The Second Sexual Revolution

This phenomenon only grows as people discover the possibilities for profit, keeping it legal, or getting away with it. I believe the internet sexual experience, at least in those countries where access to a computer is common and sites are not blocked, has bred a legion of passive, stay-at-home, do-it-alone people. There are more men than women seeking explicit sex, but women pursue other kinds of online sexual experiences and satisfactions. (Admittedly, set against this passivity is the astonishing role that internet dating sites now play in dating, new relationships, and marriages.)

In the world of sex, the internet is the easy way—the very easy way. And my perception, or perhaps just my impression, is that this ready source of sexual experience, a click away, is reducing the efforts to which people once were driven by their libido needs. I speculate that it is reducing even the time and attention that married couples devote to their sex lives—the wife trundling off to bed while the husband stays up trolling the byways of internet sex.

In so many ways—especially for men, I believe—the internet is a vicarious sexual experience (or an amplified personal sex experience) hard to match with a partner. A 70-year-old man can watch beautiful young men and women, or women and women, in any preferred sexual activity. Just hit 'sucking,' 'anal,' 'group,' 'gangbang,' 'BDSM,' 'bondage,' 'public humiliation,' 'black, 'black on white,' 'Asian,' 'Hispanic,' 'teen,' 'lesbian,' 'nude wrestling,' 'gay,' 'spanking,' 'outdoors,' 'ball busting'...and let the beautiful bodies from all over the world do their thing in full color, close up, and free. No admission charge and no restrictions on alcoholic beverages.

If this is a risk to teenagers, who in many cases are restricted in their sexual activities, surely it also puts at risk older men and women who so often face different but real limitations on their sexual choices and activities. If internet sex activities tend to dominate the attention of so many men, then perhaps women will find it even more difficult to find the intimate relationship they seek. The internet offers a kind of omnipresent competition where men can discharge their physical drive so easily that they avoid the effort and risk required to achieve a relationship with a woman. This probably will not satisfy a man who never has had a sexual relationship, but what about the man who has been married a couple times, has less libido, and less confidence that at his age women will find him attractive? Both men and women may have endured the pain over many years of their partner's loss of sexual interest in them. Where does that leave confidence?

If I am on target, in this line of reasoning, then the unprecedented nature and availability of internet sexual experiences pose an insidious and alarming threat to genuine sexual fulfillment of older men and women—at precisely the time when improved health, extended youthfulness, and more active lifestyles could be making such sex the great adventure of later life.

Can We Complete the Sex Revolution?

The internet snare is not the fate, not yet, of sex at older ages. We have the many anecdotes of the kind I offered earlier of people in their 70s and later discovering a new world of sexual satisfaction where they experience less pressure to perform, less rush to orgasm, and more of the experiences we always knew could surround and enhance sex. At this point, women may be nodding, and men rolling their eyes, but my hunch is that even men, for the most part, would appreciate more frequent, longer, slower touching by a women. Many of us love messages, but after a few years it can be damned difficult to get a massage from your spouse that lasts longer than three minutes and uses more than one hand. The erotic impetus to touch no longer is there.

Men have long been forced to compete with movies to live up to the romance--the candlelight, charming words, and gallantry--that their wives or partners associate with good sex. As women get older, I am informed, they more urgently require this romantic backdrop to get 'in the mood.' But, at the same, men are beginning to lose their libido and are in more of a hurry to get on with blatant stimulation. If older women are going to compete with the internet, they may have to summon up more imagination and tune into male fantasies that they tend to view as crude, even gross, and decidedly unromantic. The time when they could slip off their bra and turn any man into a quivering supplicant has passed.

It is reported, as I noted earlier, that only 4 percent of women admit to having visited an internet porn site in the past month. Nor do we know how old those women were. But if older women, in particular, did check out those venues, relatively few would see anything that they themselves do during sex with their husbands or partners. They might notice that women who perform fellatio on men do it on their knees, constantly maintain eye contact with the man, and raise their excited, enchanting faces to receive his ejaculate. Oh, dear! And that is just for starters... Oh, and they usually don't describe it as "taking your thing in my mouth..."

Where were we? Yes, discussing the premature obituary for exciting sex in our later years. The most positive note, here, is the growing avant garde of older men and women who insist on nothing less than the real thing—if possible, better than ever. But where is the hard evidence?

There is the recent, blatantly pornographic and kinky best-seller, Fifty Shades of Grey, which became a phenomenon among older women on several continents.

There is the huge internet dating phenomenon, mentioned earlier, that definitely includes the older age groups, and which most often has sex as its explicit goal. One such site lets users categorize their sexual desires and by far the most frequent, for men but also women, is "Anything goes."

On the wilder side, there is the popularity, today, of nude cruises, mostly appealing to older or retired men and women, that regularly attract 2000 or more passengers who seek two weeks of exhibition to strangers of both sexes on deck, at the pool, in bars, in casinos, and in spas, with possibly some covering up at meals. 2000! Regularly! You think maybe those cruises aren't about sex, but worship of the natural? Yeah, I tried that line on my wife.

And yet, in the social sphere that I inhabit, this—all of it—remains outside the bounds of polite discussion. I do realize that to some extent this is a masculine plight; women of all ages, including in their 60s and beyond, discuss their sexual relationships with women friends. Nevertheless, sex among those 60 and older, especially sex outside of marriage, is a phenomenon new to polite discussion in America. It has the potential to shock and disgust. Just read about men and women in nursing homes, or retirement homes, who have started affairs and found that the whole staff is gossiping about them and even entering without knocking to see the action for themselves. There are cases where children of one partner in the new relationship applauded, but children of the other partner demanded that the couple be separated immediately—as though they were fighting dogs.

Progress will continue, however, because the Baby Boom generation just now is reaching their mid-sixties--retirement age or at least an age to reassess life's priorities—and bringing with them the sex revolution. It will continue because changes in the biology of aging are on its side. It will continue because the signs everywhere of a breakdown in taboos, such as the phenomena of personal ads, internet dating sites, porn best-sellers, and even nude cruises.

The stumbling block on the path to the adventure of real-life love and lust in later life will be the internet—the sex phenomenon of our age, but one that features us in a seductively easy and passive role. Many already have married or will marry internet porn and it will be the last sexual relationship of their lives. For many, that will be positive; there are significant percentages of people who never have a sexual relationship (check out the Kinsey statistics), or only when they are young, and for a variety of reasons never will manage a sexual relationship.

But others, who dream of new chapters in their sex life, even chapters rising like a good romance novel toward a rousing climax, may permit the ease and safety of internet sex tap their sap, discharge their libido, and forego forever their fantasies of a real partner. The answer as at all stages of life is courage, courage to identify and pursue the values that mean most to us, even if they are the hardest to attain.

Entering the next round of the eternal bout between male and female sexuality, men will have to control their impatience and insecurity to give a relationship time to emerge—a relationship in the absence of which we have to pretend during sex that it doesn't matter who is there. Women will have to keep in mind what they always knew, that for men all romance begins with sexual attraction—usually immediate, visual, and visceral. It will take confidence to emphasize and offer, even flaunt, that allure so often identified exclusively with youth.

There are few clichés as worn as the one that relationships take work. When youth, 'perfect' bodies, and volcanic libidos are involved—and all the adulation of the cult of youth and love—the consequences of neglecting that work may be postponed. In older romance, the work will have to begin at the beginning—even before the first meeting—and never let up. There simply are too many adjustments to be made from the outset.

Far from being 'horny old broads' and 'dirty old men,' those who find the courage for what many report to be the best and highest moments of sexual fulfillment that they have known may begin to redeem our era's plague of promiscuous, ever-more-desperate, blatantly animalistic displays, increasingly violent, orgiastic, and boring, that have swamped our culture.

If older men and women (and who better?) can lead the way out of this seeming dead-end of the sex revolution--now a Dantesque landscape of grotesques on the internet, and merely tiresome in real life--then they will save and complete the once promising, life- and pleasure-affirming revolution that they began more than half-a-century ago with such idealism.