"My Naked Truth" or what I call "Bullshit"

A link to a blog post of Huffpo

detailing a 59 year old woman’s dating experience with a 55 year old man. They had been dating, making meals, going on bike rides when they decided to spend a weekend together to take it to the next level.

All weekend long they slept naked next to each other, cuddled, but never had sex.

On Monday, she called and asked him why, and his response was

“Your body is too wrinkly,” he said without a pause. “I have spoiled myself over the years with young women. I just can’t get excited with you. I love your energy and your laughter. I like your head and your heart. But, I just can’t deal with your body.”

I call bullshit. BULLSHIT.

I know men. I work with men every single day, I’ve been married forever, and before then I might have talked to one or two.

No man would spend a weekend naked with some woman he was interested in and not screw her because she was too wrinkly. None. He might dump her on Monday, he might turn out the lights, he may lay back and think of England, he may change his phone number and move to a cabin in the woods, but he is not going to turn down the possibility of getting laid at that point.

Now…perhaps he had an ED problem, and a convenient ego saving response is to blame it on the woman, that I could maybe believe. (Dialog is still BS.)

But more likely this is a woman who makes her living by writing/speaking/mentoring and she knows that this would be a hot button topic with plenty of ‘juice.’

There are a multitude of issues out there, and many wrongs being done, and Lord knows being an older woman/man can be tough in our youth-worshipping society, but this flavor of “I overcame being a victim and opened my heart to the universe and buy my book/go to my seminar/like me on Facebook” feminism drives me crazy.

Especially when the dialog and scene writes like something a woman would think would happen, not what a man would actually do.

So, in summary, I call bullshit.

I’m inclined to agree with you. Looking at her other entries, a lot of them are focused on “age-empowerment” (if that’s even a term) and things of that nature - not being ashamed of how old you are and the sort.

Now, it says she’s an international speaker, so maybe that’s her niche. I know people who are in their late 50’s or early 60’s and say they feel like they’ve missed whatever window of opportunity for romance. I personally don’t agree with that assessment, but I’m not there yet, so I can’t speak with much authority.

That being said, this article reeks of click-bait. To think that the guy would’ve said something that had the potential to be so devastating, and that he would do so “without a pause” seems extremely disingenuous. You do not do all those activities that accompany a traditional courtship, only to bail out at the last minute, when you were about to get to the (presumably) good part. Unless her vagina had teeth (or dentures, given the tone of her article), I doubt the guy didn’t know what he was getting into (or would’ve, before he aborted at the last minute).

She wrote a book and needs some publicity. This article is going to get attention. I’m going to see it linked on my Facebook friends’ pages numerous time within the next week, and the “comments” section will be full of people automatically jumping to her defense without thinking there could be any possible ulterior agenda for publishing it.

If he really did rebuff her (without buffing her first), I’m willing to put money on ED. No guy is going to be so quick as to say that he can’t perform, but even so, if that’s me, I’m going to think of a multitude of other reasons that I’m not in the mood - maybe I was tired or I had too much to drink or I wanted to wait for a better moment. I’m not going to insult the woman who wants to have sex with me, because odds are, she’s not going to ever want to do it again after I call her a wrinkly old woman.

Yeah. That reminds me of that joke from Frazier, “Men can’t use sex to get what we want! Sex IS what we want!”

Holy shit, that’s a lot of sneak bragging in her first paragraph. If “he” is even real, maybe he didn’t sleep with her because there was only room for two of them in the bed and he wouldn’t fit around her ego?

Egad, that’s some purple prose. I hope the book has a better editor than the article did.

You’re right.

It’s ok for her to old and wrinkly, and completely insulted and rejected by some guy, but God forbid we think she might be overweight or have saggy boobs.

That’s what she gets for robbing the cradle.

Yeah, because fat, and saggy are perfectly reasonable reasons for rejecting someone.

The parts that count are wrinkly on every woman, regardless of age.

I’m speaking, of course, about ears.

I, too, call bullshit.

Because that is pure fiction.

Well, there are a lot of assholes out there.

If the guy is 55 and “spoiled” by younger women’s bodies, that implies he has what it takes for a guy in his fifties to be granted access to younger women’s bodies: wealth and status. I know I’m treading onto “nice-guys lament” territory here, but assholes have an easier time climbing the ladder of raw success.

Or it could be what those of us who don’t write books for the 150 shelf accept when we go a-courting and get our feelings hurt: people with no emotional investment in you tend to act accordingly.

Of course, the author could hit it big, and parley that into a career fucking young guys like Erica Jong or any number of older women who take Carribbean sex tourist jaunts. Because there’s the possibilities that her wrinkles were the little white lie, less harsh than “you’re a self-absorbed, passive-agressive kill-joy who’d misinterpret any constructive criticism with the 150-shelf twaddle that passes itself off as your dignity.”

This might be a better topic for discussion on another forum.

Very briefly, one person’s turn-on is another person’s squick. Just because you think something is great or disgusting, doesn’t necessarily mean the next person should or will feel that way.

I once read that Elvis Presley was turned off by women who had had babies. He lost interest in his beautiful wife after they had their first. (if you want a cite, go find it, I can’t be bothered.)

My father and I both happen to be straight but he was ragging on gays one time and I put it to him this way: Dad, the way you feel (sexually) about men is the way gay men feel about women. I actually think that was a revelation to him.

Maybe someday what causes turn-ons and offs will be scientifically pinned down. I hope that doesn’t happen in my lifetime.

Yeah, what sends my full-of-shit-ometer off on this story is that this guy, who apparently has been “spoiled” by all these young girls, is suddenly pursuing a romantic relationship with an older woman, all of a sudden to turn tail and run when he realized “Wait a minute! She’s old and her body will appear as such!”

It’d be one thing if they had grabbed a dinner here and seen a movie there, and she was reading more into the situation, but the author admits that they’d been in a romantic relationship. I don’t lounge around naked with my friends.

Agreed with Calatin. The bullshit comes in after an entire NAKED weekend. Surely her age was no surprise any time during the courtship phase, so how did it only become clear that she wouldn’t have the body of a nubile 18 year old after the fact? I mean, that’s the whole reason he’d been “spoiled” by dating younger women in the first place, right?

If I had to guess, I bet she had some sort of minor rejection related to age, and from that kernel of truth, extrapolated out this almost total fabrication. And that’s sad. There’s undoubtedly many good discussions that could be had about ageism and combatting how severe it is for women, but if this is anything more than a springboard, I can’t imagine what actual positive things will come from it. Instead, it just seems like the only thing it would inspire is critique of her body and defensiveness on both sexes’ parts.

I don’t find the story, in general outline, to be unbelievable. I’m certain she paraphrased the dialogue, but nothing seems intended to deceive here.

Contrary to the OP, it’s not true that every guy will stick his dick in anything that offers.

It is completely plausible that the guy could have been thinking like, “I should like her, and once we get into position I’m sure the old man will wake up.” Then… it didn’t happen.

I agree it could have been a cover story for ED but:

  1. That doesn’t change the story from the woman’s perspective. What she has to deal with is what he said, not what he may have been holding back.

  2. It might not have been a cover story for ED. He genuinely actually might have found, in the moment, that he just couldn’t get it up for her because of her wrinkly skin.

As to what he said on the phone call, he’s presented as answering the very question he was asked. If she seemed to be asking for a frank answer (and it seems that was what she asked for) then, a frank answer he gave. “I like your personality, and I don’t like your body, and that’s why we didn’t have sex. But I really do like your personality, so if you want to pursue this, here’s what might help with the body problem.”

Pretty cruel things for him to say–and indeed, people say cruel things all the time. Especially over the phone. Especially if feeling defensive about sex.

I took the “spoiled by young bodies” comment to be referring to images, but maybe I misinterpreted that.

And no goddammit that was not “sneak bragging” in the second paragraph, it was directly and unsneakily to the point. She’s establishing that abstracting the age out of the equation, she’s got what generally “should” be an attractive body. It’s a fair point to make, and if we call any attempt to make the point “sneak bragging” then we’re disallowing a fair point from the outset.

Count me as another who believes this isn’t entirely unbelievable. I’ve seen a few situations where my women friends have dated guys who, for whatever reason, avoided sexual intimacy despite sleepovers, etc. One of my friends dated a guy for several months, only to have him get wierd and dump her when she finally asked why they weren’t making progress to third base. Turns out he was just a weird dude with weird motivations.

And there are plenty of socially awkward guys with who either don’t know or don’t care how their comments affect people. Some people really do just say whatever. I had a guy once compare my (existent, but not unusually large) pooch to other women he’d dated in great detail. Lot of weirdos out there.

Your… pooch? So he dated women who owned dogs, and compared the dogs?

Doesn’t seem all that unbelievable to me either.
I know plenty of women I love and I love to spend time with but I don’t want to have sex with.
I have female friends I would go on a weekend with and not have sex.

Do you also spend the entire weekend with them naked?

Because you conveniently left that part out.