I mention very often that men and women seem to be way, way more alike than we repeatedly tell each other we are. One reason, I think, that I think I’m right is that — sex instruction books, and college-age-oriented sex surveys notwithstanding — I’ve never assumed that sex and gender disappear after, oh, say, graduation from college. Or after grad school at the latests.

Funny thing, though. As people age men’s and women’s outlooks really do become more similar — men get more comfortable being emotional and snuggly, women get more comfortable being horny.

Another funy thing. We’re old far, far longer than we’re young. Yet most statistics are gathered, most books are written, most photographs are taken, and, of course, most conclusions are drawn before age 25 or so.

I try to mention this on a regular basis. This time, however, I’ve got a little backup from Daniel Engber of Slate.com (which has dedicated the week to stories about sex so I might quote them more often than usual.)

Old people have plenty of intercourse when they’re not in an institutional setting. A survey published last month in the New England Journal of Medicine found that a quarter of those between the ages of 75 and 85 were having sex, and many were doing it at least once every couple of weeks. A third of these sexually active respondents said they had either given or received oral sex in the past year.

There’s no reason to think that nursing-home residents would be any less frisky, if left to their own devices. After all, we’re talking about a mixed-sex population living in close quarters with almost endless amounts of free time. Already, staffers routinely field patient requests for personal lubricants, pornographic magazines, larger-size beds, and prescriptions for Viagra. And that’s with the 1.6 million elderly residents who came of age before the sexual revolution. Within a few decades, nursing homes will bse replete with the desires and expectations of almost 7 million liberated baby boomers.

He said it here.

Rule #1: No yap about “throwing up a little in your mouth” thinking about older people and sex. Barring catastrophy I guarantee you’re going to be whistling a very different tune within the next 50-65 years. In which case you’re not really going to appreciate what today’s elderly are subjected to:

For now, though, never mind what they want: We seem content to let our elders lie in celibate repose as they wait for Oscar, the death-sniffing cat. In most nursing homes, residents are relegated to narrow mattresses with very little privacy. Nurses enter rooms without knocking, and express disgust at masturbation or coupling, and in some cases, residents are even deprived of conjugal visits from their long-term partners. (This 2004 case study [PDF] from Clinical Geriatrics describes a 77-year-old resident who is instructed by his doctor to “take cold showers” when he complains of sexual issues.)

Sheeahright — cold showers are going to work just exactly as well for you then as they do now, ok? The point being that while you probably won’t have sex with anyone in their 80s anytime soon it’s in your enlightened self-interest to pay sympathetic attention. That is all.