It is highly unlikely that you will see any bikini-clad models on this site if you do it will be young people visiting us! We are two 60-year-old women who have decided to embark on this adventure not because we think that we have anything to prove but because we reckon we can do it and it might be fun!
The sea has never played much of a part in my life except for the 2 years I lived on Port Phillip Bay in Black Rock in the early ’90s. Shelley lived in St Kilda on the same bay, I didn’t know her then, for a few years in the 1980s. We both ended up in Daylesford in the 2000s as far away from the sea as you could get.
I did not want to be an invisible woman in my 60s, but like Helen Garner in an article written for The Monthly titled, The insults of age, I often feel like I am.
“Your face is lined and your hair is grey, so they think you are weak, deaf, helpless, ignorant and stupid. It is assumed that you have no opinions and no standards of behaviour, that nothing that happens in your vicinity is any of your business.”.
Although she is 10 years older than us I understand completely.
We were in Southport in Queensland a few months ago, I went to the bar to order a couple of gin and tonics, a young woman (probably in her late 20s) approached the bar after me. I stood there while the young barman served her first, I watched him pour the spirit of whatever she had ordered into the little measuring cup, it overflowed, he then asked what I would like. He poured exactly the right amount into our glasses, I suppose he wouldn’t want to get us a bit tipsy.
In 1966 Robert Wilson published Feminine Forever, it proved to be a best seller. Today we can look back and laugh or be angry at his ideas but even today women of a certain age are quite often invisible.
” If a woman refused HRT, the consequences would be unthinkable. “All post-menopausal women are castrates,” Wilson wrote. But, with HRT, a woman’s “breasts and genital organs will not shrivel. She will be much more pleasant to live with and will not become dull and unattractive.”
“desexed, unnoticed and who notice little.” I am convinced Wilson has either shares in HRT or he is really a vet obsessed with castration and desexing.
Unfortunately, menopause was classified as a disease to be cured by any means it seems and the sales of HRT increased exponentially.
In the best selling book by Doctor David Reuben, Everything you always wanted to know about sex*but
The reason I have digressed somewhat was to prove that we have not outlived our usefulness and are quite capable of learning and participating in something new. In some areas those views, while not expressed so blatantly, are still there, but I am not really out to prove something that us woman of a certain age
Does the world belong to the young? Have we had our time in the sun? Or is there room for all ages here? We will never be the couple in La Vagabond but this cruising world has a place for all ages.