Doc-maker offers ‘course correction’ for outdated notions on female desire

TORONTO – Before tackling her latest documentary, “The Truth About Female Desire,” Vancouver filmmaker Maureen Palmer admits she held some biases of her own about the oft-taboo subject.

Then she met Debra, a 68-year-old married woman who took a lover with the permission of her 84-year-old husband. The smalltown senior spoke proudly of tracking down an occasional sex partner through Craigslist, and later seeking another to make it a threesome.

“I could tell you (Debra) shocked me on every level. She did,” Palmer says in a recent interview from her home in Vancouver.

“She looks like a Mennonite grandmother when you first see her. When I first met her I looked around (and said) ‘Am I in the right place?’”

Palmer says Debra — who uses a fake name and never shows her face to the camera to protect her married lover’s identity — is among a growing number of older women who boldly pursue their desires in the wake of the novel “50 Shades of Grey” and such online dating apps as Tinder.

Her documentary includes conversations with a 50-something Toronto woman who attends an oral sex workshop and a 40-something Calgary divorcee who outlines her fondness for dominance and submission play.

“Those are the women that have begun the stampede to the sex stores and drove up the sales of the bondage gear, the lube … 350 per cent after ’50 Shades of Grey,’” Palmer says.

The 57-year-old mother of two says working on the film has changed her attitudes about “pretty much about everything.”

“I try to be open-minded but I know I’ve been judgmental about other people and about my own past, right? And I think that I’m just not going to think that way anymore.”

Palmer notes that a slew of disturbing events in 2014 — the Jian Ghomeshi and Bill Cosby allegations, as well as the Dalhousie University dental students scandal — had her questioning how far women had come since Helen Gurley Brown’s 1962 book “Sex and the Single Girl.”

She describes her film as “a much-needed cultural course correction” that shows a variety of women in control of their own sexuality. And she says their freedom to say “Yes” to sex is as important as their right to say “No.”

“Canadian women should be able to pursue their desire without any of us having any say on it. I think we’re at the time where we’re past having a culture or a religion or a man define how we should be sexual. I think it’s up to us.”

“The Truth About Female Desire” airs Thursday on CBC-TV’s “Doc Zone.”