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Considering the alternatives, and the statistical probability of you getting there, you should probably consider being comfortable admitting it.

Also, considering the skyrocketing rates of STI rates among seniors it's pretty clear that they need to start getting comfortable admitting it!

Intern Katy of Jezebel says

A recent study of 2,000 women from the U.S. shows that 60 percent of the participants had been sexually active in the last three months, and half of them enjoyed it! Should this really be a surprise?

The study, conducted by the University of California at San Francisco, asked women aged 45-80 to report on their sex lives, their sexual enjoyment, and (if applicable), their reasons for abstaining. They found that out of the 60 percent who were currently considered sexually active, half reported “moderate to high” levels of satisfaction, and nearly a third of women 65 or older had engaged in sexual activity in the past three months.

She said it here.

Although it wasn’t mentioned in the report Katie linked to most of those women are probably heterosexual and thus most of the people these older women are having sex with are older men. Which in terms of public discourse is held to be only slightly less of a surprise.

But in fact people who experience sensuous and erotic sensations in childhood, develop sexual selves as teenagers, and continue to experience all that through their twenties and, gasp, even their thirties do in fact continue to have the same muscles, nerves, skin, blood, hormones, and body parts. And, another shock I’m sure, continue to remember how they work, enjoy how they work, and, in fact, often have a great deal of practice making them work. And, just as often, to be pretty darn good at making their partner’s corresponding parts work.

It’s not anyone’s fault that it’s not terrifically obvious. The mostly-male “sexual revolution” didn’t start till the middle 1960s when the approximately Beat Generation authors started getting traction, and the outlines didn’t really start filling in for women as active subjects instead of passive objects till the late 1970s or even early 1980s. Which means the women in that survey, and their male partners, would almost all still remember the days when a) you weren’t supposed to talk about your sexuality and b) you wouldn’t anyway because c) since there really wasn’t any public discourse about it you were pretty sure you were the only one who had tangible, erotic fantasies (and for women desires independent of others.) Which means they’re among the first generations willing to really discuss their sexuality period, let alone discuss it now that they’re “older and wiser.”

So anyway I think it’s seriously great that studies like this are coming out. So much of what we know about human sexuality and sexual relations we know about, basically, young adults. And while the first, say, ten years of our sex lives are interesting and important we tend to be adults for anywhere from forty-five to ninety-two years! Yes, some people continue eat, dress, read, work, think, amuse ourselves, and just generally live the same ways they did when they were 18 or 22, but most of us don’t. Glad the public is getting these little wake-up messages because, as with men in the 1960s and women in the 1970s and 80s, we might be able to expect middle-age and older people to start sharing what they know in time for the rest of us to benefit from what they’ve learned… and continue to learn.

Ok, so I like to use the old philosopy of science joke about the cop who finds a drunk guy on his hands and knees under a street lamp, looking for his car keys. The cop asks where the keys were lost and the drunk says “way down the block.” The cop says “then why are you searching here” and the drunk says “because the light’s better over here.” Waka-waka-waka. I actually love that joke because it applies to so much of what we know about society in general and sexuality in particular.

Earlier I had a cranky post about unseemly sexism in Will Saletan’s article on differential ages of consent in Slate.com. I have kind of a love-hate relationship as a Saletan reader because he finds great information but I’m so often disappointed in his conclusions.

Now I happen also to have posted another cranky missal about how little is known — or at least paid attention to — about sex and gender as we age. In particular I grouse about how often sex and sexuality research has been conducted on college campuses where a) researchers congregate, b) research assistants tend to hang out, c) where it’s assumed the college-aged will be more forthcoming, and, finally, d) where the young people conducting the studies won’t have to think about sex between old wrinkly people in their 80s.

And yet… and yet… a question that’s left unasked might be “what makes anyone think college-age people might be more likely to answer questions about sex than their elders. Well, while the question might be left unasked, we might now glean an answer from Saletan’s not-so-questionable data. (Remember I like his data, I just worry about his analysis.)

So check this out (emphasis mine.)

Consent implies competence, and 12-year-olds don’t really have that. In a forthcoming review of studies, Laurence Steinberg of Temple University observes that at ages 12 to 13, only 11 percent of kids score at an average (50th percentile) adult level on tests of intellectual ability. By ages 14 to 15, the percentage has doubled to 21. By ages 16 to 17, it has doubled again to 42. After that, it levels off.

By that standard, the age of consent should be 16. But competence isn’t just cognitive. It’s emotional, too. Steinberg reports that on tests of psychosocial maturity, kids are much slower to develop. From ages 10 to 21, only one of every four young people scores at an average adult level. By ages 22 to 25, one in three reaches that level. By ages 26 to 30, it’s up to two in three.

Source: Slate.com

Got that? We draw conclusions about gender and sexuality from research conducted under “street lamps” where the light might be better, yes, but also where on averag less than half the research cohort have reached psychosocial maturity! And yet we assume what we learn about ourselves in our street-light-lit aggregate 20s is every bit as true of our 30, 50 or 75 year old selves.

Now here’s the tricky thing. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with people in their teens or 20s. “Emotional maturity” is a biased term so I’m not saying “nothing’s wrong” just to be nice. I mean nothing’s wrong! But! I think making assumptions about what “must” be true about sex and gender in general based on more conveniently collected responses and recollections in our college years might be as incomplete as basing them on grade-school years.

I’m just sayin’

Ok, so it’s probably just me but I’ve been noticing lately that the narrative for non-very-young women is really starting to shift. As would be expected in a culture completely immersed in the mad fantasy that women are the “no-sex” class, women themselves are generally right at home with there sexuality whereas society is stuck trying to catch up with the concept.

How else to explain Chicago Sun-Times relationships writer Leslie Baldacci’s flustered outburst?

Women over 50 want sex. Lots of sex. Hot sex. And when they get it, they write about it so others, too, can learn how to get lots of hot sex.

What else to conclude from the new niche of sex-and-older-women books? Here are a few that have come out recently:

See Baldacci’s highly-scattershot set of book blurbs introduced here.

I say flustered in part because at least several of the authors she cites aren’t yet 50 and several books aren’t really about women over 50 either. (Aside: I’ve read two of the books in Baldacci’s list and highly, highly recommend both: Pepper Schwartz’s Prime: Adventures and Advice on Sex, Love, and the Sensual Years. Schwartz is 62 and her wonderful book is about her experiences since her mid 50s’. The other is Esther Perel’s Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic. Perel’s amazingly thought-provoking book is about relationships in general, and she herself seems quite young. Other books in the series include Cissy Wechter’s Sex & the 60s: How to Survive as a Senior Woman In Today’s Dating World, Gail Belsky’s Over the Hill and Between the Sheets: Sex, Love, and Lust in Middle Age, which look interesting and seem to be on the mark but there’s also Holly H. Hollenbeck’s Sex Lives of Wives: Reigniting the Passion fits only if you equate “wife” and “over 50.” But I digress…)

Also here in town the alt-weekly kiosks feature a splashy cover story about the “elusive northwest cougar”. Note: “cougar” seems to be an anxious euphemism for “women older than 22 who don’t have to be manipulated into enjoying sex.” (As opposed to…? Only “no-sex” class ideologues knows for sure. On the bright side nobody seems to call them victims of “mid-life crisis.”)

I dunno. This seems like another one of those areas where “evolutionary biology” is revealed more as a source of metaphor than of scientific utility. Growing up I was told that women lost interest in sex around menopause. In the early 1980s sociobiologists opined this loss of interest was “designed” to help those “dried out” women concentrate on the offspring of their younger, more desirable children. Others, acknowledged that older women have active sex lives but averred that their horniness was desperation-induced in order to compensate for being all old and wrinkly. And all that subtle genetic sophistication in a species that didn’t work out basic hygene till 1867!

Yeah, well. When different decades draw different conclusions from identical data…

Me? I’ve got my own theory: given time, motive, interest, opportunity and, most importatly, economic security and self-reliance, human beings are a lot more likely to actively seek sex for personal enjoyment instead of bottling it up due to economic pressure or the pressure of one’s peers and elders (especially when one one’s self becomes an “elder!”) I know. I know! Evolutionary psychology says there has to be a genetic explanation for that somewhere. And I agree: we evolved the genes for large brains.

Now call me a rebel. Even call me a victim of mid-life crisis. But I’ve got at least as many crushes on women in their 40s and 50s right now as I do women in their 20s or 30s. For that matter, while I don’t know very many in either group I’ve got more crushes on women in their 60s than in their teens. Which in a big way is a good thing — barring tragedy we’re all going to grow older and, again barring tragedy, we’re very likely to remain pretty much the same people we’ve always been… minus perhaps a few “told you so’s” here and there as we grow to know better.