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Phoebe Harrop talks to renowned sex therapist and author of Sex Life Dr. Pamela Stephenson-Connolly about, well, sex.

Dr. Pamela Stephenson-Connolly is a serious MILF. There’s the long and lustrous platinum blonde hair, the come hither gaze, that hard-to-place accent… Oh and she’s a sexologist - and self-confessed sex lover - who refers to her libido as a mischievous “beastie” living inside her. I could introduce her as Billy Connolly’s wife, because they’ve been married for 30 years; but it might be more fitting to say one of his claims to fame is being her husband – because she’s perhaps even more famous, in her own right, than he is.
 
She’s quite the woman. I had the pleasure of meeting her recently when she graced Dunedin (naturally, it was meant to be Christchurch; every cloud and all that) on a tour promoting her latest book, Sex Life: How Our Sexual Encounters and Experiences Define Who We Are.
 
Dr. Stephenson-Connolly was born in 1949, so she has lived through some of the 20th centuries most sexually liberal decades. I wondered how society’s perception of sexuality had shifted during her life time. She said that, when she was 20, there were “almost no consequences [around sex]”. The contraceptive pill had become widely-available, and the AIDS epidemic was yet to rear its ugly, pandemic head. She says the attitude was “let’s just experiment, let’s go for it.” Alas, that drug-hazed heydey was soon to be over.
 
So how do those societal shifts affect the sexuality of individuals? She says that our sexualities are not just biologically-driven, but are a heady mixture of factors, including societal ones. Medical truths, how you feel about your body, the messages we got about sex as children, our life experiences: if any of these change, so too will our sexuality.
 
It may no longer be the swinging sixties, but we are certainly exposed to a lot of sexual images and content by the media, and the entertainment industry. Is our society over-sexed? Have things gone the other way and made us even less able to talk about sex? Dr. Stephenson-Connolly agrees: “we are unable to talk about [sex] properly. We give lip service to a lot of stuff about it: ... It doesn’t mean that we really understand all the images, that we feel comfortable with them, or that we can relate to them… There’s more and more of a gap between images and what people are actually experiencing.”
 
Dr. Stephenson-Conolly says we have a lot to learn from countries like Holland, France, Italy and Sweden, who deliver open and liberal sex education to their children from a young age. In France and Italy, the focus on sensuality and pleasure – to be taken from food, wine, sex – fosters a healthy relationship between children and their sexualities, which pays dividends into teenage and adultood.
 
It seems that New Zealand is seeing a shift in its attitude to traditional Judeo-Christian lifelong monogamy, so long the norm in the Western world. There’s New Zealand’s sky-high divorce rate, and one of the lowest marriage rates in 45 years. Is monogamy a realistic aspiration these days? “I’m not even sure that many people aspire to it”, says Dr. Stephenson-Connolly. “We see so much of people not lasting together, and it’s definitely not easy for anybody.” Her tips for a successful marriage? Be intimate: “True intimacy is not sexual, it’s really about being willing to share who you truly are with that person and not having to hide too much away. And, being able to see each other – the good and the bad; and also to be individuals… Being able to support each other in your individual growth.”
 
Is Sex Life a Karma Sutra for the 21st century? Not exactly. It’s not so much of a how-to, but more of a guide to understanding how our life experiences impact our sex lives. To say that Dr. Stephenson-Connolly wrote this book is not quite the whole story: sure, she pens an entertaining introduction, pops in some psychological gems from time to time… But the guts of the book consists of hundreds of anonymous anecdotes from people of all ages, about their sexual experiences throughout their lives.
 
Divided roughly into decades of an individual’s life (that is, 0-10, 20-30 etc.) the book examines rough themes that play out at each stage, from pre-natal erections to nonagenarian nookie, and beyond. In between there are some surprising, painful, somewhat disturbing and enlightening anecdotes that encompass all hues of the sexual rainbow: gay, lesbian, bisexual, transvestite, transgender, S&M-loving, incestual, abusive, strange men whipping their bits out in public… You name it, if someone has fantasised about it – or indeed actually lived it – it’s here for your reading pleasure.
 
 
Add to that a persistent sprinkling of pertinent quotes (according to George Burns, “sex at 90 is like trying to shoot pool with a rope”) and 450 pages of double-spaced 14pt Times New Roman later, there’s a sense that Dr. Stephenson-Connolly didn’t so much write Sex Life but compiled it and stuck it together with snappy sayings of other people’s invention.
 
“Sex, unlike war, is far too grave a matter to be left to the privates.” – Michael Haaren
 
That’s not to say that Sex Life is a cop out, or that Dr. Stephenson-Connolly doesn’t know what she is talking about. In fact it’s somewhat refreshing to read unadulterated personal experiences, rather than some sort of sweeping analysis of sex told from one person’s point of view. Furthermore, Dr. Stephenson-Connolly does remarkably well in retaining an unjudgmental point of view in her treatment of the anecdotes. One of the book’s clear messages is that there are mountains of mythology surrounding sex  - for example, that we “retire our pelvises” around age 40 – which should be de-mystified. Exhibit A: “If we can retain a sense of humour about our sexuality we’ll be able to deal with it best. One wonderfully horny 93-year-old I met quipped: ‘I know I had the wildest sex imaginable last night. Next morning, I had to see my doctor. Not because it hurt – but with my Alzheimer’s, I needed help remembering it!”
 
So without being a “how to” – at least when it comes to the mechanics of sex – it does (supposedly, I mean I wouldn’t know) answer those awkward questions we are too afraid to ask. And importantly it talks about the factors that contribute to each individual’s sexuality: childhood experiences, their parents’ attitudes towards sex, the kinds of relationships they want. Another emphasis of the book is that the menagerie of sexual experiences and approaches to human relations is more or less endless, and that’s fabulous - so long as our practices are safe, sane and consensual.
 
“We agreed that essentially we were going to be monogamous, but that if one of us ever wound up in some situation where amazing, once-in-a-lifetime sexual opportunity presented itself, we could go for it.”
 
 “I’m a big guy and my friends thought I was a hot, sexy guy… I acted like a guy that fucks lots of girls, but I was having sex with my own hand.”
 
“In sex as in banking there is a penalty for early withdrawal.” – Cynthia Nelms
 
So while sexuality, and relationships, come in almost every imaginable shape, colour and content; Dr. Stephenson-Connolly makes it clear that this diversity is something to be celebrated. We can’t box-in our sexual tendencies, and nor should we box-in others. In short, anything goes – as long as it’s safe, sane and consensual. What more is there to say, but to insert a humorous quotation….
 
“It is an infantile superstition of the human spirit that virginity would be thought of as a virtue and not the barrier that separates ignorance from knowledge.” – Voltaire