Grams and gramps are gettin' it on — get over it

Brian Alexander • E-mail

Earlier this month I had a conversation on an airplane with a woman who works in the medical field. We were talking about the well-being of older people when she mentioned an announcement her elderly relative made during a family gathering.

The 80-something lady was upset about a study showing that old people still have sex, a study like the one that came out last month in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). Such studies aren’t fair, she said, “because they stop with people in their 80s. What about the 90s? My boyfriend is 93 and he can’t keep his hands off me!”

Apparently the 93-year-old Romeo was making full use of today's armamentarium of drugs, especially impotence pills, to get all jiggy with his octogenarian babe.

My seatmate said this relative instantly became her role model, and I chimed in with something insightful like, “How cool is that?”

But then I recalled what happened when MSNBC.com ran a picture to accompany the story reporting on the recent NEJM study. Much to my surprise, some readers were offended by the photograph of two old people kissing.

“Perverts,” one reader said. Another declared that the “picture of two old people kissing on your home page is disgusting … It makes me want to puke.”

Really? Disgusting? An upchuck? Because two people were kissing?

Reactions like that prove the point the researchers made when they announced the study, that our insistence on seeing older people as asexual is flat wrong, not to mention rank prejudice.

Msnbc.com When msnbc.com ran an image of seniors making out on its front page last month, some readers responded with a resounding ewww.

True enough, among the oldest of the people surveyed, only about a quarter reported having intercourse. But that doesn’t mean all the rest of the elderly aren’t sexual or don’t want sex. Some may want it but not have a partner, others may have a partner yet have health problems that make sexual expression difficult or impossible, still more may be healthy and have a healthy partner but not be at all interested. Fine.

But to discount the power and benefits of sexuality just because somebody is older is boneheaded. Sex, being a sign of good health and vigor, ought to be celebrated no matter how old we are. 

No expiration date on desire
Sex is the most basic human drive. As has also been reported recently, we humans can come up with hundreds of reasons to have it. Sure, 90-year-olds aren’t going to be making babies, but if they are able, they can feel the pleasure, the emotional connection, the intimacy generated by sex. Why do some of us apparently feel that such a need has an expiration date? 

Confused by the attitude displayed by some of the correspondence to MSNBC and by some of the negative comments I found on blogs and Web sites discussing the NEJM study, I called Terrie Ginsburg, a geriatrician and assistant professor at the New Jersey Institute for Successful Aging who has made sexuality among the old something of a specialty. She labeled such reactions “ageist” and blamed a lack of good sexual education that could teach people that sex is not just for 20-year-olds or 40-year-olds, but for older adults as well.

Dr. Alison Moore, a UCLA geriatrician was surprised at the comments, too, and then speculated that the reaction is similar to not wanting “to think of our parents having sex, either. That is magnified in grandma and grandpa. We want to see them as sweet, harmless, old people. Even though sex is sweet and often harmless, that can be threatening to a younger generation.”

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