Aging and sexuality explained: Why your body isn't broken

The most important determining factor regarding positive sexual expression as we age is the attitude that women hold. Our attitude about our bodies and how we perceive ourselves sexually is influenced by everything from our feelings, experiences and self-reflection. The changes you experience don't necessarily mean that the body is broken or defective.

Menopause and midlife changes are no longer viewed as barriers to the sexual expression of women. It is just a predictable consequence of aging, but it is really folklore that decreased physical intimacy. There are many options now, both hormonal and non-hormonal, that help maintain tissue integrity and lubrication in order to support the physiological processes involved in the sexual response, something that needs to be done even after menopause.

It is an important aspect of sexual health to continue to engage in sexual activity. This is not limited to sexual intercourse but also includes self-pleasuring and orgasm. This is relevant, since the longer life expectancy for women overall can result in lack of a sexual partner. Studies show that at least half of healthy women over age 60 engage in self-stimulation.

The more that sexual response is stimulated, the better it works. It also holds true that more sexual expression for women results in an improved libido and arousal response. Satisfying physical intimacy is a positive reinforcer to create added bonding and more gratifying intimacy. This mechanism works on all physical levels?— neurochemical, vascular and hormonal.

Unfortunately, there is no place in the media that women can look to in order to normalize sexual desires and needs as we get older. It is almost unheard of to hear about the sexuality of a postmenopausal woman. We live in a youth and beauty obsessed culture that rarely portrays older women as anything but nurturing and wise caregivers. If we look at ads in magazines, we see older woman as obsessed and visibly insecure about body image and physical attractiveness. Aging women should relish their lifetime accumulation of experience and wisdom.

As relationships change for women later in life, so do the effects on sexual functioning and satisfaction?— especially for couples in long-term relationships. Ideally, there is an enhancement of intimacy through facets other than physical. Others find a sexual discovery of deep connection and different meaning than they knew in their youth. Partners that understand each other and can connect on a deeper level enjoy sexuality together through forms of sensual, spiritual and playful intimacy.

"Studies show that at least half of healthy women over age 60 engage in self-stimulation."

We are never too old to feel pleasure. Older women have been socialized to believe that having sexual desires and needs is wrong. There is an absence of what a healthy sexuality later in life should look like. This prevents women from identifying and acting upon their own sexual desires and needs.

However, as we age, we gain sexual wisdom and body attunement with our desires, wants and needs. There is an increase in sexual self-esteem, self-perceptions and relational possibilities. We need to embrace the changes brought on by years of life and be intentional about connecting and bonding with ourselves and our partners.

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Should You Be Afraid Of Aging?

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"Aging... is not a paramount male fear. But being seen as a loser is." 

The relationship between men’s sites like this one, and women’s sites like Jezebel or XOJane, is somewhat less than ideal. That’s because they think we are enormous douches.

From our perspective, though, we are simply speaking the way that men speak to each other in person, online. That’s the mandate that informs everything that we do. The missions of sites like AskMen and sites like Jezebel are near-identical; it’s just that men (and not just “the bad sort of men,” but men in general) and women are not.

There is no shortage of men’s sites willing to call out their female counterparts as harshly as they do us. We are sure that a lot of our readers are aware, for instance, of names like “Chateau Heartiste” or “RooshV.” As satisfying as this can be, though, it doesn’t do anything for the culture as a whole.

For a million reasons relating to fragmentation of media ownership, political expediency and sheer human biliousness, we are constantly being manipulated into fiercely oppositional camps: liberals vs. conservatives, red vs. blue, urban vs. rural. There is a culture war going on, or being made to go on, and it is killing our ability to speak to each other.

This, in part, is why we’re ignoring the epiphenomena of man-site vs. woman-site hostility in order to look at the discussion surrounding Elizabeth Wurtzel’s recent piece for The Atlantic on aging.

Let’s sum it up, if we can: Elizabeth Wurtzel goes to cool Brooklyn parties where men express disbelief that she has been alive for 45 years. Her secret, she feels, has something to do with being childless, politically liberal and defiant in a very general sense.

In response, Jezebel writer Tracy Moore notes that while it’s fun when Wurtzel acts so Wurtzely, denial may not be a universally satisfying solution to the fact that we all grow older and die. In passing, Moore also states that “it’s harder for women to age.” Is it?

We suspect that it is. For a pretty broad array of reasons (some ?cultural, more ?evolutionary), women are judged by their youthfulness, for which beauty is a proxy, more than men are, with the closest analogue on our side being wealth or prominence.

One of the things that distinguishes (we’re being general here because there are about three billion of us) the male dialogue from its female counterpart is its (sometimes blinkered) pragmatism. For whatever reason, we tend to speak about injustice- or imbalance-containing problems in a way that ignores the moral question in favor of directives on how to make it work. This is the reason, for example, that a site like AskMen’s “Power & Money” section is full of articles like “10 Ways To Think Like A CEO” and “How To Stay Out Of Debt,” rather than things like “It Happened To Me: She Judged Me For My Money.”

It’s not that we don’t experience life in the negative -- we do, and very acutely. It’s just that our taboo-structure, or our internal culture, contains this strong sense that to dwell on a bad feeling is to create the conditions for its re-occurrence. Out of this grows a generalized preference for advice over confession, and also something that can appear to women as shallowness.

It isn’t likely that a man would derive the same pleasure (and the same discursive ability) from an age-related compliment as Elizabeth Wurtzel has. Aging, or more directly, being seen by potential sex partners as “old,” is not a paramount male fear. But being seen as a loser is. Next Page >>

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