No one really wants to think of their parents having sex, but it is also true that the older they get, the less you want to think about it. Recently a friend, Rhona, told me in a state of near hysteria how, having got her mother into a retirement village, her mother was getting notes pushed under her door from a male resident suggesting sex ”with no strings attached” and his phone number.
But her mother wasn’t calling her daughter to complain; at 71, she was ringing to boast and ask her daughter what sort of negligee she should be wearing.
For many children, the virgin birth of Jesus is the perfect way to imagine their immaculately sexless conception. The age of the children — 15 or 50 — or indeed that of their parents, is unimportant: in the 21st century, the idea of ageing sex still falls into the categories of perverted, disgusting, dirty or plain ridiculous. As children, we seem incapable of thinking ahead, that we, too, will one day be called names if we keep up our sexual habits.
Yet for most people, the urge does not disappear the day they become eligible for their pension. In their book Sexuality and Older People: Revisiting the Assumptions, S Deacon, V Minichiello and D Plummer found that sexual activity was directly related to the level of sexual interest and frequency of prior sexual activity.
It makes sense: if you are used to sex, you want to continue — and why stop? Yet, to the rest of society, the right to remain a fully functioning, and therefore sexual, human being after a certain age becomes almost immoral. A kiss and a hug is as much as can be tolerated. Pass a certain age and you are meant to don a coat of respectable asexual sweetness, as if you have returned to childhood.
Society seems to have forgotten that the people who are now in their 70s are the same people who helped the sexual revolution of the 1960s swing into gear. Do we really believe they are all going to turn to knitting and sucking toffees in their dotage?
In a recent study by Durex condoms, 4% of the ”third age” had sex at least once a week.
Viagra has changed many people’s behaviour, as has the Internet. There are now thousands of senior citizens advertising on the Web for friendship and more. And the advertisers are fighting for their attention with sex aids, condoms and miracle drugs.
And, as Rhona found, do not think for a minute that just because your parent or aged relative has gone into an old people’s home that the action has come to a halt.
An Israeli academic, G Bronner, recently gave a series of lectures in Tel Aviv to teams in old people’s homes about the dilemmas facing staff over the sexual behaviour of elders.
”Unfortunately, many professionals specialising in geriatrics share similar attitudes to the general public,” he reported in the Federation of Medical Sexology’s journal. But attitudes need to change: with divorce rates rising, there are now increasing numbers of single retirees looking for new relationships.
Last year, I went to see a friend’s grandmother in her old folks’ home in the United States. At 96, she was as game as a teenager. ”Be careful,” my friend warned. ”She’s a terrible flirt, but her eyesight isn’t too good.”
This was a permissive residence in which sexual health was discussed openly. For most, though, the lack of privacy in these institutions provides little opportunity for such activity. In some homes, elderly single residents who show any interest in sex, from masturbation through to full sexual activity with others, can be defined as having behavioural problems and may even find themselves tranquillised.
The additional problem for women is that because they survive longer than men, the selection of partners of their own age falls away. For both men and women, though, it can be tough: erections and ejaculation for men can be as tricky as lubrication can be for women. Medications taken for other conditions may have side-effects that play havoc with bodily responses. And people’s emotional history can throw up obstacles: Deacon et al also found that a loveless relationship or marriage in the middle years can seriously undermine a sexual experience or relationship when a later opportunity arises.
But though the flesh may be weak, the mind is willing. Why should only the young and beautiful be permitted the privilege of sexual fulfilment while more than a fifth of the population has to sit back and read about it?
Not all of us can be such perfectly preserved specimens as Joan Collins or Sean Connery, but most of us can still be as romantic, funny, sexy and attractive as we were at 25. And if it keeps you feeling younger and makes you want to live longer — as numerous studies attest — then why not? As a 78-year-old American proclaimed in his Internet dating application, ”I’m retired, not tired.” — Â