The woman who knows Gen X women deserve better sex. And how to get it.

Just not feeling it at the moment. 

Completely touched-out.  

Don't care if it never happens again

Hormones snatching libidos, responsibilities crowding out pleasure.

Body feeling like a hostile stranger.

If you ask enough midlife women about how sexy they feel, you'll get a lot of laughs. 

For some, the literal act of it seems comical, silly somehow. What was once sexy now seems ridiculous, now that we're all so… different. 

For others, the idea that pleasure would be a priority with so much else crowding out their lives just seems far-fetched. 

Many say that they love their partners but they can't bear to be touched by them any more. 

That the part of themselves that used to want to have sex - in the morning, every night, in the afternoon with weakening light streaming in across a tousled bed - feels like someone else entirely.  

And behind the laughter, when you ask midlife women about sex, there can be a lot of sadness. Because sex can be all caught up in who you are, who you were, and how valuable, desirable and loved you feel this new you is. 

I asked a lot of midlife women about sex for a fresh episode of the podcast MID, a show for Generation X women. And my messages were flooded with sadness, resignation, and a few sprigs of colourful, fragrant joy. We'll get to those in a moment.

Listen to the full episode of MID below. Post continues after podcast.

First, to the sadness. 

Some of these women used to love sex. Could remember being that person. Feel her. That charge rippling across her skin. That tremble. That wave of intense need. That flood of warm, syrupy relief. That smile that can't be wiped. That memory of fingerprints on her skin she carried through the day and never wanted to fade. 

But that version of her seems to have dissolved away, in a soup of hormones, caring and exhaustion that's been on a low boil of resentment in a faded relationship. Or no relationship, and no confidence or motivation to seek one out.

Whatever sexy is now, she doesn't feel it. Add a dose of having to do all the damn things all the damn time and all of that might have settled into an ick that she can't quite shift.

So, she thinks. I've fundamentally changed. Sex is something I used to do. Used to enjoy doing. Not now. 

And perhaps she's right. 

But then there's the other camp.  

They know that they're in their prime. Know more about their bodies, more about what they want and what they don't. Know exactly where the spark to that rippling charge lives and how to ignite it. 

Maybe they've worked out that feeling sexual sits right alongside feeling wanted, appreciated, adored, desired. Maybe they're finally ready to feel that way. Maybe they don't give a f**k about their bumps and bulges and lines, because they know that actually, sexy has never been smooth, bland, clean. 

Some of them are rediscovering how it feels to be in lust as a grown-up. With someone new, perhaps. 

Some of them had found the confidence to remember to be playful with their long-term partners, to find freedom in loving someone who truly knows who you are.

Some of them, dating or in a fresh relationship felt, some days, like that young woman they used to be. The exact words "I feel like a teenager again" flushing and blushing with energy. 

Is the sex of your life behind you, or is it still ahead?

It's a question that the subject of my MID interview, Leslie Morgan, asked herself when her 20-year marriage fell apart at 49. 

Leslie had always liked sex. Had liked sex with her husband. But, he no longer liked her. For years, he dismissed and belittled her needs, sexual or otherwise, withdrawing affection, withholding love. He liked the appearance of having an accomplished, attractive, writer-wife, three kids, a beautiful home, someone to organise his life, someone to take care of him. But inside the charade, the marriage was rotten.

On the day they finally decided to end it, Leslie went to put her arms around her husband, in sadness at what was to come. And even under her platonic embrace, he flinched. "I don't like the way you hug me," he said, as she recounts in the book she wrote about what happened next, The Naked Truth. 

There is little more devastating to a person than wholesale physical rejection, something we sometimes forget until it's us being rejected, rather than doing the rejecting.

Leslie, like many a straight woman trying to survive a marriage collapse, swore off men as she dealt with the detritus of her divorce. And then, she didn't. She really, really didn't.

One year after that rejected cuddle, Leslie made a plan that over the next 12 months, she was going to find five men to have sex with. Not one-night-stand sex, but ongoing, no-strings affairs. She travelled a lot for work, so, with her kids almost out of home or away at college or over at their dad's, she decided she needed boyfriends who could come over when she wanted them to, and boyfriends she could visit on the road. And she set about finding them. 

The first man she slept with after her husband, and after almost three years of celibacy, was a gorgeous man almost 20 years younger than she was. It's not an empty stereotype, Leslie found, that younger men like older women. And that older women can use them wisely to top up their self-esteem.

Watch: There are common mindsets women have towards dating when coming out of a toxic relationship or divorce. Post continues after video.

"I think that younger men who are sexually attracted to older women don't expect perfection," she told me. "They absolutely know that your body is not going to be perfect. They're after the entire experience, not just the physicality of it. And they are fully aware that older women are much more experienced sexually than they are and they liked that. And also by comparison to these men. I was so wise. I knew how to put them at ease. I was very comfortable talking into them about sex. Because I'd had a lot of sex and because I liked sex, and also I could solve their problems. I mean, there's not a 29-year-old on Earth, who can come up with a problem that I can't solve in five minutes."

If you want to hear more about what Leslie learned about recruiting lovers and reawakening her libido, you'll have to listen to MID, but beyond the stories of seduction, Leslie wants all straight women who think that sex was a thing we used to want, that pleasure was something we used to deserve, that craving excitement is selfish, to think again. We are, she says, all worthy of the kind of desire that relights fires.

"Women are raised to be ashamed of thinking that we deserve a lot of that goddess adoration," she says. "And the reason we're taught that is because it's a lot easier for men, if they don't have to adore us, and they don't have to seduce us. And they have set it up so that we think we don't deserve it, that we don't deserve the flowers and the compliments. And the science, unfortunately, is not in men's favour, because the science is that what is an aphrodisiac for women sexually is to be seduced... Most men think oh, I don't have to do that anymore. She's here, she's in the bed with me, I can have sex with her whenever I want. I don't even have to be nice to her, and she has to have sex with me... And that's, I say to men and to women all the time. If you're married, and your wife doesn't want to have sex with you, it's your fault. It's not her fault. It's because you have stopped trying to seduce her." 

Maybe that rings a bell. Maybe it doesn't, because hormones and caring and work and life have just left you indifferent to even the most ardent seduction, and the only thing that you're interested in doing in bed is scrolling your phone and falling asleep with your slug mask on. 

That's okay. You're not alone. But maybe, just maybe, women like Leslie would suggest, that little whisper inside that reminds you that you were once energised by pleasure, by play, by intimacy, will eventually start jumping up and down and stamping her feet. And then? Well, what will you do?

The best sex of your life. 

Is it behind you? Or is it still ahead? 

Maybe the answer to that question has not yet been written.

This is an edited extract from the podcast MID. Follow and subscribe, wherever you get your podcasts.

Read more stories about midlife women:

• HOLLY WAINWRIGHT: Demi & Sienna & Cate. The contradiction of midlife style icons.
• HOLLY WAINWRIGHT: 'Generation X, stop fighting being Mid.'
• 'I'm a fashion stylist in my 40s. Here are 5 ways to rediscover your personal style.'

Feature image: Instagram @lesliebooks.