Abstract or Keywords
Heterosexual women are less likely than heterosexual men to experience pleasure in partnered encounters. However, because most research on women's sexual pleasure focuses on adolescents and young adults, little is known about how processes associated with aging may change heterosexual women's sense of sexual subjectivity and entitlement to sexual pleasure. Relying on 60 life story interviews with single, heterosexual women between the ages of 18 and 91, we ask how women's experiences with sexual pleasure change across the life course. We find that aging enables some women to develop self-focused motivations for partnered sex that, in turn, help them access more sexual pleasure. The mechanisms that link aging with greater opportunities for sexual subjectivity and pleasure include increased self- and body acceptance, the accumulation of sexual experience with new partners, and improvements in sexual communication. Our findings shed light on social processes that may reduce the gendered pleasure gap among heterosexuals and pinpoint a need to study pleasure trajectories.