Why are we so disgusted by images of elderly people (say, above 65) showing physical intimacy?
I work in the Menswear department of Marks and Spencer, where most of our clientele are middle aged or elderly men who are pretty well off. Now, I sometimes work in the camera room where we often middle aged couples having a quick kiss and cuddle when they think nobody’s looking. We normally laugh it off and focus the camera elsewhere.
Last Saturday, me and one of my best mates from work were pissing about as the store was about to close. We panned in on the reception area of the fitting rooms and saw this elderly couple, who must have been in their early seventies in a tight embrace. The guy then started kissing his wife (or girlfriend, or mistress, or whatever …) on the lips. Now this wasn’t just a peck on the cheek, it was a full blown snog. My friend turned to me with a look of horror and said something along the lines of:
‘oh my god, look at that sick pervert acting as though he’s a stud’. I just laughed it off and told her that i didn’t think there was anything wrong in it, and that in fact, I thought it was quite sweet. You should have seen the look on her face !!!
This incident reminded me of this one time I was watching this video with my sister. Now the film was ok until it came to this one part where this old man started to undress his wife - they didn’t show them having sex or even kissing, yet my sister thought the film was pornographic. Now i know for a fact that if that had been a young couple, she wouldn’t have thought anything of it but, just cuz they had a few wrinkled here and there she felt sickened.
I also remember writing an assignment in my first year about lesbianism amongst elderly women. We had all been asked to research into a topic that was considered a social taboo. Whilst looking for books on homosexual mothers, I came across this one paper based on research that had been conducted over a period of four years and across three countries: the UK, France and Germany. The researcher concluded that there was a high level of homosexual activity amongst elderly women living in residential care homes. The husbands of many of these women had died of old age, yet the sexual needs of these women lived on. As there weren’t enough men in the homes, some of the residents had either started masturbating or sleeping with other women. This whole subject well and truly shocked me. I’d never even thought of people over 65 having sexual desires – how wrong I was !!! Even today, when i try telling people about this they just look at me as though I’m insane.
Why?
Why do we assume that the sexual desires of our elders die as soon as they hit 60?
Why are we so disgusted by images of elders as sex objects?
Why shouldn’t couples, who’ve been married for 40 odd years share physical intimacy without being called perverts?