ON SEX LATE IN LIFE


AT 50 : August 15th 2000



This article has been put together only after a good deal of hesitation on my part. Finally, I felt driven to write it after I had noticed the following item in the London (UK) magazine The WEEK.



I agree with these sentiments.

My title might seem to be a cry for help, some lurid confessions, a parade of tasteless boasts, or even a lifeline to deprived old ladies. Readers may rest assured that none of these things is intended.

I do not refer to couplings between partners of very different ages; I am mainly concerned with the sex lives of the middle aged, and indeed the old. Incidentally, my remarks apply principally to hetero sex - the only relevant area of which I have first hand knowledge. Gay people may take from this article what may seem appropriate in their part of the sexual arena.

My thesis is threefold:

1.1 that late-life sex is not a deviation to be deprecated or mocked; on the contrary, it is laudable. Active sexuality outlives fertility - more especially in women (men can remain fertile as well as potent into awesome old age).

1.2 that sexual attractiveness and sexual responsiveness have little correlation with youth or with glamour. Therefore I proclaim:

1.3 that accepting late-life sex to be good in principle leads to making it better in practice. As the press item suggests, this is Good News. The young have to play the long game if they are to avoid needless hurt. A world in which the old are more content and the young are more patient would indeed be a different world all round. It would be a better one.



'Old' is not a dirty word; we may well be old only in the sense of having been born a long time ago and to be old is, if anything, an achievement. The word 'elderly' is, in my book, a dirty word; it is a patronising euphemism. 'Elder' and its cognates have legitimate use in the Presbyterian Church, tribal societies and in respect of certain bushes whose flowers and fruit can be made good use of in the production of fermented liquor. I am now old and proud of it. I may be chronologically accomplished (having been born in 1924) but I am not elderly.

Three large facts need to be emphasised at this point:

2.1 is that, by reason of improved health in at least the advanced countries, people are no longer likely to be decrepit at forty and dead at fifty.

2.2 is that, in spite of this, there is a quite indefensible, indeed anomalous, cult of youth in which to be forty, or even thirty in some connections, is held to be 'over the hill'.

2.3 is that the ethos of glamour (as distinct from grace, charm and beauty) now dominates popular culture. Glamour is held to consist in certain physical measurements - greater than average height and less than average girth being perceived as especially praiseworthy. A vacuous face and flimsy personality are not seen as detractions from glamour; a certain amount of boring pseudo rebelliousness can be an enhancement of glamour.

The first of these three facts is a first order truth - a matter of public record; the other two are second order facts embedded in our culture. All these facts have enormous importance in our insecure and frantic society.

People who are not decrepit - but who are conditioned culturally to fear that they are, or soon will be - are ready victims of the youth industry. We are urged to take this that and the other dubious product to keep us slim, to keep us free from wrinkles and to maintain hair growth and pigmentation. We are easy meat for the 'more hygienic than thou' cult and we are pressurised endlessly to count calories, monitor cholesterol intake, to eschew saturated fats, to take in fibre to an extent that the average woodworm - body weight for body weight - could not contemplate. We are pressed into guilt-based neuroses about all such things but ..... be assured ..... help is at hand; there is a pill for every ill, a medicament for every predicament.

In truth, there is now a credible basis for the perception that late-life sex is a very promising area of endeavour and that the obstacles to its confident enjoyment are not natural but part of an increasingly sick culture in which age is always expected to mimic youth but never to be its exemplar.

What, in particular, has 'late-life' to do with all this? What is especially notable about sex practised by old people? We can perhaps identify three features, of special note to the falling generation, with regard to their sexual activities.

3.1 is that the background fear of unwanted pregnancy is simply not there in later life. Of course, modern contraception is very dependable and so this fear might well be absent among young people but the facts remain that total dependability of contraception is not on offer and that, in any case, people themselves are not dependable. There is momentary carelessness and there is the notion that 'surely it doesn't matter - just this once'. We have all, or most of us anyway, fallen into these deviations.

3.2 The second feature of advanced age is that the menstrual cycle is then a thing of the past. This cycle is a monthly demonstration of the absurdity of the Benign Design Theory of Creation. For many women it is anything from a monthly inconvenience to a monthly agony. In later life it is, at last, all over.

These two features of advanced age relieve older women, in particular, of much of the unease that afflicts young women and - in so far as men are genuinely sympathetic to women's feelings - it is not only older women who can enjoy feeling free of the burdens of menstruation and extravagant fertility. Therefore, late-life sex is capable of being, to both parties, a source of highly relaxing pleasure. Very often it is better than sleeping pills.

3.3 The third feature of advanced age is related to this relaxed attitude that can accompany late-life sex; it is the relative freedom, that mature people can enjoy, from the burden of obsessive love. Obsession is related to feelings of insecurity; it is important to distinguish between two categories - to love, as distinct from being in love with, someone.

To be in love with someone is to be erotically obsessional about the loved one. The obsessional element is illustrated by the sick, one hopes apocryphal, story of the woman who was shot dead by her husband. As she gasped her last she murmured, all starry eyed, "Darling ....... I did not know you were such a good shot". The point is that being in love with her husband caused her to judge him, even as he had shot her, according to standards quite other than those she would have applied to other people. Had some other man shot his wife, the woman in the story would never have said that the murderer was a good shot; probably she would have been outraged by the crime or she might have been sorry for the husband who had perhaps been driven to commit it.

It is important to understand that this obsessional business of being in love, to the point of abandoning all reasonable evaluations, is not just a matter of being immature and sexually over-excited; it is a culturally induced absurdity. From infancy we are fed fairy stories that end with the words "and they lived happily ever after"; in adolescence we are fed cultural pap in which the "one enchanted evening" scenario is plugged as hard as the catch penny promoters can plug it. The result of all this is that a fundamental error is promoted and endorsed - the error that love just happens and, once it has happened, no effort is required to sustain it and that if the unthinkable happens and the magic evaporates then there are always other pebbles on the beach.

Mature people, especially those matured by the passing decades, know differently. They can understand the meaning of love in a way that does not validate obsession, does not make a virtue of special pleading about the over stated merits of the loved one and, above all, does not hinge on the predation, possessiveness and manipulation that sexual obsession generates.

The meaning of mature love is primarily that which is commonly attributed to the Biblical precept "love thy neighbour as thyself". To love, in this sense, is to be as concerned with the best interests of thy neighbour as with thine own. That is as far as love needs to go, indeed ought to go, in relatively impersonal dealings with thy neighbour. But in the sphere of warmer personal relationships, there has also to be an element of delight in the loved one's company When the relationship is not only personal, in a general sense, but sexually moved too, then the prospect of shared sexual activity arrives on the agenda. If such activity is to be undertaken in such circumstances then the rule must be strict adherence to the now classic formula "consenting adults in private".

The question of whether the proper limits are set by domesticated monogamy, or whether the permissible limits are wider, is not the business of this article to discuss. What is relevant is that no sexual relationship - in any context whatever - is sound unless predation possessiveness and manipulation are essentially absent from it. It is precisely the practice of late-life sex that is most likely to be free from such perversities.

Domesticated monogamy (if it works) is the safest option and anything beyond this is worth considering only if due attention is paid to the same criteria as apply to any other action that might elicit the widespread disapproval of average tolerant people. These considerations are those of motive, opportunity and alibi.

Motive, however genuine and genuinely shared, is not enough; due privacy can only be secured if cool attention is paid to opportunity and to alibi and, again, it is relaxed mature people who are best able to make the required cool assessments. The more you depend upon strict privacy the greater is the degree of mutual trust needed and ultra-trustworthiness is hard come by in our sick culture.

As to the feasibility of having fulfilling affairs on the side, wise people, especially those of mature years, may well take much the same attitude as intelligent Catholics take to miracles. In both of these very different areas it is perhaps a matter of faith that such things are, in general, possible but no amount of faith warrants a lack of scepticism in alleged instances. Scepticism is not, of course, total disbelief; it is belief relentlessly monitored.

Even if consent on the part of adults is duly private and cognisant of the importance genuine motives, safe opportunities and leakprof alibis .... even then there may be a good case for continued sexual inaction. Leave well alone and if it ain't broke don't fix it may perhaps be ideologically meagre precepts but, nonetheless, sufficient reasons for not embarking upon sexual enterprises that might otherwise seem reasonable.



The next issue, Number 51, will appear on September 15th 2000.




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