The Blowfish Blog

OTAKU MAnKO: New England Journal Publishes “Comprehensive” Sex Survey of Older Americans

We’d like to welcome the latest column to the Blowfish Blog: Thomas Roche, sex author and editor, will be writing a weekly column on sex, science and technology, entitled OTAKU MAnKO (we’ll let him explain it later). Welcome, Thomas!

In last week’s New England Journal of Medicine, researchers from the University of Chicago National Social Life, Health and Aging Project published the results of a study described as the first comprehensive national survey to chart sexual behavior among adults aged 57 to 85.

According to the University’s website, this survey overturns stereotypical notions about aging and sex (namely, that old people don’t like it). Edward Laumann, one of the report’s authors, told BBC News: “There are a lot of people who feel that age is very tightly correlated with sexual activity or interest . . . But it turns out that healthy people are sexually active if they have a partner, and that this is an important part of the quality of life.”

In addition to “sex,” the study asked about oral sex and masturbation; half of the people surveyed “up to age 75″ said they had oral sex, and half of the men and a quarter of the women reported masturbating, with no apparent correlation between masturbation and having or not having a sexual partner.

The survey was intended to be different from most other surveys of sexuality in older adults, of which Laumann said on the University website: “they have typically been based on convenience samples with low completion rates or clinical samples with unknown biases in representing the population at large.” More respondents declined to answer questions about their income, for instance, than about their masturbatory habits. That methodology is open to debate, but the survey’s (supposed) takeaways are being proclaimed East to West: older adults like sex; their sexual vitality is tied closely to their overall health; masturbation is enjoyed by many (though if you ask me, not enjoyed by enough of them).

Importantly, the researchers actually asked those questions, even if I or anyone can nitpick them on the details. Rather than assuming that only married elders have sex, or that old people don’t masturbate, they opted for the descriptive perspective, rather than the prescriptive or proscriptive. Bully for them.

This information helps illuminate the changing face of aging America at a time when more and more adults — many of them a hell of a lot younger than 57 — are depending on the miracles of modern medicine — namely Viagra, Levitra, and Cialis — to enable and in many ways to define their sexuality. Men spend more than a billion greenbacks a year to treat erectile dysfuction, and since only 14 percent of men in the survey said they used pharmaceutical treatments to address a sexual concern, maybe you could help me figure out who’s chewing those little blue pills like Jujubees?

Given the profits smelled by pharmaceutical companies in marketing drugs to treat “female sexual dysfunction,” it’s probably only a matter of time before women have similar expectations about being able to treat sexual malaise or other dissatisfaction with a pill, which could be good or bad depending on how you look at it.

Let’s put that together with two other important facts about aging: first, that Americans, at least reasonably well-off Americans with access to health insurance, are living longer, and second, that the largest group now entering the land of the “older” American, the Baby Boomers, came of age with the sexual revolution. In the next ten years, we’re going to see parallel shifts in the demographics of sexuality and the expectations of later life. I most certainly applaud this: though I may not hit that age for a few more years, I plan to be the dirtest old man any of you sumbitches ever met, if I’m not already.

But there’s a couple of very strange things happening in the news coverage of this article. The New York Times headline was “Many Found Sexually Active Into the 70s,” “Study: Seniors Having More Sex Than You Think,” trumpeted the Associated Press; “Elderly Staying Sexually Active,” said the Washington Post; the list goes on, with the same headline: Old people fuck.

But fully 35% of female respondents rated sex as “not at all important” to them (vs. 13% of men). To me, that seems like an awfully large percentage (and indicates a creepy gender bias) for the survey’s takeaway message to be “Older people are hornier than we thought.” Just how not horny did we think they were beforehand? And the high prevalence of sexual concerns reported, from vaginal dryness to erectile dysfunction to lack of interest in sex, indicates that the path of Eros from cradle to grave is not the smoothest one, which isn’t exactly news . . . but again, it’s not the rosy picture painted by the University website or even the BBC news article.

Furthermore, there’s an even bigger datum that’s just plain weird. in a survey of more than 3,000 people, more than 2,000 of them reported being in an intimate relationship — but only 3 men and 5 women in that group reported that said relationship was with a same sex partner. That’s 0.2%. It’s a long reach from there to ten.

The survey collected “physiological specimens such as spots of blood, saliva and vaginal swabs,” which researchers plan to use as “biomarkers” to provide evidence about hormone levels, diseases, and STD prevalence. They also “gathered data . . . assessing participants’ sense of touch, taste and smell as well as vision and hearing,” all of which are critical to sexual experience. To lend such detailed methodology to sexual science is laudable and critical to our understanding of the way we’ll all relate to sexuality as we get older.

But I have a bit of trouble trusting a survey that asks me to believe that 0.2% of its sample, whether the median age is 25 or 50 or 150, is actively queer and partnered.

Is it really possible that a fifth of one percent of Americans over 57 are in an active queer relationship? Should such a result engender distrust in the survey’s other findings? Could the low level of same sex relationships indicate selection bias, surveyor bias, or an unexpectedly thick closet door for the sixtysomething friends of Dorothy out there? Does it put a stake in the heart that 10% of the population (or 5% or even 2%, depending on who you ask) is gay? Or is it that are our aging queers are really that lonely?

The scientific study of sexuality, much like the scientific study of particle physics or basket weaving, usually brings up more questions than answers; that’s the nature of scientific inquiry. But there are a lot of big questions left out of the University of Chicago study. As important as the results may be, those questions are too big for anyone to blow them off.

Thomas Roche is the managing editor of Eros Zine, teaches at San Francisco Sex Information, and also blogs on sex, drugs and cryptozoology at thomasroche.com.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, 11 September 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.