Back in August the new-to-me blogger Rabbit Write participated in a conversation with sex activist and educator Carol Queen on Kink On Tap (I’ve added names to the following snippet to help identify speakers.)
[White] Why are there cultural taboos against old people having sex? It seems these really aren’t challenged.
[Queen] “They certainly aren’t challenged very openly by the larger culture. I see two things operating here. There had been an underlying bias in our culture –not completely gone yet– that sex really is, at bottom, for reproduction. (That’s one of the things that continues to power homophobia too.) After one is out of one’s reproductive years, the notion of sex becomes unseemly and even unacceptable to many. The other thing, I think, is that there is societal pressure on us to fear aging, and seeing evidence of older people’s sexuality brings up our difficult feelings about getting older ourselves, our own body image fears, fears of mortality, etc. All this may be true even if the older person is nowhere near decline and death! Plus plain old-fashioned ageism is at work too — the kind that makes the lives of elders problematic in many more ways than around sex.”
Yup. For what ever reason we have for covering our ears and saying “la-la-la-la” whenever we think about it before, say, age 40, old people have libidos. They’re there. If all goes well you’ll be there too! Get used to it.
