality as they pass menopause but may lose sight of it as they age, especially if they have been stuck in an uninspiring marriage. “They may have been in marriages that have been dysfunctional for some time,” she says. “They may have been having poor quality sex for some time, or no sex at all. In a new relationship, dormant sexuality and passion may be reignited and that heightens arousal. The sexual urges would have been there all along, but it’s just that they may not have been aware of them anymore. Once they realise they still have them, women may want to make up for lost time.”

Porter agrees. “When I split up from my partner, I really did think that was it for me,” she says. “In the last few years of our relationship sex was really just perfunctory and mechanical. I said to myself, ‘Well, I’m in the menopause, I don’t feel sexy any more, maybe this is just what happens at this stage of life. I’d rather read a good book.’ But when I had that encounter with the 26-year-old, it reawakened what was dormant and I realised it was all still there. We spent the entire night together and it worked as well as if we had both been 26. That struck me as miraculous and it kick-started everything.

“I knew this wasn’t the way I was going to meet my next big, important relationship in life but I decided that in the meantime I could have fun times. Having sex with these hot young guys is fun and it’s flattering and you can get addicted to the sheer physicality of it. As there was a limited time that I could keep doing this, I decided that I should pack it all in while the going was good.”

A year on, Porter is back on the dating scene, but this time with men closer to her age. “In the end I just got fed up with the young guys,” she says. “They’re fun and energetic, but you can have a more normal life with people your own age. You can go to dinner, go to a movie or the theatre, and the great thing is that you don’t have to pay for everything!”

A week after we speak, Porter emails me. She has met a helicopter pilot “with grey hair and a designer beard – not my fave look”, but he seems keen on her and she will see him again, “although I don’t feel like jumping into bed with him”. Does she miss the young men? “Only Pup,” she says. “But that year of internet dating gave me back my confidence and sense of independence. I’m really quite grateful to [her partner] for buggering off, and I’m grateful to the 26-year-old for showing me I’ve still got it. I’ve been given a whole new life.”