Aging and Sexuality
by Judson Jervme

I began to worry about the effects
of aging on seeual performance in my
mid-ffties when a friend and colleague,
ten years my elder, told me in a letter
that he could no longer have erections.
Was, I asked, my own terminal
detumeccence on the horison? I
began searching in panic through card
catalogues under the headings of Sex
and Age. It turned out that my
friend's condition was complicated by
diabetes-and perhaps also by many
years of heavy drinking. The studies I
found in the libraries were remarkably
reassuring. Many men have active sex
lives into their nineties. Nonetheless,
the casualty reports from the front
were sufficiently alarming that I began
carrying my informal research, through
correspondence, into the personal lives
of my friends who were willing to
share their experiences. I'll pass on
here some of the things they said (and
have given me permission to quote
anonymously).

I address here heterosexual men,
not least of all, because I am
concerned about the women in our
Iives. Not only do women outlive and
outnumber men in the elderly
population, they are often long before
their own sexual interests have
abated left high and wet by their
partners. Too many men simply lose
interest or begin turning to younger
women or external stimulation for
revival of their waning sexuality.

One major problem is that men
after forty experience an unsettling
shift in their ability to become sexually
aroused, and it is likely to catch us
off-guard. Before that age in  the
popular image and in the experience of
many of us-the male is always ready
for sex whereas women's arousal is
typically slower. Then the rules
change.  And men accustomed to
taking the sexual initiative discover that
their declining testosterone levels have
made arousal more problematical.

Some can't handle that.  Some men
panic and retreat and some women
respond with assertive behavior that
even further daunts men who are
already feeling insecure. Impasse.
The Great Divide.

What I've learned from talking and
corresponding with men (mostly men
like myself: Over fifty, married and
monogamous) is that those of us who
caught on early to the problem of
aging decided, consciously or
unconsciously, to do something about
it. Just as we take up jogging or
watch the fibre in our diets, we begin
taking care of ourselves in regard to
sex.  For example, one friend writes:
It was a puzzle to me why I began
regular masturbation when I turned
fifty after having given up that
practice (at least on a daily basis)
in my teens. God knows I wasn't
frustrated. It had nothing to do
with arousal. It was more like
swimming laps. I'd be sitting at my
desk, my mind on nothing but
columns of figures, and find myself
once or twice a day massaging my
groin until I was erect; then I'd
close the office door, masturbate for
five or ten minutes.... This was for
myself, a sense of well-being. As I
think back, it was an intuitive
recognition that I had an increasing
need of sexual exercise-just to stay
in shape.

Masturbation is not the only strategy
for maintaining sexual health as one
gets on in years, but it's very
important one for both men and
women who want to keep their juices
flowing. Some sex researchers
recommend that men deliberately
maintain daily erections for an hour or
so at a time without ejaculating. Keep
it up, and there is no given age at
which your ability to do so necessarily
declines.

Men who have written me are
much more willing to talk about
masturbation and frequency of orgasm
than they are about the intimate
details of their sexually satisfying
relationships. But I have heard
enough from them, and learned
enough from my own experience, to
suspect that the standard advice of sex
manuals and counselors is dead wrong
when it boils down to a recom-
mendation that those becoming bored
with their sex lives seek greater variety
in sexual behavior.

Consider a typical pair of aging
partners. Thcy've raised kids together,
paid off mortgages, conducted
successful careers, shared a wealth of
lasting friendships with people like
themselves who relate with dignity,
comfort and mutual respect. Though
they may still have attractive, well--
groomed figures, their bellies no longer
resonate like drumheads. "Good
looking" no longer means to them
sexually titillating. It's a relief to them
that they no longer have to play the
game of maintaining physically
seductive appearances. They lie there,
white-headed and wrinkled at the
extremities (though it's amazing how
flesh beneath the neck retains its
youth), knowing that something isn't
working.

And though swinging or trying new
positions or seeking other modes of
imaginative and mechanical renewal
seem to work for some, those are not
the solutions sought by most I know.
What they have developed are
attitudes-toward one another and
toward sex-that release their erotic
potential. Sometimes the language for
such attitudes may seem corny. For
example, a man in his 60's writes:

"The best word I can come up with
is cherishing...I go through a
conscious process of reminding
myself how fortunate I am to have
my wife there in bed with me. I
think of the years we have shared,
of the importance of our being there
for one another, and then simply of
her.  How dear she is. How wonderful
her flesh!  How grateful I am to be
functioning so well-a process I am
all the while assisting with my hand.
It's like a kind of discipline, like Zen,
clearing your mind of everything and
letting and letting a pure white glowing
concentration on nothing arise, a kind of
transport.  I wouldn't describe it as
passionate.  It's more like transcendence.
And I am inside her, my penis seems
like the hot link joining us, a weld.
I think much less about plunging and
coming than about caressing. Sometimes
ejaculation wells up and spills, and
sometimes (about half the time) it
doesn't, but that doesn't matter.  I
remind myself that there is nothing
I am trying to achieve, that this is it,
the loving, the being joined.  If I happen
to spill over, that's as one might say,
gravy. The important part is the daily
experience of mindless absorption in
one another."

As we age we have to learn that our
satisfaction is not some kind of  gift
or obligation from someone else.
It is natural enough when one finds
that the juice doesn't flow as automatically
as in the old days to blame external factors-
such as one's partner. Many men suffering that]
delusion have long been a prime target for those
marketing aids from hostess services to phone sex
to porno films and exotic mechanical contraptions.
But others learn that it is easier (and less expensive,
embarrassing and risky) simply to work on the
obstacles in their own minds.

The props don't help for long, many of us have
discovered.  We can train our partner (or find
one who has been trained) like a seal, but we will
finally have to recognize that if we're going to be
sexually satisfied, it is mostly ourselves who will
make that happen.  Our satisfaction is not something
we can buy, but rather something we do in our heads.
For example, we might learn the truth of what our
women friends have always tried to tell us:  love comes
before sex. In short, we can school ourselves in loving.

The first step is to stop associating sexual prowess
with manhood, a mistake much like that of associating
one's annual income with manhood. One would
think that the myth of a linkage
between hunkdom and
studhood had been sufficiently
exploded, but many of us carry those
boyhood fantasies into middle age, only
to be severely disillusioned about
ourselves as age takes its inevitable toll
in our testosterone levels. We have to
accept that we are what we are.

The second step is to overcome our
worship of the involuntary. "I just
couldn't help myself' is one of a man's
favorite excuses when he has com-
mitted some sexual indiscretion. That
may fool the world, but it shouldn't
fool you when you find you "can't" get
it up and the temptation is to whimper
"I just can't help it." Many of us are
taught to nourish the idea that sexual
desire comes over us like poetic
inspiration (another wicked myth), and
that we are passively the prisoner of
spontaneous urges-or, most fearfully as
we age, lack of urge. That can leave
us paralyzed. When desire doesn't
well up in our flesh, we have to learn
how to summon it.

If it were constipation rather than
erectile failure that was interfering with
our performance, we would have no
hesitation in' doing something about it.
Of course penile behavior (like bowel
behavior) is ultimately involuntary, but
there's a lot of voluntary stuff you can
do to help it along-both in restraining
yourself when inappropriately aroused
and in arousing yourself when
inappropriately inhibited.

A third (and related) attitude many
men deal with is the notion that there
is something unnatural or unseemly
about helping oneself along. We may
act freely in touching the genitals of
our partners and want them to return
the favor, but to stimulate our own
genitals seems somehow like cheating
(especially in the company of one's
partner). Old folks who have satisfying
sex lives know better. They know
fingers and mouths (oh, those mouths
without dentures!) were invented
before forks. You use what you have.

If your body is simply producing less
ejaculate and you therefore lack the
physical manifestation that assures you
that something really happened, you
can make yourself miserable trying to
be happy. Who cares what you call
it? If it feels good, enjoy and don't
concern yourself about some imaginary
sexual Richter scale. You can have
both orgasms and ejaculations even
without erections. People with all
variety of physical disabilities have
learned to satisfy themselves and one
another. Satisfaction is ultimately a
psychological, not a physical, response
and you are only abusing yourself if
you define it in physical terms that are
too narrow for your physical
capabilities.

Above all, though, we all have to
outgrow our reverence for ejaculation,
as though that experience were the
objective of sex. Some ejaculations
are wonderful, some are nuisances or
mere interruptions. But it is nothing
but torment to think of elaculations or
male or female orgasms as
achievements, as moments like
breasting the tape after a grueling run.
No one is keeping score. Intense as
their blinding light may seem, satisfying
as the sense of completion may be,
remember that they (at least
temporarily) conclude a sustained
period of ecstasy. Who needs to be in
such an all-fired hurry to end that?

In a poem for my 60th birthday I
appealed to values not often associated
with sex:

let's make love as more than four

decades

have taught us how serenely

without error

I can forgo passion if precision is left
to me. And though foolishness will
ever, I am sure, glow in my aging
brain, I hope it never confuses me
about my functions.

Meanwhile, to those just placing
their foot on the dark sill of forty, or
fifty, or sixty, or later decades I would
say with Robert Browning's "Rabbi
Ben Ezra:"

Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first
was made.

The shift into gear of aging sex can,
indeed, be traumatic. But it can also
be liberating. At last the anxieties of
courtship and competition, of jostling
egos and lecherous indulgences, of
scoring and being scored upon, can be
left behind. Think of sex less in terms
of an athletic achievement than as a
steady drive that can impel you
blissfully into these golden years.

Judson Jerome, married to Marty since
1948, has published numerous books of
poetry, fiction and nonfiction.  He has been
a poetry columnist for Writer's Digest since
1961.