At fifty her magnetism was as evident as the nimbus of mauve tinted hair which ballooned out from her triangular shaped face. Her devilish eyes challenged both sexes. Paul Leautaud, a fellow author, attempted to define her appeal. He wrote": She is still very pretty—no pretty is not the word. It would be truer to say she radiates voluptuousness, love and passion." Alas, I have met few females of "a certain age" who emulate her. American society expects femme fatales to be wrapped in youthful, skinny packages.

If I had a dollar for each time I've heard a mature man described as "distinguished," even "elegant," I could retire. Conversely, I would starve if I waited for such prestigious adjectives, couched in a sexually desirable context, to be used in connection with his female counterpart. I keep my thrysus(pole with a pine cone tip which celebrants of Dionysus carried in their revels) clutched tight to avoid striking out in vexation when a female friend declines to visit a bar or other entertainment spot because the crowd is "too young."

I want to shake my chum Vivian and pelt her with vine leaves. The ninny, a green eyed blonde, has not made love in three years. She blames younger women for snapping up the men "her own age." Roberta, who crunches numbers for a large corporation and makes over six figures per year, promises to actively seek lovers after she has her "eyes tucked." I doubt it! Like so many unattached older women she fears rejection and sublimates by watching romance on her VCR.

By example in life and art, I exhort martyrs to jump down from the shelf and stop acting like blue haired ladys. Occasionally, I call upon other authors to buttress my point of view. Elizabeth Barret Browning, a Victorian bacchante, wrote "The Dead Pan" lamenting the absence of Eros from her world. We might invoke the gods in a similar manner today, even though "The Dead Pan" was written for a repressed society.

Gods of Hellas, gods of Hellas,
Can ye listen in your silence?
Can your mystic voices tell us
Where ye hide? In floating islands,
With a wind that evermore
Keeps you out of sight of shore?
      Pan Pan is dead.

My search for Pan has lured me into bedrooms on several continents. At fifty I cannot ignore grey hairs, cellulite and other symptoms of maturity. The bacchante in me refuses to "act my age," that is, perceive myself as a matron unworthy of male attention. Low necks and short skirts still flatter and, when they do not, obstinately I'll concoct fetching outfits which play up my strong points. I must be a "procurer for the serpent"—a sex crazed vixen, one of those Jezebels whom divines over the centuries have ranted against as though retaliating in perpetuity against Eve for seducing Adam. Some moralistic tracts give me a tummy ache, others a hearty chuckle.

One of the freshest, which could have been written yesterday, emanated from Philo of Alexandria (130 B.C. - 50 A.D.), a Hellenistic philosopher. My sort seems to have abounded in the early Christian era, for Philo described women of similar propensities to a T:

Her gait has a looseness bred of excessive indulgence and luxury, asserted the Jewish Plato. "The voluptuous movements of her eyes is a bait to draw the spirits of the young; her gaze is bold and shameless, her neck held high, her posture unnatural to her; she grins and giggles. Her hair is in extraordinary and complicated plaits, she has lines drawn under her eyes, and painted eyebrows. She constantly indulges in warm baths and has contrived her flushed coloring.

Personally, I prefer showers, the lack of which, in retrospect I am convinced, precipitated my breakup with Peter—an Englishman I met at a poetry reading. Peter was twenty years younger than I—a bagatelle among our set of Greenwich Villagers. Six months of his caresses hooked me on this reincarnation of Lord Byron, who recited couplets as he made love. My friends envied me for attracting a romantic poet whose dash was a throwback to the age when men duelled over love.