Old people sex, ewwww!

One of the things that scares me about getting old is the idea that a lot of old people lose their sexuality. Not sixty and seventy year olds, I know all about the shenanigans that go on in retirement homes, but eighty and ninety year olds. When you go from retirement home to nursing home.

There's not much sex in nursing homes. (Quick clarification: in this whole post "sex" means sexual intimacy in general, not necessarily intercourse.) For safety's sake, every door has to be open all the time. Most roommates are same-sex strangers; once in a blue moon a married couple is able to room together, but only an opposite-sex legally married couple and only rarely. I don't think many nurses or aides would be comfortable helping with sex in any way--say, helping two people into the same bed (they're all single beds of course) would almost certainly be refused as some sort of safety hazard.

I don't know what the ethics of dementia and sex are. Obviously having sex with someone who's a little forgetful is fine, and having sex with someone who can't understand what's happening is wrong, but where do you draw the line? Is there a single day when you realize it's no longer okay, or the day before they have to move out to a facility, and on that night... do you have the last sex of your life with your spouse? What is it like to knowingly have the last sex of your life?

The whole hospital setting, whether you're old or not, seems horrifyingly anti-sex, or rather just not considering sex as a concern; with nurses making rounds at night and privacy consisting of a curtain if you're lucky, I don't know how people who are in the hospital for courses of months even masturbate.

Healthcare institutions make at least some effort to provide physical and psychological comforts; they have massage and music therapists and therapy dogs and recreational therapy. Maybe by the time I'm old the "vibrator, porn, partner if you've got one, and a promise of 30 minutes of real privacy" therapy adjunct will exist. God I hope so.




The real problem here is I don't want to lose anything and I don't want to die. Not wanting sex to die is just another part of that.