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2010-03-11 06:03:08
By JOHN CLOUD John Cloud Wed Mar 10, 6:25 am ET
Spring is coming, and a young man's thoughts turn to...you know. Apparently,
old men's thoughts turn to the same subject. According to an article to be
published Wednesday in the journal BMJ (British Medical Journal), 67% of men
ages 65 to 74 said they had been sexually active in the past year, compared
with just 40% of women in that age group. Everyone knows young men think
constantly about sex, but many guys remain interested in sex until they are
almost dead: more than one-third of men ages 75 to 85 said they had sex in the
past 12 months, compared with just 17% of women in that age group.
Some of this surely has to do with Viagra, which makes it easier for older men
to be interested in sex. But the disparity in sexual activity between older men
and older women isn't entirely explained by the 1998 release of the little blue
pill. One set of data presented in the new paper - taken from the National
Survey of Midlife Development, involving about 3,000 adults aged 25 to 74 - was
collected in 1995 and 1996. That data set shows that 62% of men ages 65 to 74
reported sexual activity in the previous six months; only 36% of women in the
same age group did so. (See how to prevent illness at any age.)
These differences matter because having a healthy sex life is strongly
associated with having a healthy life, period - and also a longer life.
Scientists aren't sure about the causal relationship here. Sexually active
people tend to be healthier, and healthier people tend to be sexually active.
It could be that the fulfillment of sex gives you a health boost, or that being
more fit makes sex better - or, more likely, it's a little of both.
What we do know, from this new paper, is that if you are a 30-year-old male,
you can be expected to have sex for 35 more years. The authors - Dr. Stacy
Tessler Lindau and researcher Natalia Gavrilova of the University of Chicago -
call this measure your "sexually active life expectancy," or SALE. A
30-year-old woman has a SALE of just 31 more years. (The study also finds that
men and women who stay healthy and in good shape gain extra years of sexually
active life in older age, compared with their peers in poorer health.) But
women live about five years longer than men, so when you do the math, all this
means that women go approximately twice as long without sex as men before they
die. (Read about elder porn in Japan.)
Older women also enjoy the sex they do have far less than older men. Married
women ages 57 to 64 who haven't been divorced or widowed report having about as
much sex as married men in the same age group. But while 77% of partnered men
in that age group say they are interested in sex, only 36% of partnered women
report the same interest. These figures suggest that a lot of older women may
be having sex when they don't really want to.
Lindau, the lead author on the paper, is cautious about drawing strong
conclusions from this variance. "It may be that women are more likely to have
sex for reasons other than fulfilling pleasure - or that they are more
interested in giving a partner satisfaction," she says. "Maybe they lack the
agency, or maybe they feel marital duty, but our paper doesn't provide an
explanation."
It's a shortcoming in the paper that the journal itself noted: In a BMJ
editorial accompanying the paper, Texas A&M University professor Patricia
Goodson notes that while Lindau and Gavrilova's new SALE measure might someday
prove a useful tool for gauging an aging population's medical and public-health
needs as they related to sex, it "sheds no light on the intriguing - and still
poorly understood - question of why, even though they enjoy fewer years of
sexually active life, many women do not perceive this as a 'problem.'"
Another problem the editorial doesn't mention: the paper is based on
self-reported data, and although the authors note that self-reported
information about health is usually highly consistent with objective health
data, reports of actual sexual activity simply cannot be objectively measured.
Even so, the paper does confirm a very large difference in sexual interest
among older men and older women.
The reasons for the male-female sex disparity among the elderly may not be
clear, but the paper shows that the problem in sex quality seems to worsen with
age. Still, there is a silver lining for older women having bad or unwanted
sex: Men tend to die younger than women. Also, it is men's increasing physical
and health problems that are most commonly cited (by both men and women) as the
reason sexual activity declines later in life.
This new paper raises more questions than it answers. When interviewed, Lindau
avoids making any sweeping social commentary. Instead, she notes that as a
gynecologist, she gets a lot of questions from older patients about whether
their level of sexual activity is normal. "And I haven't had the data to give
these women answers," she says. The new paper is a start.