Sex, Is too for Fifty Plus

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“No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace As I have seen in one autumnal face …If we love things long sought, age is a ...
we are 50 years in ... K.
... she was young enough “No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace As I have seen in one autumnal face …If we love things long sought, age is a thingWhich we are 50 years in compassing.” K.
RainesWhen she was young enough to know some, but not all, about the adult world with its mysteries of sexuality, my daughter, in the midst of a seemingly unrelated conversation about pets asked: “Mom, can old people still do ‘it?’ You know they are smelly and their skin sags. How can they?” Her nose wrinkled with the disgust and horror of the whole idea.Moms need to be quick on their feet in response to their kid’s questions.
I took a long deep breath, I needed time to think. Understanding her dilemma, I answered, “Well, “God or nature, or the universe is very smart.
As we age, our eyesight goes, and our touch sort of slows, and body shapes don’t matter quite as much. Some how it all works — it does work a little differently, though — but it does work.
She looked at me quizzically, tucking the information away to be considered another time. And, she just as quickly returned to our discussion of pets.
She seemed at peace with my response---for the time being.Frank, at 21, is savvy, tall, sexy, a “hunk” who knows all about sex’s magic elixir. At 21, he struts his stuff when he enters a room, testosterone-sure, confident that he can attract a girl to bed that night, or any night he wishes.
No one has to tell him he is in his sexual prime; his healthy body and the heads that turn as he walks down the street are constant affirmations of his self-image. Deep down, he believes that he is the very first to have discovered that awesome magnetic force that has, in fact, drawn the sexes together since the beginning of time.
Frank, the son of a friend of mine, is a thoughtful and fun loving college student. As is true of other young people, he cannot talk about, nor even think about, anyone over fifty having sex.
One day as we were lunching together, I directly raised the topic: What do you think of people over fifty having sex? Eyes instantly averted and nervous laughter, much feet shuffling, lots of coughing and a sudden need to get away. Like his peers, he’ll avoid the topic if he possibly can.
I ask him about his obvious discomfort. Blushing, but with the guts that come from knowing and trusting me, he answers as directly as he can a question he has never before even pondered.
"My parents? I don't want to think of them, you know, doing it. And, you say even my grandparents may be — Dr.
D. You are too much, I really don't want to think of them that way.”I’ve challenged the franchise, threatened the exclusive territory of youth.
Not that he will dwell on the matter for long, I’m sure. Soon, Frank will be back in the place where young people live.
The intersection of Testosterone Boulevard and Estrogen Avenue, where the heavy hot-rod traffic is seen as all there is to sexuality — surely that can’t be Mom and Dad steaming up the windows of the Oldsmobile parked at the overlook, or Grandma and Grandpa, giddy from a couple of champagne toasts, groping each other in the back of that limo?Youth “knows” that it has the franchise, that sex requires supple skin, firm bodies and energy galore surging into all night orgasms. “Don’t you tell us you are doing it too,” the kids say, seriously shocked and appalled.
“You can’t be, not really and certainly not with as much fun as we have.”We have to understand them, forgive them their self-absorbed, hormone-propelled instincts, for they live a life of fresh discoveries. They are astronauts in uncharted space.
“Yeah,” they’ll admit, “maybe you old fogies hold each other some.” But real sex, like they show in the movies, like youth does it, not that, not their parents, and certainly never their grandparents. These are the thoughts, the fantasies that run through my mind as I watch Frank struggling with images of his own.
As if to let me off the hook, but also to ease out of the discomfort I have somewhat mischievously drawn him into, Frank concedes: ”OK, Dr. Lynn, you’re attractive for your age, but really you’re an old foggy.” Oh, it’s put in a light, joking sort of way.
But deep in my heart I can hear, maybe not Frank, but certainly the voice of modern youth, telling me and my generation: “Go away please, clear the playing field, get off to the back benches of a retirement community, you old foggy. Don’t tell us your are still doing it.
Who do you think you are, and whom do you think you are kidding? How disgusting. Be grown-up.
Behave. Act your age.
Ugh.”Life is too hard to do alone,Dr. D.Dorree Lynn, PH.D.
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