Last week I interviewed one of the greatest sexuality educators and lifelong learning experts of our time, Peggy Brick.
For over 10 years, Peggy has trained thousands of educators, health care professionals and community advocates about sex in mid and later life and the importance of expanding our concept of “sex ed” to include the entire life-course. She's been teaching sex education across the lifespan since high school over 3 decades ago. Founder of the Consortium on Sexuality and Aging, Peggy is a pioneering, visionary leader whose passion and remarkable ability is revolutionizing sexuality education itself.
In 2003, Peggy, Jan Lunquist and SIECUS produced the groundbreaking book New Expectations: Sexuality Education for Mid and Later Life. I’ve used this book and recommended it for years as one of the most well respected and thorough resources we have as sex educators in addressing sexuality in mid and later life. Lifelong learning institutions, community centers, aging advocacy organizations and nursing homes/assisted living facilities across the nation have incorporated the important and all too rarely shared information and resources within this book.
At the end of May, along with an amazing team of co-authors Jan Lunquist of Planned Parenthood of West and Northern Michigan as well as Bill Taverner and Allyson Sandak of The Center for Family Life Education at Planned Parenthood of Greater Northern New Jersey, Peggy is releasing a freshly updated, factual, fun-loving and fabulous new version entitled (and I LOVE the title!), “Older, Wiser, Sexually Smarter: 30 Sex Ed Lessons for Adults Only.”
I asked Peggy what she thought people should know about aging and sexuality—and she said that as we all age, people learn social/cultural scripts about sexuality that are often inadequate, unhealthy, un-just and damaging to people’s relationships with family, lovers, health care professionals, and even themselves. Older, Wiser, Sexually Smarter provides a comprehensive lesson plan based on facts and lived experience rather than the fear, silence and invisibility that so often accompany dialogue (if it even exists) around aging and sexuality. Here are a just a few of the primary topics: faith/spirituality, disability/illness, safer sex activities, masturbation, body image, grandparent’s role as sex educators, lgbt elder sex issues, gender and sex, skin hunger, loneliness and not least of all…. pleasure. Peggy added that two new areas of focus are also provided: 1) new information on the internet as a tool for exploring online relationships as well as safer cyber sex practices and 2) communication related matters—how to talk to your doctor about sex and how adult children/grandchildren of older adults can learn to embrace the idea that their family members may still want to find love and sexuality beyond being widowed.
I also asked Peggy what she thought of the broader and emerging field of sex education (and thanked her for her role in making that emerging field possible) for aging adults and she said that we are in a “paradigm shifting moment”—a “time of quiet sexual revolution” where the gift and possibility of lifelong sexuality and love is increasingly becoming recognized and respected.
Here at NSRC, we are prioritizing aging and sexuality and we are integrating it into everything we do from publications to research to training and advocacy at national conferences and as part of The National LGBT Aging Roundtable, facilitated by SAGE. We do not see any other way of moving forward as sexuality educators and researchers—to do so would be to remain complicit with the continued erasure of the lifelong gift of sexuality and the stakes are way too high to remain on that dead end of a road. We’ll be presenting on sexuality in long term care as well as LGBT aging at AARP’s upcoming conference on Diversity and Inclusion. We’re also doing work within local San Francisco based assisted living facilities to determine the sexual health training needs of the staff and administrators as well as the resource/policy needs of single residents. The Chair of our Advisory Board at the National Centers on Sexuality, Dr. Pepper Schwartz (author of Prime: Adventures and Advice on Sex, Love and the Sensual Years), will be providing a workshop on aging and sexuality at an upcoming San Francisco Jewish Community Center event. We hear you loud and clear Peggy, Bill, Jan and Allyson….and we look forward to collaborating moving forward….
If your work in any way touches on the fields of aging, sexuality, LGBT rights, diversity, social justice I’d highly recommend that you pre-order Older, Wiser immediately. It will undoubtedly serve as a compass for creating the future of sex education itself….its very existence argues that we can never really go back to a time when “sex ed” was for youth alone. If anything, as Sallie Foley (Director of the Center for Sexual Health at Univ of Michigan and another pioneer of the field of sex and aging) has said about this new book, “from dating decisions to long-term lovers, the information is so solid that people under 50 will want to crash these sex ed lessons.”
In fact, this is one of those rare books that can only serve to help everyone in your life—we all age…we all have family and friends who age and few of us—yes, even as sex educators—understand the issues and implications of aging and sexuality. Give it to your family, friends, medical doctors, religious leaders, policy makers, fellow activists…Use it, enjoy it and spread the word!
One day soon, saying “Sexy Grandma” will no longer seem an oxymoron in any way….to anyone of any age.
*Title attributed to Sallie Foley., LMSW Author of Sex and Love for Grownups and Former Columnist for AARP—The Magazine
