Kink, Sexo e Envelhecimento

Kink, Sex, and Aging

The Who: “The things they do look awful c-c-cold. I hope I die before I get old.” Peter Townsend (1965)

This article is a brief overview of some of the ways aging interacts with being kinky. Such a summary calls for two caveats up front:

Kink is a subculture, and not just one community, but many small ones. That means that many of the strengths and problems of the general culture infiltrate kink subcultures. Social problems and prejudices from the general society do not stop at the dungeon door. Communities vary, and not all dungeons are the same.

Kink is not a panacea, and where kink communities and values are potential resources, it can still be quite challenging to find and use them. Your experiences may vary from examples cited here. Just as I cannot promise that if you just want it badly enough, you can become a Cirque du Soleil acrobat, I can pretty much guarantee that you cannot do so without intention and dedication. Anecdotes presented here are not intended to norm kinky sexual experiences but to alert you to what might be possible when you set your goals. When participation in the world of kink does provide skills and advantages in dealing with the challenges of maintaining sexual satisfaction as aging advances, I do not mean to imply that the communities of alternate sexuality are the only places that such advantages can be attained.

Aging:

The model of aging implicit in this essay derives from Erik Erikson. Childhood and Society (1950) is great for further reading, although it is not about elder adjustment per se. Erikson transformed Freud’s developmental theory into a social theory, and then expanded it to cover the entire lifespan. For a more practical and less theoretical reading, I would also suggest Joan Price’s Naked at Our Age (2011) for a non-kinky discussion of sex and aging.

Erikson’s model of adjustment outlines development at different life stages as a kind of socio-emotional obstacle course. In infancy we negotiate attachment and the formation of identity and psychological differentiation from our parents. In young adulthood we separate from parents and search for intimacy with age mates. In adulthood, we tackle problems of generativity, mostly making a family, building communities and defining our work. In old age we seek to retain the satisfactions of relationships and accomplishments in the face of aging, illness and loss.

Peggy Kleinpaltz and Dana Ménard have described exactly this in their work on how different people at different ages describe optimal sexual experiences. When you are 16-21, optimal sex might mean getting any partnered sexual experiences at all! By their fifties, most people have come to terms with optimal sex as building the kind of family they desire. Kleinplatz and Ménard’s data strongly show that when you interview a sample of older people with longer histories of sexual experience, the descriptions of what constitutes a peak sexual experience gets reframed as we age, and is much more multidimensional than just achieving conception, or having a powerful orgasm. Here are the main characteristics of optimal sex experiences described by their research subjects:

Being present, focused and embodied. Feeling connection, alignment, being in synch. Experiencing intense sexual and erotic intimacy. Enjoying extraordinary communication, heightened empathy. Feeling authentic, being genuine, uninhibited, transparent. Feeling transcendence, bliss, peace, transformation or healing. Feelings of exploration, interpersonal risk taking, or fun. Being vulnerable and experiencing surrender.

The NHSLS: Ageism in the first representative sample study of the U.S.:

In the 1980s, America was hit by the AIDs crisis, and public health officials and social scientists demanded that the US government authorize money to investigate its relationship to American sexual behaviors. Eventually Ed Laumann, John Gagnon, Robert Michael and Stuart Michaels at North American Opinion Research Center received a grant to conduct the first methodologically exacting profile of American sexual behavior. They published The Social Organization of Sexuality (1994). Faced with limited funding, the authors decided to cut the age range instead of sacrificing methodological rigor, closing the sample at 60 years of age — so the first study of American sexual behavior fails to apply to anyone over 60.

The findings showed a stark drop off of sexual behavior after age 50. Men between 55 and 59 had no sex at all (15%) or only a few times in the past year (25%), and women between 55 and 59 had no sex at all (25%) or only a few times a year (40%).

The Sexual Risks of Aging:

Aging threatens sexual health and satisfaction in several ways. Some of the bigger risks include demographics, relationship loss, partner loss, illnesses and disabilities, menopause and the decline of fecundity for women, and social expectations about sexuality.

Demographics are a special problem for women because women on the average live longer than men. Partner and relationship losses threaten everyone. Illnesses and disabling losses are more common as age increases, and the principle lethal diseases often have sexually disabling consequences even when they are not fatal. Heart disease, cancers, diabetes, anxiety, depression often have adverse sexual effects as do the medicines and procedures to treat them.

This also creates opportunities for kinky people that the general public are less likely to have. To admit and act upon one’s kinky desires requires the practitioner to confront their kinkiness and creates experience fighting stigma. Having a community of friends with whom one discusses such intimacies is a potentially valuable resource when one becomes ill.

Kink Aging Challenges:

Generational issues divide the kink community:

Because of the rapid pace of social and technological change, there are significant divides within the kink communities. People who came of age when kink was an underground and outlaw motorcycle culture have very different experiences than people who had the support of above ground social organizations like Till Eulenspiegel society and Society of Janus or the steady drumbeat of Safe Sane and Consensual educational programs. These people had very different early experiences in social kink from those who have come since the popular 50 Shades books and movies in the era of Fetlife, Tinder and Grindr.

Intense relationships are difficult to grieve or replace:

Serious long term kinky relationships are intense and irreplaceable. It has been a long and important part of kink culture that the loss of such relationships is extremely difficult. Whether this is true relative to non-kinky straight or gay relationships is not based upon science, but is understandably difficult because kinks are many, often highly specific, and long-term kinky relationships are singular lifetime events.

Medical practitioners are largely clueless about the implications of your diagnosis on your sex life:

In 2016, Sprott and Randall conducted the National Kink Health Survey. They discovered that 14% of their self-selected sample had ever had a kink related health problem, and nearly 70% had never spoken about their kinks to a health provider. These results are a great source of concern given that many kinky activities are strenuous, some are risky, and many health conditions have implications for the safety and opportunity to do kinky behaviors.

The National Coalition for Sexual Freedom NCSFreedom.org maintains a list of Kink-Aware Professionals that includes physicians. There are not nearly enough of these to serve the entire out kinky population, and they tend to be in urban areas.

“Old age is not for sissies” – Bette Davis

Being older and being disabled are stigmatized in the general society, and it is unreasonable to expect participation in kinky life to ease all the burdens. But aging also promises perspective that can broaden sexual pleasure, and community can help to cope with those losses that even good sex cannot entirely avoid.

Updated: March 14, 2020

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