Sex in the 60s—the Age, not the Decade

Warning: If the thought of your parents having sex makes you shudder, you are too young for this book.


“Before I turn 67—next March—I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.”

Jane Juska paid $136.50 to place her carefully thought-out personal ad in The New York Review of Books, where “very smart people write very thoughtful, very long essays on everything from Freud to Jon-Benet Ramsey.” What would move a retired high school English teacher to go man-hunting in this way, and what happened when she did? The story is told in her feisty 2003 memoir A Round-Heeled Woman (slang for a woman who spends a lot of time with her feet in the air), one of my favorite books this year.

“I did not begin this adventure seeking a husband, a long-term relationship…, a partner,” Jane writes. “I liked where I lived [in California] and, for the most part, the life I lived there. It just didn’t have any touching in it…. I had felt a little dying happening to me for too long. I suppose placing the ad was my way of raging against that. I sure as hell wasn’t going to go gentle into that good night. Fuck, fuck against the dying of the light.”