Lisa.
A conversation with intuitive Lisa Rosman about the Chiron Return, perimenopause, Baby Girl, and the vulnerability of the male orgasm.
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The other week, I made mention of a magazine article my friend Maggie sent me about the Chiron Return and how it might relate to sex and dating as a Gen X woman. I wanted to hear more, so I reached out to Lisa Rosman, a New York-based intuitive and cultural critic with whom my friend Max gifted me a session a few years ago. (Subscribe to her Substack!)
Listen, I don’t necessarily believe in (or, for that matter, understand) astrology, but I do believe in Lisa. And I wanted to get her take on things, not just about the Chiron Return, but about middle-aged women, sex, and dating. What follows is a condensed and edited version of our conversation.
ME: Max and I were talking the other day about middle-aged women of our generation, and sex, and the Chiron Return, she said “you know, you should talk to Lisa about all this.” And I was like, “that’s a great idea!”
So, my friend Maggie had sent me this article about the Chiron Return. And I was like, I wonder whether if there's something in the Chiron return that we can connect to a new sense of freedom or possibility that can also connect to sexuality.
LISA: Okay, so let's pull back, and I'll explain a little bit about Chiron from my vantage point. Chiron is technically an asteroid, a very small planet. It was discovered by astronomy in 1977. And I always think the way things line up is so cool. Because though it was astronomy that named this asteroid Chiron, in Greek mythology, Chiron literally was known as the wounded healer. He was the abandoned child of the sea nympth Philyra and Saturn, and he raised himself, then taught others how to be heroes. If you think about it, Chiron is exactly who we needed in 1977—the year of the personal growth revolution.
1977 was when the self-help movement really kicked in. That's when the Course of Miracles was launched. That's when Louise Hayes, who wrote the groundbreaking You Can Heal Your Life, about the mind-body connection in illness, was launched. That's when the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies was founded. So that really was the year. And one of the things my teacher always says is that the stars tend to surge in our awareness when we need them.
I'm not a classic astrologer. I find it a little disturbing when people won’t make any moves until they've done all the charts; you can’t underestimate the power of human free will. But I do think astrology is super helpful in terms of predicting and framing the big transitions looming on our paths—the Whether, I call it. I also find the natal chart—that screenshot of the heavens at the time of our birth—to be wicked useful because it indicates how we're wired to respond to things, what tools and challenges our soul chose in this life to help us grow.
Think of it as your spiritual DNA, essentially.
So when Chiron intersects with your natal chart, which only happens once a lifetime unless you live into your 100s, you finish raising the parts of you that are still unparented so you can become more wholly the person you always were meant to be. You become a more integrated expression of your true self. Don’t get it twisted. Chiron Returns, which technically happen when the asteroid approaches the position your sun was in around the time of your birth, can be rough. Highlighting the unparented parts of you is always rough. But these returns are incredibly rewarding in the long run.
I was taught they take place between ages 49 and 51, and I do think this is when the return is most acute. But when I went through my own Chiron return, I realized that they actually impact you for around seven years. So you start feeling it around 46, 47, maybe, and it doesn't really spit you out until 52, even 53. I'm 54 as of a couple of weeks ago.
The traditional wisdom around Chiron is that it puts you in touch with your wounded inner child, but, honestly, what doesn’t put us in touch with our inner wounded child? I think what Chiron uniquely does is activate the internal ideal parent—the caretaker we always needed to develop our whole self. The part of us that can heal and guide ourselves and others. Chiron returns finish up the parenting of the parts of us that didn’t receive proper care or guidance before now — not necessarily because our parents were jerks but because they were humans with their own challenges and blind spots.
To me, what Chiron Return really does is take us out of survival mode. Out of compensation mode. It transforms us into who we would've been if we'd been raised with unfettered, unconditional love by people who weren’t broken.
What this means for a lot of women and femmes is it takes us out of being an object and into being a subject for the first time our lives.
A lot of us walk around until this age, campaigning to be seen in a positive light because we’re afraid of the ramifications of not being positively seen. We’re fearful of displeasing the person holding the gaze. Unconsciously or not, we don’t think we’re whole people, people who can survive or even should survive, unless we receive that external positive affirmation. We’re taught to feel this way from day one; it’s key to keeping patriarchy in place.
That’s why the big insult is being told you’re not attractive. What would happen if we stopped caring less about whether we were perceived as attractive and more about what we were attracted to?
And we’re not just taught to defer to or desire the male gaze or the white gaze. It's the gaze of the other in general. We fear other womens’ gaze half the time, too, if we're being real. And so what I think Chiron actually does is give you the self-possession to privilege your own gaze.
ME: What I'm gazing at as opposed to who's gazing at me.
LISA: Yessssss. Look, I went through an extended period of sexual celibacy during my forties. I was done. I'm not going to lie. I just done with the whole mess of dancing around other people’s egos but I didn’t know any other way to be in relationship. And then when my Chiron return kicked in, I started fucking again, but really differently. The questions I’ve asked since then are less Can I make this work? And more like: Does this feel resonant? Does this make my pussy jump?
ME: Make my pussy jump!
LISA: Okay, less crudely, what I mean is: Is my nervous system pleasantly and functionally stimulated, or is the chemistry with this person kicking me into some older, more reactive, survival mode that doesn't feel authentic anymore? Is this chemistry about what I want now or am I just trying to solve a deficit from the past?
ME: it sounds to me like what you're saying is that we spend much of our lives, as women, being focused on ourselves as objects in other people's eyes, and that when Chiron returns, we start to see ourselves as subjects.
LISA: Yep. I mean, if you got lot of positive affirmation for being a hot young thing, and then you walk into your fifties, it doesn’t matter how much Botox you’ve had or how clean your habits are, you’ve lived enough life through the sheer volume of years that you no longer look like a blank slate upon which people can just project their dreams and fantasies.
Now, this is on record, so this is embarrassing, but you and I both hot, but we're hot now as self-possessed women who’ve seen some shit and grown from it. So if you're someone who's looking for a lady to just blindly accept whatever you’re throwing at her, who is more dependent on your validation than her own, then we 50something broads are not what you want.
And I think that a lot of women don’t allow themselves to embrace the opportunities of this shift. They fight it. You have to choose it.
ME: You have to choose what, though?
LISA: You have to choose to consciously cross over into giving more of a fuck about your own perception of things rather than about how you're being perceived. Not everybody feels up to it, not everyone even knows this happening or they can make this choice. I think the way that menopause is being dealt with by our generation is very connected to this. You don't have to answer, but where are you on that spectrum right now?
ME: I'm in perimenopause and I'm on HRT.
LISA: I stopped menstruating very recently and am choosing to go through these hormonal shifts without western medicine, though I am getting herbal and osteopathic support. It’s massively opening my eyes to how menopause is really a door that opens. We are taught to think it’s just a door closing; so we should postpone it as long as possible and trick our bodies into thinking it’s not happening. But I view the whole menopause transition as a power surge that puts you in touch with your own body and feelings and needs and desire very viscerally and immediately because your hormones are surging and putting you on notice.
And what I’m noticing in my practice and my social circles is that during this second puberty, more and more of my married female clients are stepping out on their partners even if they don’t realize the timing. Some of them are doing it with their partner's awareness. Some of them are doing it without their partner's awareness. There’s no common theme to the age of the people they are stepping out with, either. It's more that these women were either not having sex with their partners or the sex was incredibly unsatisfying, so they're privileging their own pleasure by looking elsewhere. That's the theme.
ME: Is this a Gen X thing?
LISA: If you think about it, Gen X is a really weird generation. Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s meant we were raised by people who culturally were being encouraged to prioritize their own self-care, their own lost childhoods. You know, beat up pillows, issue primal screams, all that jazz. For the most part, the parents of our generation were not really thinking about our childhoods so much as their own. So in a weird way, a lot of women our age are only now trying to actually fuck for themselves—not for some cultural approbation or received idea or to keep a relationship locked down. Only now are we learning to prioritize what we need and feel rather than trying to get some attention and support from someone else.
This is going to sound like a crazy sidebar, but I think it’s related. I think many, many women our age fake most of their orgasms even though few of us admit it to each other.
ME: They might. I mean, I don't, but yeah.
LISA: I think at the very least, way more women fake their orgasms than is discussed, and I think they don't talk about it because they’ve been doing it in their marriages from day one, and if they started admitting it this late to the game, they fear it would destroy everything they’ve built, everything they have. The movie Babygirl isn't in any way perfect. But the centerpiece, which is that Nicole Kidman’s character has been lying about her sexuality from day one, gave me chills because as an intuitive I sense that in an insane number of women my own age.
I think that’s one reason why so many affairs and poly arrangements are happening. Divorces too. What people aren't doing for the most part is having sex with their long-term partners because the unsatisfying patterns are set. I’m not against poly arrangements abstractly, I’m really not. I don’t a priori judge any relationship arrangement. But too often poly relationships are being handled as badly as they were by the generation before us, frankly. In my observation, for them to work, everyone really has to be on very much the same page. You have to be really clear on why you're doing it, and both people have to feel the same amount of agency about what's going on. Sadly, I think that happens less often than we’d hope.
ME: Do you feel that way about ethical non-monogamy?
LISA: Yeah, a 100 percent. Terms like that are cute, but it's like the way everyone calls bifocals progressives now. Too often, you’re giving it a different name, but someone is still being strongarmed or gaslit or is trying to keep their partner happy without feeling safe to say what they actually feel or want. Too often it’s a way for someone to dismiss anyone’s needs or humanity but their own. For sure, sometimes it can beautiful and can lead to a much richer life with deeper communion between more people. But sometimes it’s like putting a band-aid on a tumor, on a longstanding hotbed of resentments and disappointments.
So what I feel can happen at this Chiron return age is that we start actually tuning into what we want, what we authentically feel willing and open to—not just what we feel like we should want, and not just what we feel like we should will into being or white-knuckle through. The cool girl era ends with Chiron Return, cuz you don’t have the energy or reserves to keep shaping your own persona around what you think someone else wants. Thank fuck!
I have incorporated a new exercise into the breathwork I do at the beginning of my sessions. I ask my clients to breathe into their desires in that moment---not what they need but want, not what they think they should desire but what they actually desire. It can be a struggle at first to single that out.
A lot of women in our generation haven’t really been connected to their own desires for most of their lives. Even though most of us weren’t expected to wait til marriage to have sex like prior generations, we still were taught to react to and accommodate t other people’s desires rather than put our own into the world. Look at how courtship is structured. The paradigm is: men ask us out. Men pay for us. Men give us their name. We’re not creating these relationships with our own resources and agendas. We’re not getting to frame the questions. Our only choice is whether we answer yes or no.
And so many of us buy into it. There is so much taboo around us putting ourselves out there. It amazes me how few cis women have actually asked out cis guys out, though they have had to ask us out since the beginning of time. When I started also dating women and trans men, I realized asking someone out takes a lot of vulnerability. It’s scary and a lot of cis-women just never develop that muscle. It’s a muscle of agency even though it’s scary to use it at first.
So since I hit my Chiron return, if I’m into a cis-man, I ask him out. My friends are a little surprised by me. Honestly, I am a little surprised by me. I got asked out a lot more as a younger woman, and it embarrasses me to say this, but I think my responses often boiled down that old story of: Who am I going to give the milk to?
ME: I did not get asked out a lot when I was younger.
LISA: Well, you were also married, huh? You were married for a lot of it.
ME: Well, part of it, but in my twenties I was not asked out very much. I was celibate for periods of time; I didn't get asked out.
LISA: I get that. I think celibacy can be useful, though. I mean, right now I haven't had sex with anyone in a while, and I'm not worried about it. I think it is because I don't think of myself as not having a sex life. I'm just not actively sharing my pussy with anybody else. I’m in the process of reconfiguring what works for me after leaving a relationship that really didn’t work for me sexually though I loved him a lot.
ME: Let’s go back to Gen X.
LISA: I think what's distinguishing Gen X’s midlife experiences — astrologically, call it Chiron return, hormonally (if you’re female) call it menopause or peri—is that in some keys ways we were robbed of an identity as a generation. And this puts the midlife coming-into-your-own experience that every generation undergoes on steroids.
I mean, our parents’ generation was all about fetishizing youth—they were literally called the youth-quake. In some ways, they literally commodified it—in music, in fashion, you name it. In the 50s, that generation invented rock and roll, the ultimate soundtrack of youth! They also revolted as no generation had before in this country, and it cost them enormously. They took risks and they suffered.
And our generation—Gen X—grew up in this defensive crouch responding to our parents’ trauma. Most of us were aggressively aware of our parents’ wounds, especially because we were always trying to get attention from these shell-shocked people who had undergone so much upheaval and loss and were dealing with their stuff instead of ours. We were the generation of parentized children. I know you were in that storyline: I very much was too. Few of us experienced that steady, loving gaze from a parent which helps you develop inner strength, self-acceptance, self-compassion.
So the idea that we could have something now that is uniquely our own is major. Yes, technically we’re in our second puberty, but for a lot of Gen X women, doesn't it kind of fell like a first puberty in terms of the experience of actually crashing through doors and finding your own sexuality and figuring out what actually pleases you separate from being an object and making everyone else happy?
ME: Yeah. Well, my first puberty was marked by profound insecurity, whereas this one feels like it's leading to the opposite. Or at least I’m more willing to talk about the insecurity, which is freeing in and of itself.
LISA: Yes. I think what we're all struggling to do is find a way to work with vulnerability and fear that doesn’t involve self-erasure.
ME: Can you say a little bit more about that?
LISA: It's literally coming through me as I'm saying this to you. But I think the thing about it is that you can't have an orgasm without being vulnerable and open. It literally requires surrender. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but that’s what I love about male orgasms. They’re so naked. For this one second, the guy just opens up. No bravado. Just authenticity. You can't maintain bravado while you come. You can’t fake the funk. You're a hot mess. I think it is so hot. And you can’t really afford that release for yourself, that surrender, if you don’t feel self-secure in other ways. That’s what I want more and more for we women too. That’s what I want for myself.
And that’s what's so funny about Babygirl, right? When you see how Nicole Kidman’s character really comes versus how she performs an orgasm for her husband, it’s almost shocking. We have almost no model or record of authentic female orgasms in our culture, because female sexual pleasure is so decentered.
So at first, Nicole Kidman’s authentic orgasm is unnerving to watch on a big screen. It seems guttural. It's like a little labor. Most of the time, women are only allowed to seem so primal, so primordial, in a movie when they are literally in a birth scene.
ME: That scene where she's on the floor, I was like, that was incredibly brave of Nicole Kidman because it's not “pretty.”
LISA: I liked her so much more after I saw that movie. I've always been on the fence about her, but after that I was like, okay, I'm in. Her pleasure really wasn’t tailored for anybody else’s eye. She wasn’t in a zone where she was caring how she came off, she was fucking in it, and that's the thing I like about watching guys cum. They’re inside their pleasure.
Her orgasms were peak female subjectivity, and I think it’s why she hasn’t been getting her flowers during this awards season. Female pleasure is still too radical.
I think I was 30 years old the first time I had an authentic orgasm in the presence of someone else, and I've been having sex since I was 15, so that’s saying something about how little I privileged my own sexual pleasure. I think the sexual liberation of the 1960s filtered down to many girls in our generation having more sex than prior generations, but not necessarily having healthy or rewarding sex.
I have a new rule since my Chiron Return: I don't have sex with someone until I really am going to feel a hundred percent comfortable going all the way there. I’ve found out the hard way this means that there's a lot of people I just make out with and then say, nah. Nicely, of course. Rejection is hard for everyone!
ME: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I used to just never come in the presence of guys because what it usually took was for me to have a vibrator or for them to go down on me, and those were really vulnerable things. Now I'm like, I'm going to get my vibrator.
LISA: I’m so glad you do! I am amazed by how complicated it still is, but I think the opportunity of this transition is to start to embrace the close link between vulnerability and authenticity. To find a way to practice this openness without so much fear. I think of it as informed or conscious vulnerability, because you have enough self-support, self-confidence, to know it’s not the end of the world if you are not seen or received as you’d hope. You know you can trust your instincts about what you’re allowing in. You can handle what comes up. You are choosing, not being chosen.
It comes down to that Ntozake Shange quote I’ve had on my bedroom mirror for 5 years now:
i loved you on purpose/i was open on purpose; i still crave vulnerability & close talk/& i'm not even sorry bout you bein sorry.
ME: You said to me at one point…you said something like, if you're with a guy and he doesn't make you come, then make yourself come. Right then and there. And I haven't forgotten that.
LISA: I think the opportunity that's being offered to women through the second puberty that is menopause, ultimately, is us giving no fucks except for our own, right? Or at least giving as many fucks about ourselves as we do about everyone else. [Laughs.]
Practically speaking, it is very hard to be a good girl and keep everything tucked in and under wraps when you are sweating and flushed and feeling this insane current of energy and hormones rush through your system 24 hours a day. It’s a truth serum in a way, because you don’t have the reserves to lie or fake anything. You just ride this powerful tide. Honestly, I dig it. I recommend it!
Because this not Adam and Eve. This is Adam and Lilith, his first wife, the woman who wanted equal partnership and wouldn’t make it all about him.
This is the time of life when we make it about us.