Jack and Jill: Over the Hill

By Tonia

“The older one grows the more one likes indecency.” – Virginia Woolf

I was recently walking through a drug store minding my own business with absolutely NOTHING lewd on my mind. Really. Promise. And then I saw it - magnifiers hanging over the family planning/sexual products section. What???

Which got me to thinking about geriatric sex. Why not? Granma still wants to make whoopee. Why are people so squeamish about the idea? I guess they think she should be knitting or cooking or reading stories to the grandkids. She has no business gadding about, having  <shudder the thought> wild sex!

A study in 2007 showed that 73% of those aged 57-64 were still getting some, 53% of 65-74 year olds were still doing it and 26% of 75-85 year olds were making the horizontal mombo. And, get this, in another study, 30% of the partners of patients on VENTILATORS reported continuing to have sexual intercourse! I’m tellin’ ya, it gives a whole new meaning to “you take my breath away.” Makes you wonder what kind of assistance one can get at an Assisted Living Center!

So evidently there are still LOTS of older folks fornicating. Hollywood is certainly recognizing it – think Grumpy Old Men; It’s Complicated; Something’s Gotta’ Give; Hope Springs. Instead of Sex in the City, we’ll be watching Sex in the Nursing Home. I loved Meryl Streep’s interview response to being asked about how challenging it was to do the masturbation scene in Hope Springs. She paused; then responded, “What makes you think I was faking?”

Personally, I just had my 59^th birthday. And it hit me – 60 comes after 59 (yes, I have a PhD and can figure out these complex math problems). I’m approaching the geriatric set. Oh, hell, I’m already there. But I still want to get lucky. I’m not dead yet.

For your next girlfriend’s get together we suggest a book discussion of Jane Juska’s A Round Heeled Woman: My Late Life Adventures in Sex and Romance. Its Jane’s story of how she decided she’d been celibate too long and placed a personal ad in The New York Review of Books that said, “Before I turn 67—next March—I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.”

So I leave you this story stolen from the internet:

On hearing that her elderly grandfather had passed away, Jenny rushed to her grandmother's side. When she asked the particulars of her grandfather's death, her grandmother explained, "He had a heart attack during sex on Sunday morning." Horrified, Jenny suggested sex at age 94 was surely asking for trouble. "Oh, no," her grandmother replied. "We had sex every Sunday morning, in time with the church bells - in with the dings and out with the dongs." She paused and wiped away a tear. "If it hadn't been for that ice cream truck going past, he'd still be alive."

Happy fucking!