newjerseynewsroom.com

BY SUSIE WILSON

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

SEX MATTERS

The boomer generation—not content with starting only one sexual revolution—can opt for a second in later life if they follow the intelligent advice of Peggy Brick, M.ED., a nationally known sexuality educator who has observed changes in sexual knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors for the past 40 years.

“With the longevity revolution will come the chance for another sexual revolution,” Brick told the enthralled members of the Potluck Society, a recently formed older women’s group interested in exploring new horizons, in Princeton, N.J., earlier this week. She was invited to conduct a three-hour evening workshop, “Older, Wiser, Sexually Smarter.” Her workshop is based on the curriculum of the same name that contains 30 sex ed lessons “for adults only,” which she co-wrote in 2009. It is available at The Center for Family Life Education at Planned Parenthood of Greater Northern New Jersey.

At the start, Brick told participants (all women ages 50 and onward) that they can be part of a “new sexual revolution” if they are willing to rethink many old beliefs and habits about aging and sexuality and learn new facts and strategies for getting sexual pleasure as they age. She did not promise them “free love,” but rather more intimacy and sexual enjoyment throughout the later part of their lives.

Brick is the founder and current president of the Sexuality and Aging Consortium at Widener University. She is currently writing a manual about the importance of sex through the latter years for professionals to use with seniors in assisted living communities and nursing homes.

“People as they age have so many questions about aging and sex,” she explains, “but they come into mid- and later life having learned not to talk about this topic.”

She sees her role at workshops as getting people to talk about sex and to understand that “communication, or lack of it” is the biggest issue is sexuality, a point-of-view I think is as basic for older people like myself as it is for adolescents.

In order to communicate with partners as they age, people need to rethink many of the myths and assumptions about sex with which they grew up. As an example, Brick mentioned that most older people still opt to have sex at night. But as men age, she told her audience, their testosterone levels tend to be higher in the morning and afternoon, so older couples might want to change the times they have intercourse. Brick also counseled women to accept themselves and feel sexy, wrinkles and all, and not feel intimidated by the young women with perfect bodies that they see constantly in advertisements.

She mentioned the work of Jean Kilbourne, who has studied how advertisements distort older women’s sense of themselves as sexual beings, because they focus relentlessly on young women with perfect bodies as the only ones deemed “sexy” by our society. She added that there is “something wrong with the prevailing view of sexuality and aging” and blamed “ageism” as the cause of many sexual problems for both older men and women.

“Sex education doesn’t stop at adolescence,” she told the group, “and having sex doesn’t stop at 50.” She assured the group that sexuality is a learned behavior and women in the audience could learn a great deal by reading books, visiting websites, talking to each other, and attending workshops that could improve their sex lives substantially as they age. In the long lists of resources she handed participants, she particularly recommended the websites www.mypleasure.com, www.sexmartfilms.com, and www.sexualhealth.com.

As for books, top choices were Our Bodies, Ourselves: A New Edition for a New Era, by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, and Guide to Getting it On, by Paul Joannides, Psy.D.

Brick voiced much concern for Big Pharma’s perspective on sexuality and aging. She counseled her audience to ignore the constant drumbeat and ads for drugs and more drugs to enlarge and increase a man’s erection (thereby ignoring women’s rights to equal sexual pleasure). Instead, Brick favors more education about intimacy, deeper understanding of the very real and normal physical changes in sexuality that affect both genders as they age, acceptance of masturbation as “a natural supplementary activity within a relationship,” and the realization that “longevity and happiness of marriage is NOT tied to frequency of sexual intercourse.”