Comic by Randall Munroe of XKCD. Used under a Creative Commons license.

In a news roundup Robin Marty of RHRealityCheck.org passes along an interesting tidbit

Remember that whole argument that it’s ok to cover Viagra and not birth control because Viagra doesn’t run up other insurance costs?  Look who’s suddenly skyrocketing up the STI charts — sexual enhancements users.

Read the rest of the roundup here.

The information in the article (Business Week but pretty straightforward reporting) is more interesting, with a number of sensible but counterintuitive tidbits.

First, fairly predictably, people most likely to use Viagra, not to mention people who’s partners are likely to use it, are also likely to have come of age at a time when condom use was not widespread, in part because straight people back then relied on the Pill for contraception, and all known STIs were easily treated with antibiotics.

Less predictably, though, it turns out that STI rates for men who use Viagra tend to go up approximately a year before they start taking it, and actually levels off or drops a bit in the year after!

The risk of getting HIV in the year before taking the pills was 3.32 times higher in drug-takers and 3.19 times greater in the year after, compared with those not taking the pills, they said. Users of the medicines also had higher rates of chlamydia.

Source: Business Week

It’s not an insignificant problem, by the way. According to the article

[P]eople aged 40 to 49 accounted for the largest proportion of newly diagnosed HIV/AIDS cases, 27 percent, in 2007, according to the CDC. Those 50 to 59 accounted for 13 percent, while those over the age of 60 accounted for 4 percent.

I want to reinforce a conclusion from the original report and contained in the article as well: Sex education is just as important for people in their 40s and beyond as it is for those in their teens and 20s. Physicians should be strongly encouraged to in turn encourage patients who request drugs like Viagra to practice sexual safety.

Finally I’d like to stress, strongly, that one shouldn’t fall for gendered assumptions about who’s driving “promiscuity” among older people. I can’t put my finger on a link but I’m pretty sure I’ve posted links in the past that suggest up to half of hetero men who seek medication do so at the prompting of their partners. It’s certainly the case that most of the gendered behaviors evolutionary psychologists swear are “innate” or “evolved” turn out to be highly conditional on age and circumstance.

Echidne of the Snakes had to dig, and dig, and dig through pop reports all talking about the “biological” inevitability behind a new study that suggests elderly men are more interested in sex than elderly women.

One complicating factor that’s mentioned by the lead investigator but not so much by the breathlessly gender-confident reporting?

One reason why older women are less sexually active than men may be because they don’t have a partner, or because their partner is no longer healthy enough to have sex. “Women outlive their marriages and their relationships,” Dr. Lindau says.

She and her colleagues found that as women aged, they were far less likely than men to be married or living with a partner. In one of the surveys the authors used, just 58% of the women ages 65 to 74 had a partner, compared to 79% of men in the same age bracket. Among 75- to 85-year-olds, 72% of men still had a partner, compared to just 39% of women.

Lindau said it here.

If you’re a woman between maybe 40 and 50, with a male partner over maybe 45-55, raise your hand if your partner’s health, his libido, or both allows him to keep up with your libido? (I’m not saying everybody’s in that boat but… it’s a fairly common lament of partners of older men.)

What makes this particularly funny, in a not-so-funny way, is all the “happy tradeoff” lead sentences Echidne tracks down where in reporters smirk stuff like “Women may live longer, but it appears men are more likely to go out with a smile” and “Men have shorter life spans than women on average, but when it comes to sexual life expectancy, the guys have the advantage.” (Um, “advantage?” fuck you, dudes?!?!)

Oh wait, and look, here’s a nifty, but related “advantage” that’s not going to show up so often in the popular press, again from Dr. Lindau.

When women did have a partner, they were almost as likely as their male counterparts to be sexually active, although they tended to give their sex lives lower marks than men did. In every age group included in the surveys, a smaller percentage of women than men described their sex life as “good” overall.

Read the quote in context here.

As Echidne says “Women tend to have older husbands and the ill health of their husbands could well be one of the reasons for not much sex even in intact relationships.” Yup. Funny how blood-pressure medications, prostate problems, and even bad backs, hips, and knees can take the, um, wind of of a fella’s sails. And, again, funny how demoralized even the most enthusiastically consenting adult can become when sex requires not only candle light and slow dancing but also… repeat trips to the bathroom, penis-pumps, and other erectile interventions.

If you or your partner still have it — and not all men lose it — that’s great. But with even the most attentive partner in the world the disappointment levels are likely to be lower. And while I’m not positive, it might be particularly wearing on both older women and older men if they grew up back when heteros expected that men would take the lead in sex, and do nearly all the work as well.

Another little tidbit Echidne mentions:

I should also tell you that this study defined sex as heterosexual activity with someone else. People not engaged in heterosexual activity were not included (which the researcher would have liked to have changed) and neither was masturbation counted. Only heterosexual activity with someone else. That’s worth repeating, because the quality of that sex does also depend on that “someone else.”

Echidne says it here.

One final thing, something Echidne doesn’t mention but I’ve noticed that pulls the above snippets into a common thread. Even today, but certainly in the past, “interest in sex” was men’s domain. Consequently, as I mentioned in my first real post about the no-sex class paradigm (The limits of “no means no”), men grow up expecting to be interested in sex when they’re interested in sex, with the happy (for them) consequence that when we’re not interested in sex we… pretty much don’t notice. Whereas if our partner isn’t interested in sex we do. Meanwhile women are expected to notice when their partners are interested in sex, yes, but… that pesky no-sex class paradigm, with it’s bogus Two Rules of Desire, leads men to imaging women don’t notice when their partner’s aren’t interested.

See the trick? A man can be interested in sex only once a year. But! If he has sex once a year then… he’s going to mark his sex life as “satisfactory.” Even if his partner mentions it he’s still go the weight of the two rules on his side. Meanwhile his female partner? If he wants sex more often than he she’s going to mark down “dissatisfied.” But! If he wants (or is capable of having) sex less often than she does she’s also going to mark down “dissatisfied.”

Advantage? Men. All over. Although that advantage might be one hidden reason men’s shorter lifespans.

Just a though.

Wombat of Kiss & Blog on the new-to-him “cougar” designation.

Cougars are interesting at the very least because it’s one case where women behave in exactly the same way as men. Older guys chasing (much) younger women is passé. We don’t call such men ‘lions’ or ‘striped siberian tigers’. They’re just icky old dudes. When women do the same thing, they get a title, websites and college sporting teams named after them.

But let’s not focus entirely on Cougars. Let’s make this week’s topic about age differences between men and women in relationships.

Does half the man’s age plus seven years work for women too?

He said it here.

I’d like to say I’m all for it, mostly because at least in the statistical/demographic sense it’s evidence of gender balancing. It seems to me that older women pairing with younger men has been less obvious in modern western society mostly because until fairly recently ordinary, non-celebrity, non-wealthy women were rarely in a social, economic, or marital position to make their own partner choices in the first place, let alone either to choose, or be desirable to, younger men. In other words most of the eyebrow-raising has far more to do with its novelty rather than with impropriety.

On the other hand I can’t say I’m all for it because age differences in relationships between older men and younger women, older men and younger men, and older women and younger women can be problematic not because of gender but because age differences are often accompanied by experience, economic, and power differences. The potential for problems between older women and younger men is therefore no different.

But to the extent “cougars” (a term, by the way, I suspect will go away once the novelty wears off) finally balance set of gendered age differences we can begin to look at the issues with less passion but also with greater scrutiny of distribution of power within relationships in general. Because that’s likely to persist even after we move past the artificial and induced traditions of gender imbalance.

Oh, and short answer to Wombat’s direct question? I think half the older partner’s age plus seven is a good ratio to begin introspection on the party’s parts and scrutiny by onlookers regardless of gender mix.