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Whatever female empowerment ought to look like, it probably isn't googling “is it normal to still want sex after 50.” Putting the browser into incognito mode, I feel 13 again. At least I have the Internet now, and don't have to flip through my friends’ magazines (which were forbidden in my house for being “shallow”), hoping for some acknowledgement of my experience between the Barbizon ads.

 

The last thing I need is to pathologise pleasure. But podcasts, news articles, Tube posters, even the work intranet have told me I ought to be sexless and miserable now. Maybe I have a brain tumour. 

 

A website tells me that what I'm experiencing is normal. Not as common as the opposite, but normal. It could be down to increased testosterone (which should please the Mumsnetters who think I'm a man), or increased freedom and confidence, or something else. Who knows? There's no money in researching these things, and you can sell more products to unhappy women than happy ones.

 

I glance down at the comments. “Thank God,” the first one says. “I thought I had a brain tumour.”

 

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I'm not proud of it, but sometimes the prevailing narrative of menopausal misery makes me smug. I wish I could go back for one day and confront my middle-school bullies: I'd rather be flat as Kansas than dry as Arizona, Krystal. 

 

The “not like other girls” mindset is a trap, I know. Still, I'm glad being unusual is finally working in my favour. 

 

*****

 

If you read the kanji in 色情 literally, the word seems to mean “colourful feelings,” which sounds like a rather charming euphemism. 色, the kanji for “colour,” is pronounced “shiki” in this word, but “iro” when it stands as a word on its own (and “shoku” in some other compounds). In both Chinese and Japanese,  色 had acquired secondary meanings relating to sex and/or romantic love by the 10th century CE.

 

As for 情 (pronounced “jō” both here and as a standalone word, although it's pronounced “nasa” or “sei” in some other compounds), it originally meant something like “the true state of the heart.” From there it branched off to have two meanings: most commonly “emotion” or “feeling” (with a slight implication of positive emotions), but also “true circumstances” or “fact.”

 

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I'm a year younger than Karenna Gore, which means I was 10 when Tipper Gore found 11-year-old Karenna listening to Darling Nikki by Prince and formed a federal committee rather than talk to her pubescent daughter about masturbation. 

 

Since it wasn't a single, Darling Nikki wasn't played on the radio, and there was no record store in my town. I wouldn't have known about the song if Tipper hadn't kicked up a fuss, prompting a classmate to copy down the lyrics from an older sibling's album and pass them around under the table at lunchtime. 

We didn't pass around the lyrics to another song in the PMRC's Filthy Fifteen, Dress You Up by Madonna, because its vocabulary doesn't even meet a fourth-grade standard of naughtiness. The problem wasn't the words, it was what they communicated. A grown woman playfully expressing sexual desire was considered too shocking for little girls to witness.

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Recently Fukuyama Masaharu's wife, Fukiishi Kazue, returned to acting and was viciously trashed online by some of his fans. I think this kind of thing might happen less often if girls of my generation had been taught that sexual fantasies could be an end in themselves. To the extent that we were taught about such things at all, they were portrayed as a way station on the journey to a relationship. If we’d been told it was OK for an attractive celebrity to just be the person we thought about when we masturbated, maybe we wouldn't attack their real-life partner like they'd taken something away from us. Men can be gross, but I've never heard of them ganging up on Javier Bardem because they fancy Penelope Cruz.

*****

 

Several Japanese dictionaries define 色情 specifically as sexual desire between a man and a woman. I'm not sure whether this is a strict limit on the word's meaning or simply reflects heteronormative assumptions. There is another word using 色, 男色 (danshoku) which means “male homosexuality.” But the obvious female equivalent, 女色 (joshoku), means “feminine beauty” or “love affair with a woman” (which again, is often assumed to be conducted by a man). The only word I've found for female homosexuality is レズビアニズム, which is just “lesbianism” written with katakana. 

 

There is a relatively modern term for “bisexuality,” 両性愛 (ryōseiai), which consists of a logical procession of kanji: “both,” “sex,” “love.”

 

*****

 

Although I first had a crush on a girl at 14, I haven't been out as bisexual for most of my life. In West Virginia in the 1980s, it was practically unthinkable. By 1995, when Newsweek published its infamous cover story on bisexuality (“a new sexual identity emerges”), the culture felt less threatening. But I had learned to hold my feelings at arm's length, to ignore any parts of me that might be disruptive. Five years later, I married a man and told myself the whole topic was moot.

 

I had spent so long convincing myself my sexuality didn't matter that I was barely conscious I was hiding anything. So when I finally came out to the wider world last year (not changing anything in my relationships, just letting people know who I really was), I was astonished at how liberated I felt. I had often wondered why life seemed so dim and restrained. It was because I had only been living with half my soul.

Shortly afterward, I got my nails done for Pride Month. Life becomes more colourful when you reveal the true state of your heart.

 

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