For elderly, sex doesn’t have to get old

Wed Aug 13, 2008 9:47am EDT

By Andrew Stern

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Getting old does not mean saying so long to sex, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday.

More than three-quarters of American men aged 75 to 85 and half of women that age are still interested in sex, a survey of the elderly by University of Chicago researchers found.

“It’s not age per se; that when you get to 80 it’s all over with,” said sociologist Edward Laumann, who led the study of 3,000 American men and women aged 57 to 85 who lived at home, not in nursing homes.

“It’s driven by more proximate factors such as if you become obese, or you’re smoking too much, or you contract diabetes. Medications can depress sexual interest. The aging process itself is not a major factor driving these results,” he said in a telephone interview.

Laumann and his team, who performed a companion survey of younger adults nearly a decade ago, found that sexual dysfunction such as experiencing pain during sex or an inability to achieve orgasm tend to increase as adults reach middle age but then plateaus.

In the survey of elderly Americans, two-thirds of the men and nearly half the women had been sexually active in the past year, they reported in the Journal of Sexual Medicine.

The reasons for losing interest in sex are wrapped up in several physical and mental health factors, Laumann said.

“If sexual health goes to hell, it may be a canary in the mine shaft. It may be a sign of health problems,” Laumann said, urging doctors to investigate if sexual problems arise.

Chronic urinary tract infections and incontinence often suppress sex lives, he said.

Having a partner to have sex with can also be problematic for the elderly. Among women aged 70 and older, 70 percent have outlived or are separated from their spouses. Among men in that age group, 35 percent have lost a long-time partner.

If the surviving relationship is bad, that can snuff out the couple’s sex life, Laumann added.

“Anxiety is very clearly a big factor (in sexual dysfunction) for women, and depression in men,” he said. “And men can become very depressed because of sexual dysfunction.”

Erectile dysfunction increases from 31 percent among men aged 57 to 64 to more than 40 percent among older men. Laumann said he had found in other research that 14 percent of men of all ages had tried erectile dysfunction drugs.

Those who have attended college are less likely to have sexual problems than the less-educated, Laumann said, presumably because the educated tend to dismiss myths about sex and aging and are more likely to seek out answers.

Last month, Swedish researchers reported that 70-year-olds of both sexes are having more sex than they did 30 years ago, with 68 percent of married men and 54 percent of women saying they were having sex in 2001, up from 52 percent of men in the early 1970s and 30 percent of women.

(Editing by Maggie Fox)

From Reuter’s News 8/13/2008

=====

Well.

Back in the late 1960s and early 1970ss, there was a TV show in the US called “Laugh-In” that featured fast-paced skits, quips, and of course, the ubiquitous fake news show. One of the regular features was an actor who played a very aged man that frequently made suggestive comments to the (younger and attractive) women on the show, and occasionally to another actor playing an older woman. He was always rebuffed, sometimes physically; the implication was that he was a “dirty” old man. The message that sunk into my pre-teen mind from that and other shows, was that at some point in life, sex was going to be a bad thing, so you’d better get it out of your system when you were young, because past (whatever “old” was) nobody was going to want to have it with you.

The amazing thing is that in the last 40 years, society has learned to be okay with non-married sexuality and homosexuality. We’ve learned to accept masturbation as normal, and we even give suggestions in some schools, relative to safety and disease.

So, why are we still not okay with old people having sex?

Is it because we’re not beautiful? Is it because we’ve got wrinkles? Some extra body fat? Hair growing out of various places? Scars, warts, liver spots?

Is it simply because we’re not young?

I’m going to remind you what media blog Gawker wrote about Kim Cattrall in their review about her new cable TV show:

The positively ancient fifty-something coital acrobat has signed on to play the lead in a new series […]

Hopefully by the time that I’m *cough*old*cough* societal attitudes will have changed, and I’ll be able to have sex with out feeling like I’m a “dirty old man.”