Heck Of A Guy

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Still Amorous After All These Years

August 24th, 2007 at 2:28 pm · DrHGuy · 3 Comments


Yes! Yes! Oh God Yes!

According to Elderly Staying Sexually Active, an article from yesterday’s Washington Post, 50-75% of a representative sampling of U.S. adults ages 57 to 851 are “sexually active, with a significant proportion engaging in frequent and varied sexual behavior.”2

On reading this, my first thought - OK, my first thought after “What the heck does age 57 have to do with elderly? - was that with only a few strategic adjustments, a bolt-on attachment or two, some tasteful leather accents, and eight 12-volt batteries my walker could be transformed into a gasp-inducing boudoir appurtenance and, not incidentally, an after-market accessory with significant profit potential based on the results of this market research.

The article goes on to point out

… elderly men reported more sexual activity than women, but researchers said that was largely because women live longer than men, giving the surviving men more opportunities to have sex than women.

By the way, according to my calculations, exchanging a few years of life for better odds in the sexual roulette game works out to be an altogether advantageous trade.

It’s a dandy story everyone should read. In addition to the data, however, I find one element of the Washington Post article interesting in its implications.


Text-Photo Dissonance

Accompanying the Washington Post story are the photo3 and caption shown below.


“Older people value sexuality as an important part of life,”
said the researcher who led a major survey of more than 3,000 adults.


So, the Washington Post prepares a legitimate news story with content that is positive, sweet, and, of course, sexy, that, when published, will capture the interest of a huge proportion of the reading public.4

So, to illustrate this wonderful story about the “Elderly Staying Sexually Active” the decision-makers at the Post select, from the thousands of archived photos The Washington Post must maintain in its justly renowned Camera Works photojournalism compilation, the more than 10 million images of the AP photo library5 to which they have access, and the untold numbers of photos they could have had their photographers snap expressly for this article, this graphic.

That’s the best they could come up with?

The photo itself is, I’m sure, well-done technically and aesthetically. It just seems - well, not sexy. Were it not for the couple holding hands, in fact, the picture, especially in the tiny size shown by default on the web page, would, in fact, appear distinctly asexual.

For comparison, consider this photo the Edmonton Journal selected from the Getty Collection to run along side virtually the same story.


And when they ran a similar piece a year ago, NPR matched it to this photo on their web site.



Even if one eliminates the porno industry’s overwhelming stockpile of images referencing elderly sex, there are all kinds of nifty graphics available to convey the thrust of the article. For example, I immediately thought of this iconic scene from The Graduate with Mrs Robinson radiating seductive sexuality.



If I were a shrink, I might wonder if someone at the Post isn’t a tad conflicted about grownups having sex.

The Housman Update

Finally, with the study’s results in mind, I am moved to revise the final line of the Housman poem the appeared in yesterday’s post, It’s Been a Mithridates Kind Of Day.

After describing Mithridates being unharmed by poison planted by his enemies because of his immunity to such substances that resulted from his practice of consuming them in small doses every day, Housman concludes the poem with these lines:

–I tell the tale that I heard told.
Mithridates, he died old.

I submit that Housman’s point might have been even more emphatically conveyed, albeit at the cost of some damage to the meter and the rhyme scheme, with this addition to the last line:

–I tell the tale that I heard told.
Mithridates, he died old - still boinking like a priapic bunny.



Footnotes

  1. Researchers conducted face-to-face interviews with a randomly selected sample of 3,005 Americans from July 2005 to March 2006.↩
  2. Apparently, “varied sexual behavior” does not, as one might reasonably assume, designate activities illegal in eighteen states or those requiring diagrams, three or more participants, or special equipment not available at ones local Wal-Mart, but instead is used in in this context to indicate only masturbation and oral sex. I know, I was disappointed too.↩
  3. The photo is credited to “Reed Saxon — Associated Press Photo.”↩
  4. At the time this post was written, one day after publication, the article was still the most frequently viewed story in the Washington Post Health section and was the second most emailed story for the entire paper.↩
  5. Reference: Wikipedia↩

Tags: Bagatelles

3 responses so far ↓

  • 1 ben // Aug 24, 2007 at 8:36 pm

    “On reading this, my first thought - OK, my first thought after “What the heck does age 57 have to do with elderly?
    - was” - viagra!

  • 2 Mary // Aug 25, 2007 at 3:09 pm

    Paragraph 2 — we must chat.

  • 3 MindSpin // Aug 25, 2007 at 9:03 pm

    I’m partial to the gal with the twinkling eye and the sheet.