Lindsay Beyerstein, guest posting at Pandagon makes a great point about dodgy definitions of paraphilia and perversion while dissecting a troubled essay about aging, dementia, deviancy, and sexual assault by science writer Jesse Bering. Beyerstein says

Bering fusses over the precise definition of “gerontophilia” but he doesn’t address the central conceptual problem with the entire psychiatric framework for “diagnosing” paraphilias and fetishes. In a world where we can date whoever we like, the difference between a paraphilia and a “type” becomes meaningless. If I’m only attracted to skinny brown haired guys between the ages of 25 and 45, I just don’t date anyone else. Nobody questions this relatively rigid preference because it fits with society’s definition of normal. If I only wanted to date 80-something dudes, Bering would say I was a deviant. Actually, he’d say I was a golddigger because later in the essay asserts that female gerontophiles don’t exist.

Source: Pandagon

There are two good points in there. The first being that if someone of your "type" is a) able to make a competent decision to join you in bed but b) not a "type" Jesse Bering approves of then... you're not actually a deviant, you're just interested in someone who's not Jesse Bering's type.

But for the sake of argument, consider an exclusive heterosexual likeGeneral J.C. Christian. The General, a Manly 11 on the Scale of Absolute Gender, is absolutely dependent upon women, or thoughts of women, to become aroused. Every single time. Nothing else has ever aroused him in his life. Does that mean the General has heterophilia? No.

Bering insists he is incapable of erotic thoughts about elders. Does that mean Bering some kind of paraphilia for adults roughly his own age? No. He just has his preferences, like everyone else.

Incidentally, the DSM, the bible of mainstream American psychiatry, classified homosexuality as a paraphilia until 1973. Gerontophilia isn’tlisted in the DSM--which says a lot about why it isn’t studied more. To psychiatry’s credit, a thing for grey beards is no more remarkable than a thing for redheads, as long as it’s all between consenting adults.

Secondly, there's that echo again that women aren't supposed to have sexual fixations, and so any deviation from just wanting babies ...er... keeping your man interested long enough to raise those babies fairly staid vanilla sex amounts to calculation of some sort rather than genuine erotic interest.

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By the way, don't even get me started on the heart of Bering's actual post.

The point of his exercise in geriatrics and erotics appears to have been whether raping a very old woman with dementia should be taken as seriously as raping someone younger. After all, sez Bering, she wouldn't remember and she couldn't get pregnant so, hey, the ref says no harm, no foul, play on!

As, oh, maybe 99% of everyone reading the piece points out, that doesn't just start down the slippery slope towards condoning universal use of alcohol and roofies, it drives it right over the cliff.

Because in addition to slipping roofies to young men and raping them (remember, no recollection plus no pregnancy = no harm, no foul) then slipping roofies to a just-past-menopause 50-year-old woman, slipping roofies to a 35-year-old woman who's had a partial or complete hysterectomy, slipping roofies to a woman with an IUD or other birth control, slipping roofies to any woman of any age if you've had a vasectomy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, also looms large.

In none of those circumstances they would't know and they won't get pregnant so if we were to follow Bering's lead it would all just be exploring, as he puts it, "questions about issues related to consent, trauma, and the impact of sex crimes on victims with different psychological and physical stakes."

Actually I'm pretty sure Bering believes nothing of the sort but was was just looking for a phone-it-in way to close his article. He's been phoning them in a lot lately and I'm guessing his regular editors at Scientific American took a pass on this one. But not Slate!

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.”

She said it here.

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.

Somebody named Simcha at The Frisky makes with the funny.

Stamina Pillows Stop Men In Their Sacks

Thumbnail image from The Frisky.

Men premature ejaculate because you are just too damn fine! Girl, you know it’s true! Well, that’s the concept behind Durex’s new limited edition Stamina Pillows. Originally given away with their Performa condoms that have a mild anesthetic to prevent dudes from beating you to the finish line, the cases feature some not-so-sexy pictorials—like an old bag lady with pigtails, a pearl necklace, and armpit hair licking her lips. It’s pretty creepy. But there’s also a redheaded guy with cabbage patch bangs sucking on a lollipop and we think he could be Michael K from Dlisted’s soul mate. Hey, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so, it might not work for everyone! However, we’re willing to try anything if it means we’ll get to party with our pants off for even just a few more minutes.

Read the quote in context here.

What. Ever.

First of all, even though they only seem elderly instead of misshapen or unattractive the people in the photos don’t do much for me either but then I’m not close to them in age. And since I distinctly remember my early teens when my peers and I felt sorry mostly vague dismay for older, “one-foot-in-the-grave” college-aged men and women I suspect the alleged flaws in these pillow photo models are more a matter of the onlooker’s generational perspective (or lack thereof) than of the models themselves. Call that strike one against the pillows.

What also makes it jarring is the effect of even-older-than-usual people striking “sexy” poses and facial expressions derived from… the generally naive flirtations of school children. You’d have to click through to the article to see them but… where exactly did that finger-in-the-mouth or slurping-a-lollipop look get lumped over into sexy? (And everybody laughs at Senator Vitters’ diaper fetish!) Anyway, I’ve noticed in general that actual grown up men and women in their 20s, let alone 40s, let alone older, tend to flirt and express arousal in ways that make sense for their ages and experience. Call that strike two.

Finally, though, I’m also struck by the name, “Stamina Pillows,” and the implications that the solution for premature ejaculation would be presumed psychological dismay of envisioning people one isn’t (yet) old enough to be attracted to. I mean… seriously… what’s the intention here?!?! Never mind intentions, what are the implications?

Here we are, men supposed to be all selfishly, short-sightedly, thinking-with-the-little-head obsessed with our own gratification and… during holy-grail-for-men intercourse we’re… memorizing baseball scores? Reviewing tax tables? Contemplating allegedly non-sexy elders?

Sheesh, and we complain that women think about shopping lists?

Maybe…

Just maybe…

Nahh… communications, creativity, taking turns, and maybe getting over the idea of intercourse as the sexual end-goal couldn’t possibly result in overall more frequent, let alone more frequently enjoyable sex. For all involved.

Couldn’t be.

That would be strike three.

And with perfect timing as a follow-up to this post Via Alex of Neatorama, Time Magazine has an article by Michiko Toyama about Japanese “elder porn”

Besides his glowing complexion, Shigeo Tokuda looks like any other 74-year-old man in Japan. Despite suffering a heart attack three years

ago, the lifelong salaryman now feels healthier, and lives happily with his wife and a daughter in downtown Tokyo. He is, of course, more physically active than most retirees, but that’s because he’s kept his part-time job — as a porn star.

...

Tokuda is rare among Japanese porn stars in that his name has become a brand. The Shigeo Tokuda series he’s just completed portray him as a tactful elderly gentleman who instructs women of different ages in the erotic arts, and he boasts a body of work far more impressive than most actors in their prime.

Read article here.

As A from France put in in comments on that previous post, “We feel exactly the same as we ever did but people judge us from our outward appearances, or our birth certificates.” It’s easy to mock John Derbyshire’s claim that women are already “over the hill” after puberty but if he’d said instead that men and women are over the hill considerably later — say 65, or 75, or so how many people would have mocked him then?