A review of Cosmo's survey on sex after 60 finds it celebrates sexually active older women but ignores vibrators, vaginal atrophy, trauma, and why many aren't having sex at all. The report also skips pornography's role and overlooks that far more older women than men are single.
Chapters
Let's talk about the Kinsey Institute and Cosmopolitan magazine sex survey that just came out about women over 60 and some of the highlights. For me, most of it was pretty obvious stuff. Women over 60 take longer to orgasm. Yep, most of us women knew that, and some of us use vibrators to overcome that challenge. Woo! And many of us are still masturbating, although I have to say it was a much smaller number than I suspect is actually true. Maybe women just don't want to come right out and say it, but yes, many of us are still masturbating. There you go. Also, the older women are finding it harder to find a partner, and a lot of that is just down to the numbers. There's a lot more older women than there are older men, simply because women live longer. Men often have health issues, and as a result, there's just more of us. So it makes it more difficult for us to find somebody. For me, one of the things that was just missing was about pornography and the impact of pornography on our lives, even at this age, how it's impacting on our relationships and the way that we have sex, and also some of the big health challenges that many of us face things for women like vaginal atrophy and using vaginal estrogen, and how many of us are overcoming some of those challenges in our sex lives by resorting to pharmaceuticals like vaginal estrogen, for example. That just— I didn't see that anywhere. Maybe I was missing something. And I also think that one of the things that was very clear is that a lot of older women are just simply not having sex, and those numbers were pretty significant. And I know that for a lot of women I talk to, it's as a result of just not having had pleasurable sex, they overcoming some form of trauma or abuse and just deciding, fuck it, I don't want to do that anymore. And I think delving into the reasons why many older women aren't having sex would have been quite interesting rather than just glorifying all of the women that are out there still doing doing it. Anyway, it was an interesting report. It's in the latest issue of Cosmo if you want to check it out. Kind of disappointed that they didn't ask for my opinion, but you know, there you go.
