Changes in ageing women’s sexual subjectivity as seen from a life course perspective: security, caring, and desire

Abstract

This article explores the sexual subjectivity of women of post-reproductive age who seek partners on dating apps. The existing literature highlights the sexual subjectivity and agency of older women as contested and not sufficiently investigated. Even less research has been conducted on changes in the sexual subjectivity of women born in the USSR in the 1960s, with the liberalisation of sexual behaviour. The study is based on 45 interviews with women aged 55 years and over, who were born in the USSR and who now live in Israel, Finland and Russia. In the article, we examine sexual subjectivity as presented in the interviews from a life course perspective. We explain theoretically and empirically how changes in sexual subjectivity are expressed in the light of age and socio-cultural context constraints. Three life stories highlight the accumulation of experience and turning points, such as divorce and migration. They illustrate very different pathways in changing sexual subjectivity, yet all contain three Leitmotifs: desire, security and caring. The expression of post-reproductive female desire can be related to the need to feel secure and enjoy mutual care in sexual relationships. We show that these Leitmotifs shape and are shaped by women’s identifications as both sexual objects and subjects, and explore how they relate to different sexual cultures and variations in the socio-sexual positioning of women in Israel, Finland, and Russia.

Keywords:

• ageing women
• sexual subjectivity
• life course
• security
• caring
• desire

Introduction

This study aimed to explore the sexual subjectivity of post-reproductive age women who use online dating apps as viewed from a life course perspective. The sexual life of older women, especially those who are actively searching for partners, remains largely invisible, as it is often assumed that older adults, especially women, are sexless (Fileborn et al. 2015a; Syme et al. 2019). However, there is evidence of a cultural shift concerning ageing and sex in Western societies (Sandberg 2013; Fileborn et al. 2015a). This shift is influenced by increased life expectancy, rising divorce and repartnering rates, changing gender norms, the increased consumerisation of intimacy, and the growth of discourse on “positive ageing” (Laumann et al. 2006; Hägglund and Rotkirch 2021; Towler et al. 2021; Gore-Gorszewska and Ševčíková 2022).

In addition, the recent rapid rise of dating apps has been understudied (Wu and Trottier 2022). Dating apps have increased the possibility of older people finding new partners. Interestingly, older people are often more satisfied with dating apps than younger adults are (Bergström 2022), yet disappointment and fear of being tricked or manipulated through their use are also common (Gewirtz-Meydan, Opuda, and Ayalon 2023). A recent review of research on online dating sites among older adults demonstrates the sites’ increasing popularity. Nevertheless, studies in this area tend to ignore sex and sexuality and focus instead on love or companionship (Gewirtz-Meydan, Opuda, and Ayalon 2023).

Despite growing interest in the subject, few studies have explored the sexual subjectivities of women of post-reproductive age (Fileborn et al. 2015a), especially those who are not from Western European or North American countries (Laumann et al. 2006). Focusing on sexual subjectivity sheds light on the embodied experiences of women as constructed by changing materialities (Attala and Steel 2019), cultural scripts, and interpersonal experiences of ageing. To be locally relevant, attention to the intersections of age and sexuality from a life course perspective must focus on national sexual cultures (Wu and Trottier 2022). By sexual culture, we mean the cultural meanings and social organisation of sexual behaviour in a specific national, social, and historical context (Parker 2009). We contribute to this discussion by investigating the sexual subjectivity of women born in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in the 1950s and 1960s who experienced the dissolution of the USSR as young adults in the 1990s.

Our research question was: “How do post-reproductive age women narrate their sexual subjectivity in their stories of searching for partners through dating apps?”. We answer this question by analysing the key Leitmotifs that organise the collected narratives on sexual subjectivity in our data, considering constraints and the socio-cultural context.

A theoretical framework: sexual subjectivity from a life course perspective

To explore sexual experiences, we draw on two interrelated concepts: sexual subjectivity and the life course. Sexual subjectivity may be defined as how one thinks of/feels about/narrates oneself as a sexual being and the meaning one ascribes to sex (Tolman 2012; Fileborn et al. 2015a). In the post-structuralist literature, sexual subjectivity is understood mainly as a form of discourse production “determined by normative discourses of femininity, masculinity and heterosexuality” (Bryant and Schofield 2007, 322). Nonetheless, understanding sexual subjectivity solely as the product of discourse risks ignoring its material aspects, i.e. the role of the physical body, socio-cultural practices, sexual desire, and agency among other issues (Bryant and Schofield 2007). Following Jackson and Scott (2001), we therefore conceptualise subjectivity as the expression of material bodily experiences interpreted and mediated through culturally available meanings. Hence, we approach sexual subjectivity as changing over time and being shaped by the physical specificities of the ageing female body (Fileborn et al. 2015a), sexual culture and gender norms (Laumann et al. 2006), as well as by social political factors such as divorce, migration, and health conditions.

A life course perspective focuses on trajectories across various dimensions (geography, family, work, sexuality), turning points, and key events. It emphasises the active role of individuals in constructing their life paths within the constraints and opportunities of particular contexts (Elder, Johnson, and Crosnoe 2003), their agency in negotiating the discourses available to them, and their role in changing the social patterns of sexual practice that develop over time. From this perspective, bodily practices are central to understanding how discourse operates in the social world; they are implicated in sexual practice and the making of sexual subjectivities. For this reason, this perspective is useful in feminist research that explores female sexual subjectivity as active, desiring, and changing (Bryant and Schofield 2007). Like Bryant and Schofield (2007), we argue that ageing female sexual subjectivity is related to turning points and the accumulation of dis/advantageous experiences and skills in different sexual relationships; “through their bodily experiences, new erotic possibilities [are] revealed” (334).

Few studies on the sexual subjectivities of ageing women have employed this kind of perspective. Existing research indicates that women’s sexual subjectivities are fluid and diverse across the life course (Fileborn et al. 2015b) and affected by the global context of individualisation and the consumerisation of sexuality (Gill and Scharff 2013). For example, ageing women may need to negotiate the binary of the sexless person as opposed to the “sexy oldie” (Fileborn et al. 2015a).

Little is known about the sexual subjectivity of ageing women from the USSR. It is assumed that these women need to negotiate with additional constraints to express sexual desire after menopause against the Soviet cultural background, in which the babushka offered the dominant representation of older women. The babushka stereotype depicts older women as sexless and mainly focused on caring for their grandchildren and families (Shadrina 2022). In contrast, recent studies show that some elderly women hitherto excluded from local dating markets due to age discrimination have found sought out and new romantic opportunities after migrating from the former USSR (King et al. 2017; Cvajner and Sciortino 2021).

Socio-cultural context

Recognising the unique cultural context of our data was crucial to our analysis of the interviews. Interviewees in this study were born in the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s and spent their formative years there in the 1970s and 1980s. This period in the Soviet Union can be characterised as relatively gender equal, with equal rights for women and men but traditional gender roles in the private sphere. Marriage and having at least one child were culturally obligatory for women, and divorce began to become normalised. Although sexuality continued to be silenced publicly, sexual norms began to change, and attitudes became more permissive due to urbanisation, the relative liberalisation of society, and the influence of the Western sexual revolution (Rotkirch 2000; Temkina 2008).

The 1990s witnessed the dissolution of the Soviet Union alongside the radical transformation of society, globalisation and marketisation. One third of women were residents in Russia at the time of data collection. Sexuality became more publicly liberalised and diverse, yet sexual activity was considered riskier because of HIV. During this period, a new sexual script evolved that acknowledged greater sexual pleasure and choice for women. In addition, the phenomenon of Russian women using their sexuality to achieve material goals through relationships with prosperous men quickly spread (Temkina 2008; Temkina and Zdravomyslova 2015). Despite these changes, the cultural script for older women limited by the babushka social role did not change significantly and remained salient (Shadrina 2022).

During the 1990s or thereabouts, one third of the interviewees in this study emigrated to Israel as returning Jews, and received citizenship immediately. Israeli society has undergone a cultural shift from collectivism to individualism in the last several decades and has become pluralistic and globalised (Kaplan 2016). Israel is perceived as a familist society with conservative gender-role differentiation (Blus-Kadosh et al. 2023), however, regarding sexual behaviour, there has been a cultural shift towards more liberal views, with growing sexual individualisation, especially among middle-class individuals (Kaplan 2016). At the time of their emigration to Israel, women with a Soviet background, many of who were not ethnically Russian, also had to cope with negative stereotypes of “Russian” women as “bad” (often divorced) mothers, sexual Others, and prostitutes (Shevchenko and Lachover 2023), in contrast to respectable native Israeli women.

Another one third of our interviewees emigrated from the USSR to Finland, mainly in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In line with Finland’s migration rules, Soviet-born people with an Ingrian background could move freely to Finland as “returning Finns” (Mähönen et al. 2015). Other paths to immigration were studies, work, or marriage. Cross-national marriages often occurred, especially in Eastern Finland, near the Russian border (Krivonos and Diatlova 2020). Finland is considered a liberal and egalitarian society with regard to gender and sex. Attitudes towards Russian-speaking immigrants varied, and young Russian women were sometimes perceived as sexually available and culturally backward (Keskinen 2018). At the same time, “Russian” women in Finland were also considered suitable for caregiving jobs and family roles, such as mothers and babushkas (Tiaynen 2013).

Methodology

Research participants

This study included three samples, each consisting of 15 interviews with post-Soviet women in Russia, Finland, and Israel. We accessed prospective respondents through our personal Facebook accounts and different Facebook groups. Some interviewees contacted us after hearing about the study from other interviewees and through personal connections.

Our final sample consisted of mainly well-educated women aged 51 to 76 (Table 1). We sought women aged 55+, who can be classified as “young-old” adults (Laslett 1991). However, several women aged 51 to 54 responded. We decided to include them since they had all experienced menopause, which shapes female ageing biologically and culturally (Krajewski 2019).

Table 1. Demographic information on interviewees.

	Age	Education	Relationship status before dating app	Relationship status at the time of the interviews	Sexual identity
Russia	52 - 70	2 Professional Education 13 Higher Education	13 Divorced 1 Widowed 1 Married	7 Single, 4 long-term monogamous relationship, 1 married, 1 long-term casual relationship, 1 casual, 1 parallel relationship	13 identified as heterosexual 2 identified as bisexual.
Finland	51 - 64	8 Professional Education 7 Higher Education	9 Divorced 3 Widowed 2 Married 1 Single	5 Single, 2 long-term monogamous relationship, 5 married, 1 parallel relationship, 1 cohabitation, 1 relationship with married men	All identified as heterosexual.
Israel	54 – 71	3 Professional Education 12 Higher Education	12 Divorced 2 Widowed 1 Married	9 Single, 1 married, 3 parallel relationship, 1 cohabitation, 1 relationship with married men.	All identified as heterosexual

Data collection

The first two authors supported by research assistants collected the data through semi-structured interviews conducted in Russian. The interviews took place face-to-face, by Zoom or via WhatsApp and lasted one hour on average. The authors’ ages varied from mid 40s to 60 years and the research assistants were between their mid-20s and late 30s. Before the interviews, we explained the aim of the research and the research process. We told the interviewees that we wanted to hear about their experiences using dating apps, their relationships, and their sexuality. We began the interviews by asking the women to tell us their stories about using dating apps. After the initial story had been told, we asked each woman several open questions from the interview guide about their relationships and sexuality; their search for partners on dating apps; and the influence of ageing on their sexuality. We also collected demographic information. A copy of the interview guide is available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Data analysis

Narrative analysis (Lieblich, Tuval-Mashiach, and Zilber 1998) was used to construct an interpreted, context-sensitive description of sexual subjectivity. The narratives of migrants are often extremely rich with elements of social and cultural subjectivity and identity being interwoven with the political-historical and spatio-temporal contexts of their lives (Shahar and Lavie-Ajayi 2018).

Data analysis took place in several stages: (i) reading all the interviews and writing a summary of each story, which was then discussed by all the authors; (ii) choosing one interview from each country that was typical of this country’s dataset but was not the most or least sexuality-focused narrative; (iii) analysing each selected story, focusing mainly on the content but with attention to terminology, silences, laughter, and the like (Lieblich, Tuval-Mashiach, and Zilber 1998); (iv) writing up the analysis of each interview; (v) discussing and reviewing the analysis of each interview within the research team; and (vi) identifying key interconnected Leitmotifs present in the narratives.

Research ethics

The study (the research programme, the guide for semi-structured interviews, and the assume instructions of interviewers and transcribers) was approved by the ethics committee of the St. Petersburg Association of Sociologists (date of approval 20 April 2022). Sexuality is a highly sensitive topic, and we ensured compliance with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) throughout data collection and the research process. The invitation to participate emphasised that participation was voluntary and anonymous. We informed women that the interviews would be recorded and transcribed and that excerpts would be published unidentified for research purposes.

The collected interviews were anonymised and transcribed by specially trained research assistants. Sensitive personal information, such as the names of the respondents, their family members, and their partners, as well as specific life story details, were omitted, and pseudonyms were generated. Respondents’ contact details were deleted within 12  months of the interview dates.

Reflexivity statement

Four researchers collaborated on this study. The first author (AT) was born in USSR and had lived there much of her life. She recently received Israeli citizenship based on her Jewish origins hand has subsequently spent a lot of time in Israel. The second author (LS) was born in Russia and emigrated to Finland seven years ago. The third (MLA) was born in Israel and has always lived there. The fourth (AR) was born in Finland and has lived there all her life. Our geographical and national biographies shaped the research planning and implementation. In addition, our diverse national, personal, and relational biographies and different perspectives on gender and sexual power relations deepened our discussion throughout the data analysis. In addition, wars started in Russia and Israel during the period of data collection and analysis, affecting our lives (and those of many others) and influencing the research. Studying positive changes in women’s lives through a small-scale feminist collaboration helped us cope personally.

Findings

Three narratives on sexual subjectivity

Below, we describe in detail three narratives in our data. We identified three interconnected key Leitmotifs present in the narratives concerning changing sexual subjectivity: desire, security and caring. We begin by presenting the narratives of Valeria, Angelina and Karina. In our subsequent discussion, we explore how they shaped and were shaped by women’s identification as both sexual objects and subjects.

Valeria: learning to articulate desire outside committed relationships

Valeria, aged 54, emigrated to Israel as a person of Jewish origin and has lived there for 22 years. She received a professional education, worked in the beauty industry, is divorced, has one adult child, and was involved in long-term casual relationships at the time of the interview. Valeria narrated her story as one of sexual subjectivity that had changed with age, as divorce and migration opened possibilities for exploring new sexual scripts and her sexuality.

Valeria described her sexual life as an accumulation of experiences characterised by the development of her sexual taste and the growth of her self-confidence. From her youth, she had a negative perception of her body and its sexual attractiveness. Referring to her appearance, adult family members mocked her: “Who will marry you? Who needs you? If you at least gave birth, it would be good”. She was convinced that she was not attractive. Valeria married twice in her country of birth. Both of her marriages were with “just convenient” partners and failed to bring her emotional or sexual satisfaction.

After her migration and second divorce, Valeria began to explore her sexuality. Unmarried, she had relationships with several local men and found that she could be attractive. Gradually, Valeria discovered new sexual practices (e.g. oral sex) and sexual pleasure unconnected to childbearing or marriage. She felt freer and developed a positive perception of her body. During interview, Valeria portrayed herself as being well-integrated into Israeli society. She speaks fluent Hebrew and is financially independent thanks to her business in the beauty industry. She has familiarised herself with Israeli sexual culture, which she perceives to be more hedonistic and oriented towards female pleasure than in her native country: “Basically, what’s different about Israeli men is that they think this (oral sex for women) is normal. It’s easy for them to do. And … most of them have great pleasure, and if you have pleasure, they are absolutely sincere, express genuine joy … I liked … that … there were no restrictions, no conventions, yes. … I could finally behave freely”.

A turning point in Valeria’s sexual biography took place in her fifties. After ending a long-term relationship with an Israeli man, she registered on Tinder. Based on her acquired sexual experience and self-confidence, Valeria felt that Tinder opened extensive possibilities for choosing partners. She discovered that she could enjoy sex outside of a committed relationship. This redefinition of sexual subjectivity was facilitated by the interplay in her narrative between being a sexual object and a sexual subject.

Feminists have argued that the objectification of women’s bodies and sexuality hinders women’s ability to develop “sexual body knowledge” (Schalet 2010). Nonetheless, Valeria’s sexual subjectivity and desire have developed together with her wish to see herself as a sexual object. Men’s desire and admiration changed her self-perception: “I have very good skin and a good figure, large breasts … With this age difference, they (partners) have such pleasure. They say, ‘Look, you’re so beautiful, you look like this, you have this skin’. They want to date me more and more, making me want to date … I cry over the years when I was a thousand times prettier and younger and completely unaware of my worth”.

For Valeria, being a sexual object is a significant part of her sexual subjectivity. Her narrative brings together sexual objectification, sexual subjectivity, confidence, pleasure, and desire. Caring in connection with sex is important to Valeria. Connection and erotic intimacy are the essence of sexual pleasure. They provide a space where there is no separation between desire and being desired: “If you care, it’s before, after, and during sex. I mean, there’s this caring during sex … starting with … I don’t know how to convey that. When you feel that a man cares about you, that is wonderful”.

Valeria’s story is about transformation and a better understanding of desire through changing sexual scripts and accumulated experience. These changes in sexual subjectivity are made possible in sexual relationships that give her a positive perception of herself. Age and migration have been beneficial for Valeria’s growing self-confidence. On the one hand, Valeria connects changes in her sexual subjectivity to Israeli culture and her feeling of being well-integrated and safe in Israel. In Israel, she has been exposed to different sexual scripts. With some irony, she explained, “Here everybody can, everybody wants [sex]”. On the other hand, after the divorce, she was able to have caring sexual experiences and discarded her initial negative attitude towards her body and sexuality. Thus, Valeria felt safe not only because of her sense of security in Israeli society but also as a woman who, with age, had developed self-confidence through sexual experience and the gaze of admiring partners.

Angelina: looking for caring romantic relationships

Angelina, aged 55 had received higher education and lived in Russia. She is a teacher, divorced, and has adult children. Angelina narrated her story as one of sexual subjectivity that developed after divorce. She learned what she wanted by ending unsatisfying relationships while continuing to search for caring, romantic ones. Angelina described herself as an energetic woman who loves to travel, enjoys an active cultural life, and has many friends with whom she likes to spend time. In her interview, Angelina generally did not talk much about sex. We found this to be a common discursive characteristic of interviews with women who live in Russia. This characteristic is likely related to Russian culture, in which it was and remains rare for women to talk about sexuality, among members of the older generation. Angelina referred to “sexless” traditional Soviet culture while describing modern contemporary culture as more open and favourable.

Angelina began her story by saying that divorce was a transformative event for her since she had felt sexually insecure in her marriage. She described her sexuality as improving immensely in her mid-forties following the “bad sex” she had experienced earlier in her marriage: “I think I have changed (sexually) and changed for the better. When I lived with my husband …somehow, all these feelings were dulled. And when something appears negative, something you are dissatisfied with, in your partner, then you don’t want this sex, you don’t want this intimacy, in a drunken state, he just forced me … And I was so disgusted by that sex”.

Marriage was an important aspect of Angelina’s identity. According to her, she married as a virgin and believed her husband would be her only partner. She regretted the failure of her marriage and began seeking new relationships after her divorce. Although sex was important to Angelina, she also hoped for closeness and caring emotional communication: “For me, sexual need is probably somewhere around third place. I mean, first, it’s communication, understanding, and closeness of the soul. And then, it’s probably everyday life, helping around the house, doing things together, and so on. And sex is third because, well, just because. (laughs) It’s still important for me, let’s say”.

After leaving her abusive husband, Angelina dreamt of having a close and caring relationship in which she could share her life with a soulmate. She used several dating apps, through which she was able to establish contacts and start dating several men. Doing so helped her understand what kind of men she wanted. She expected men to have the same social, professional and educational background as herself. Their outward appearance and behaviour on dates were also important to her. She wished for a certain habitus and leisure habits similar to her own, a middle-class mindset, and a similar level of social activity and mobility. In addition, Angelina told us she gained agency in her relationships by learning to say “no” and break up with partners who did not suit her. She also realised her self-reliability and independence:

But in principle, it’s good that I don’t depend on anyone now. That is, if before I considered men … [sources of] housing [and] … money. Now, I don’t need this. That is, it’s as if nothing has changed in my situation, let’s say, but I have changed. That is, my perception is, yes, that I can do everything myself. This, on the other hand, is bad because now I’m in a relationship with a man who … well … a man’s man, with a capital M, let’s say, in all respects. [The kind that] brings my bag and hands me my coat, and at home, he’s like, “You sit. I’ll do it for you”. That’s all very well and good, but I can do it all for myself!

This excerpt highlights Angelina’s ambivalence towards her newly acquired independence. On the one hand, she is happy not to depend financially or otherwise on her male partner and feels independent. On the other hand, she illustrates her partner’s masculinity by describing how he cares for her, which she enjoys. Nevertheless, she says she does not want to fulfil a traditional gender role in a shared household. She understands that she is not looking for marriage, which would limit her freedom, and said: “I don’t need to be put in a cage”.

Angelina claimed that her sexual life had improved since the divorce, stating, “I flourished sexually only probably after 45”. However, she seemed uncertain about her sexual attractiveness and sexual desire. For example, her partner considers her to be very sexual, and she takes this as a compliment yet is not confident that it is true. She receives nice words from him but reacts with ambivalence: “[He said], ‘Sex radiates from you’. I no longer know how sex radiates from me. What kind?” She observes the desire of men around her and considers herself sexually attractive to others: “I see how men want [me and] lick their lips”. She seemed ambivalent when speaking of her desire. “Now I don’t know how to say it, no crazy desire because with age, the hormonal background drops”. She considers sex important and explains that she desires it and is seeking “sex for health”, referring to the popular Russian belief regarding the health benefits of sexual intercourse for the female body.

Her divorce and the subsequent experience of dating and relationships benefited Angelina. She could be independent and choose relationships in which she felt secure. Angelina’s story can be read as one of liberation from sexual insecurity with an abusive husband and establishing more secure relationships based on shared interests and lifestyles. Nevertheless, sexuality remains an area of potential vulnerability for her, as her assertiveness and self-confidence conflict with traditional gender roles, and ageing may affect her future sexual desires.

Karina: looking for security in life through partnerships

Karina, aged 57, had received a vocational education and works as a kindergarten teacher. At the time of the interview, she had lived for 15 years in Finland, where she moved from Russia following her marriage to a Finnish man. Karina has an adult son and has been married several times. At the time of the interview, she had two long-term partners, who she meets regularly: one 20 years her junior (referred to by her as “the Arab”), with whom she had a sexual relationship, and another 20 years older than her (referred to by her as “the Finn”), with whom she does not have a sexual relationship, but who supports her and provides financial assistance. Her narrative sheds light on how relationships help her cope with the insecurity she experiences due to her migrant status in Finland. A similar attitude was common among many interviewees in our data from this country.

Karina told us she has always had a high level of sexual desire, which did not diminish after menopause. Sexual desire has been a driving force in her life, and she has had many sexual partners. At the time of the interview, Karina mentioned that she had stopped searching for new partners because her current partners “fully satisfy” her. She considers herself a “happy person” who lives in harmony with herself and her partners. Karina described herself as an outgoing, social person with many friends. She met men on dating apps and websites not only for sexual reasons but also when she wanted to socialise. Many of these men remain her friends.

The sexual subjectivity present in Karina’s narrative is revealed through relational categories. She talks about relationships as long-term interactions based not only on sex but primarily on mutual interest, understanding, and enjoyment of communication. For example, when describing one of her sexual partners, she said, “He not only satisfies me sexually but also satisfies me as a person. We watch movies together, watch Russian movies, and discuss them. We are on the same wavelength”.

When talking about relationships, Karina also spoke of sexuality in terms of self-respect and love. The category of self-respect may be related to the stereotypical Finnish perception of Russian-speaking migrant women as sexually available (see Krivonos and Diatlova 2020), from which Karina strives to distance herself. In her interview, she emphasised that despite her interest in sex, she only agrees to sexual relationships with certain men: “I dated men. Of course, I didn’t share a bed with all of them. I wouldn’t respect myself. Why? After all, I am a self-respecting woman”.

It is also important for Karina not to feel like a sexual object. She presents herself as a subject who can choose partners. She underscores her ability to choose, control sex, and assert her self-respect: “There must be relationships. After all, a person is recognised through human qualities, not through, excuse me, sex. I love sex. I adore it, but I wouldn’t ever go with just anyone because I wouldn’t respect myself”.

The second important category for Karina concerning her sexual subjectivity is love. Karina describes love as a special feeling of attachment, care, and happiness. She depicts love as caring and emotionally supportive communication: “I write to him: ‘Good morning, my happiness’. He is my happiness, and I love him”.

Karina expects to be cared for by her partners. She understands care as both material support and assistance with everyday tasks. Despite having her own income, Karina values financially stable men who are willing to give her monetary support, buy her gifts, and purchase expensive items. She sees herself as independent, yet, to her, such material support provides proof of love and caring: “My Finn supported me. He had his own company. He had a lot of money, and he supported me financially. He bought me all the furniture. He loved me very much”.

Karina is also willing to take care of her partners and help them. Through mutual care and assistance, Karina constructs relationships as involving reciprocity and the opportunity to feel like an active subject: “I helped him then. You can’t imagine how I helped him once in his life—I just pulled him out. When we met, I helped him, but at the same time, he gave me so much positive energy”.

Another important Leitmotif in this narrative of sexual subjectivity is security. Sexuality creates vulnerability for older migrant women, whose second-class position is challenged by their status as immigrants and their ethnicity (Diatlova 2016; Krivonos and Diatlova 2020; Shadrina 2022). Concerns about race and age permeated Karina’s interview. She fears dishonest men who, due to her origin, may use her sexually and materially for their benefit: “There are many male freeloaders in Finland, a terrible number, and everyone wants to attach themselves to a woman. When they attach themselves and establish their lives, they leave your life because they no longer need you—they have used you up”. She worries about her future, which seems uncertain due to the possibility of losing her partners, with whom she is now in a balanced relationship:

They complement each other. If one of them leaves my life, I will probably split with the second one because they complement each other so much that I don’t need just one man. I understand that the young one will eventually leave me because he will turn 40 and eventually start his own family. It will be normal; he has to leave my life … Someday, the other one will also leave me. He is older than me, he is already in his eighties, and he will die someday. I can’t imagine that someday they won’t be in my life. Of course, it will be a shock to me. They are like the foundation of my life, so they are both very dear to me. I have a job, and I have their support.

Karina’s sexual subjectivity is entrenched within the meaningful context of relationships. She understands relationships partly instrumentally, i.e. as a means of coping with the insecurity of being a migrant. At the same time, she develops her sexuality as an active subject who can choose partners by asserting her desire and interest in them, and not accepting the stereotypical view of sexually available migrant women or the cultural script of the sexless older women. She strives for self-respect through caring and being cared for. Karina’s sexual script is characterised by a hierarchy of sexual relations with men in which local men are at the top. Research on women from the former USSR in Italy has shown similar preferences for local men as possessing symbolic, cultural and economic resources that help the woman integrate into the local society (Cvajner 2019). Thus, Karina’s case is not unusual or relevant only to Finland but rather a sexual script prevalent in the experience of many migrant women.

Discussion

Desire, security, and caring in post-reproductive age women

In this study, we aimed to shed light on changes in female sexual subjectivity with ageing, key turning points, and changing national contexts during the life courses of our participants. Our results suggest that the sexual subjectivities of post-reproductive age women are shaped by changing sexual cultures in their countries of origin and, in the case of migration, in their host countries. Different and diverse cultural scripts became available to our interviewees in Russia, Finland and Israel. They present themselves as sexual subjects, although they remain socially located in paradoxical situations; there is still limited space for ageing sexuality, while the liberal cultures promote and even require sexual agency. Women in this study expanded their horizons beyond traditional gendered norms, engaging in pleasurable casual sex, non-monogamous relationships, and new sexual practices. They no longer accepted the traditional sexual script that focuses on men’s orgasm, and they expected their partners to care about their sexual needs.

In line with the findings of previous studies, our results highlight how older women can experience new sexual pleasure and freedom (King et al. 2017; Gore-Gorszewska and Ševčíková 2022). Nevertheless, expressions of ageing sexual subjectivity are constrained by cultural norms and gender power relationships. Ageing women, especially post-Soviet women who grew up with the babushka as the key social model for older women, may feel uncertain about the sexual desire and sex appeal in a new context or cultures. Similar effects were noted in Gewinner’s (2020) research on the sexuality of Russian women of different generations in Germany.

We distinguished between three organising Leitmotifs or narratives on sexual subjectivity in our dataset: desire, security and caring. Desire was related to life-changing events and the accumulation of experience, while age was narrated as beneficial to desire. Though not all women speak openly about sexual practices, in the three narratives described here, the women discussed their embodied desire. Transformative moments reveal new possibilities of erotic pleasure (Bryant and Schofield 2007). Alongside the ability to be attuned and responsive, these moments play a significant role in the development of women’s sexual subjectivity. Women discover themselves as agential sexual subjects who actively pursue sex in order to express their desire and experience pleasure. This phenomenon resonates with Gore-Gorszewska’s conclusion regarding sexual agency among older Polish women who develop greater self-awareness and decisiveness by deciding to abstain from sex (Gore-Gorszewska 2023).

Although men remain privileged sexual subjects in women’s accounts, women themselves are both subjects and objects of desire. Objectification during sex and being desired are understood as pleasurable if sex is also caring and secure. We found a nuanced interplay rather than a tension between being an object and a subject. This finding may be related to relatively lower cultural objectification pressure on women of post-reproductive age (Fredrickson and Roberts 1997) and the fact that our participants had gone through menopause and experienced divorce and migration.

We found that women’s security as sexual subjects is shaped partly by legal citizenship and belonging. The interviewees who emigrated from the former Soviet Union described how their sense of belonging to the new country had shaped their sense of security in various ways. Most of the interviewees in Finland had Finnish citizenship, but they still described feeling vulnerable because they did not feel they fully belonged to Finnish society. As older migrant women who are vulnerable due to their national identity and age status (Diatlova 2016; Krivonos and Diatlova 2020), they wanted partners to protect and support them. In contrast, interviewees in Israel mainly described themselves as well-integrated into Israeli society. They described feeling secure exploring their sexuality and what they consider more liberal and hedonistic Israeli sexual scripts that include more gender power balance and open new possibilities. This dimension is largely absent from previous studies of the subjectivity of ageing individuals across the life course (Fileborn et al. 2015b).

Regarding security, interviewees spoke about their fear of dishonest men who would treat them only as sexual objects, exploit them financially, lie, and cheat. They all described previous relationships in which they had not felt secure. All of them need to feel secure in their relationships, whether casual or committed, in order to explore and enjoy their sexuality. Finally, a sense of security could also stem from feeling desired and self-confident. Our interviewees related security to the ageing process, many of them described feeling more sexually confident with growing age and experience. However, they expressed a fear of being lonely and losing their sexual desirability in old age.

Caring is the third important Leitmotif. Gore-Gorszewska and Ševčíková (2022) emphasise the importance of intimacy as being cared for by a partner, yet we found it to be significant not only in long-term relationships. Caring is understood as important for sexual pleasure, self-confidence, and a sense of security. We understand the wish to be cared for as related to the dominant sexual script, in which men are often defined as primarily caring about their own sexual enjoyment, while women’s caring in sex is taken for granted. In the light of this dominant script, it was very important for women to feel that their male sexual partners cared for them and perceived them as subjects and not only objects of desire.

The interviewees expressed the need to be cared for in various ways. For some, sexual enjoyment must be part of any caring, committed relationship. For others, mutual caring was important only during sex itself, and they were not interested in committed relationships. None of the interviewees expressed interest in caring for a man in his household. Many reported that they enjoyed living apart and spending time together, demonstrating that these women do not feel bound to traditional gender roles, according to which women should take care of their male partners, their daily lives, their children and their households.

Limitations

It is important to note several limitations of this study. Given the purposive and small scale nature of the study, it is not possible to generalise from the findings as described here. In particular, it is not possible to make claims about women over 50 years of age as a whole, since data were collected only from women actively looking for partners on dating sites. We also collected data only from those who were ready to speak with us, so further research is needed to expand our understanding of sexual subjectivity among older women later in life as accessed by different means in different cultural contexts.

Conclusion

Based on three typical narratives selected from 45 interviews in three countries, we have presented post-reproductive age women’s sexual subjectivity as narrated and experienced during the life course. Despite their vulnerable social position and conflicting sexual norms for older women, interviewees spoke of experiencing greater sexual satisfaction, which was associated with the fulfilment of their needs as sexual subjects in chosen relationships.

The three narratives illustrate different pathways for the development of female sexual subjectivity, yet all contain three interconnected Leitmotifs related to desire, security and caring in heterosexual relationships. While positioning oneself as a sexual subject became more important for these women, their acceptance of being an object of male desire also provided pleasure within secure and caring sexual interactions. For women to express desire, it can be very important for them to feel secure, cared for, and desired.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the anonymous reviewers, the respondents, and their colleagues Maria Glukhova, Karina Makarova, Daria Nikitina, Ekaterina Tokalova, Anna Shadrina, Julia Shevchenko, and Elena Zdravomyslova.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Partnership and Family Dynamics in Old Age (LoveAge) project and the NetResilience consortium funded by the Strategic Research Council, within the Research Council of Finland (under Grant Numbers 317808, 345184 and 345183).