The author says older women do have some advantages.

Question: When are women at their peak?

Mary Roach: I wondered about that too because, you know, you hear about... Actually, you hear middle age women now. Middle age women, they're like... They are at their sexual prime. I think, personally, that I didn't find any... anybody who specifically studied, you know, women longitudinally, like tracking them... because you need to follow a group of women overtime and sort of, you know, see how they've changed from their twenties to forties.

I think what's going on, a lot of the time, is that, you know, by the time you get to your mid-thirties or forties as a woman, you know what you like and you know how to make it happen or ask for it or talk about it. The other thing going on is that you're... you know what... You've got your birth control situation under control. You're not anxious about am I going to get pregnant?

So you're just a lot more confident and use to your body and how it works and you feel more comfortable talking about sex, you've known your partner longer, maybe. There's all kinds of things, I think, that contribute to a woman feeling more comfortable with sex, more comfortable making it happen the way it works for her, and being relaxed about it as opposed to somebody who sort of just stepping out into the world of sex.  I don't know, hormonally, why that would be the case. I think, you know, your hormones...tends to have a decline in middle age, in libido, in hormone so I don't know why that would... I don't know why physically a woman in middle age would be... have a better sex life than in her twenties.      

Recorded on: April 6, 2009