Essay: Sex After 60? Showing It Is Complicated

(Jan. 16) -- Meryl Streep, 60, and Alec Baldwin, 51, play a divorced couple, Jane and Jake, who temporarily renew intimate acquaintance in the new hit film "It's Complicated." After their first reprise, Jane doesn't want Jake to see her uncovered. "The last time you saw me naked, I was in my 40s," she says. "Things look different lying down."

As the affair progresses, though, Jane changes her mind and confronts Jake in the altogether -- but not in such a way that we, the audience, can share his view.

I was intrigued. The director, Nancy Meyers, shows us an older woman as a fully sexual being, delightfully desirable as well as being seriously libidinous. You don't see much of that in a Hollywood film. Yet when the moment comes for Jane to reveal herself to Jake, Meyers lowers the veil over our eyes. How come?

As it happens, the same question occurred to novelist Erica Abeel, who interviewed Meyers for Huffingtonpost.com. "Why can't we see older women's bodies?" Abeel asked. The director's response -- "I never saw it that way in my mind" -- was essentially a non-response. It was evident this was one taboo she was not prepared to break.

We are at a strange moment in our attitudes about age and sex. In years past, there was a general perception that once men and women reached retirement age, their sexual drive pretty much retired as well. The onslaught of TV and print advertisements for Cialis and other male enhancers, on which we spend $1 billion a year, has made it eminently clear that some substantial number of older men at least remain sexually active.

The latest report of the National Social Life, Health and Aging Project makes it official and unisex: 40 percent of women age 65 to 74 and 67 percent of men that age said they had some form of sex in the previous year. In most cases, that happened two to three times a month or more, and sex was overwhelmingly vaginal and with their current partner.

So we are now confronted with the fact that millions of older couples continue to find each other's bodies sexually desirable. Many millions more younger couples understand, intellectually, that they can look forward to a similar future. Yet their negative feelings about older bodies, particularly older female bodies, remain unchanged. Our culturally induced obsession with youthful appearance trumps our reason.

Film directors know better than to expose us to sexy older women. Or vice versa. Meyers is a courageous exception. She directed "Something's Got to Give," the 2003 comedy in which 57-year-old Diane Keaton actually made a brief appearance in the nude. And in "It's Complicated," Meyers presents an even older woman who really wants and enjoys sex.

Make no mistake, Streep looks her age. A 40-something friend noted Streep's "droopy eyelid and softened jawline," but said she was "relieved to see Meryl's face looking really pretty without surgical work or a gauzy lens. That was victory enough for me without a full monty."

Some experts suspect that the myths about older people and sexuality may be weakening. For example, Beverly K. Johnson of Seattle University, an elder sex researcher, suggests that the openness about sex across the lifespan in recent books, on the Internet and in the media may be eroding the stereotype that older women are not as sexually attractive as older men.

One sign of that change: The growth in reverse May-December relationships. An AARP survey of singles age 40 to 69, for instance, found that 34 percent of the women were dating younger men. The percentage of marriages in which the woman is at least 10 years older doubled from 1960 to 2007. And the pejorative term "cougar" has become commonplace, describing women who date men 10 or more years younger as though they were jungle cats pouncing on defenseless prey. Cougar films, TV shows, cruises and books have proliferated.

Meanwhile, older women have lined up to buy Jane Juska's book, "A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance." In 1999, Juska, a retired teacher, placed an ad in The New York Review of Books that began, "Before I turn 67 -- next March -- I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like."

She received 63 responses within a month, and she has been dating one or another of her respondees, some as young as 35, ever since.

In an interview with The New York Times, Juska was asked whether she had felt a postmenopausal lessening of desire. "No," she said, "I was probably even more interested because I wasn't as afraid as when I was younger, of not doing it right or, well, being thought randy."

I saw "It's Complicated" with a 50-something single woman. We talked about Streep's role as a sexual elder, and I asked her opinion as to the message of the film. Her instant answer: "We're the same person and have the same feelings as we did when we were younger."

'Nuff said.