Aging is Everyone's "Issue"

Although I frequently attend professional and academic conferences focused on sexuality, it is the conferences not focused on sexuality that end up teaching me the most about how we are going to empower a nation to more effectively talk about its sexual health, education and rights.

This past week, at the 2009 AARP Diversity and Aging in the 21st Century: Power of Inclusion Conference I was reminded just how imperative it is to include the new framework of lifelong sexual literacy within the emerging dialogue between the fields of diversity and aging where it has previously not existed.

The current youth-centric and “one size fits all” approach to “comprehensive sexuality education” does not mean a thing for the older adults it does nothing to serve. It also does very little to address other nation-wide gender, racial, class…diversities and we are all responsible and accountable for the sexual inequalities that erupt from their erasure. And there are many. Sexuality education does need to be comprehensive—it must be lifelong or it never will be and it must absolutely incorporate the diverse voices of this nation in its very creation and deployment. Sexual cultural relevancy is nothing short of it is what is needed…for older adults and all people.

So the question begs, why are older adults left out of our discussions about sexuality (within the media, sexuality education etc...)? Assumptions that older adults are asexual or already have everything they need to know about growing older sexually is literally killing them—emotionally and physically. It is a crisis that will continue to escalate as the older adult population increases globally.

The way our country currently scripts it, older adults, who often suffer great losses toward the end of their lives, (spouses/partners,/friends, physical and mental abilities, access to independence, access to feeling safe etc…), can much of the time also count on losing something else: any access to sexual health and rights they may have enjoyed throughout their lives.  How?

·      The “ick factor”: younger people not wanting to think about older people having sex. Social constructions of what is and is not a beautiful body. Society itself denies the possibility of sexy, older adults. And this denial has tremendous impact.

·      Assumptions of the asexuality or inability of older adults to enjoy intimacy and sexuality (which by the way benefits pharmaceutical companies as well as care facilities not trained or designed to deal with elder sexuality as well as families not wanting to even think of their elders as sexual beings as well).

·      Privacy—even if older adults wanted to be intimate/sexual in some way, they have almost -0- access to resources, knowledge about their changing bodies, safer sex practices and even the privacy in physical space needed in order to safely make it all happen.

·      LGBT older adult couples are often forced apart when moving into care facilities. Many of them, after having spent an entire lifetime having the courage to be out about being LGB and/or T must often go back into the closet in order to literally survive the blatant and harmful biases of health care providers, nursing home staff and family members. The loss of dignity is profound.

·      Older adult males who express themselves sexually are often seen as “dirty old men” who are a danger to women (heternormative). Whereas at one point in their lives as men, they were encouraged and applauded for being sexual "manly men" whose identities as such literally depended on these expressions, they become somehow “dirty” as they age and express what they have been their entire lives.

·      Older adult women are expected to be asexual and not talk about sex at all. Not lady like. Not grandmotherly. If they break this silence, they are often seen as somehow “losing it” mentally because expressing sexual interest openly would be in such dire violation of their gender expectation. This can have ramifications for how they are treated by family members, nursing home staff, healthcare providers, clergy etc...

·      HIV, HPV and other STI rates are currently escalating in all elder-living communities. Few older adults see a need to use condoms or any other form of protection when engaging in intimate connections. Many think HIV is only something certain “other” groups get. After all, they figure, they can’t get pregnant anymore so what’s the worry?

·      Gender expression—older adults who attempt to cross-dress or who are transgender or transsexual are often treated extremely poorly by providers and family members. Whereas these adults may once have been free to express their gender in whatever way they please—they often grow older having to hide that important aspect of their very core identity. 

·      Suicide, the ultimate loss, occurs far more frequently with older adults—especially LGBT older adults than most of us would ever begin to imagine. Loss of ability to love and connect (even just touch) sexually and intimately with another human being is yet another loss that often contributes to these suicides.

Like AARP says, “We can do better”. We must. We will. A lot of us already are…. We did this week and were proud to be part of it.

The sexual literacy movement that NSRC is promoting addresses the current lack of focus on diversity within sexuality education and within numerous professional fields and academic disciplines. By its very definition, sexual literacy seeks to bring to the surface the many voices (literacies) that have not yet been heard when it comes to aging and sexual health and rights: from those who are economically disadvantaged, homeless, ethnically/racially diverse, gender and sexual identity diverse, people with chronic conditions and disabilities, immigrants and others. 

NSRC Honorary Advisory Board member, former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. David Satcher was one of the first national leaders to call for this attention to sexual health and diversity in 2001 and he and we and many other partners internationally have ever since been redressing the lack of information, research, policy, education and training when it comes to the disparities caused by ignorance of sexual diversity.  The dialogue has begun and we still have a long way to go.

A lot of older adults have sexual intercourse every day.  Some do not but do enjoy romantic friendships, touch and even close physical intimacy not related to intercourse (cuddling, hugs, kissing). Some older adults are becoming militantly asexually identified for many interesting reasons. A lot of older adults come out gay and/or straight as they age, finally allowed to embrace parts of themselves they might not have been able to throughout their lives. I suspect we could all learn a great deal from them if we could ever get over our sexually arrogant and adultist selves with our too carefully scripted ideas of what “hot” is and is not and what “counts” as “real sex” or “real relationships”.

Older adults ARE beautiful. Older adult bodies ARE sexy. Older adults ARE diverse. But we’re not letting that diversity shine through. We’re not encouraging it and we're certainly not celebrating it. We are promoting the ignorance of those diversities and that is NOT serving any of us well.

Recent research is increasingly proving that older adults who maintain intimate and sexual lives are much healthier mentally and physically (and live longer) than those who do not. More than ever, in the coming decades, as the baby boomer population (children of the sexual liberation era) explosion occurs, we’ll need to be prepared. We have to begin now to respond to the knowledge, resource and service needs that will inevitably occur and in fact already are occurring….globally.

AARP may not have known it, but they made (sexuality) history this week. It was the first time an AARP diversity conference had workshops devoted specifically to the issue of sexuality for all older adults and not just related to sexual identity of LGBT people alone. Not just one sexuality workshop but three (including NSRC’s).

As a major national organization dedicated to diversity, AARP is very much leading the way in helping this nation get to a more humane level of aging. We hope that other mainstream national organizations will soon follow suit. It’s not easy to do so for many political reasons, but it is a sure indicator of which companies and organizations truly care about the overall health and well being of the people they serve. AARP’s intentions could not be more clear or powerful:

Aging is everyone’s “issue”.