Last year the British Heart Foundation released this ad (found at the Mail Online) encouraging people to get a half hour of exercise each day:

It sparked some complaints, presumably because it says sex so openly and has a naked man in it. But it’s kinda neat to see an ad that shows middle-aged people with bodies that don’t necessarily fit our cultural beauty ideals, and acknowledging that they have sex. Of course we know people in their 40s and 50s have sex, but the images we get of women in those age groups being sexual usually depicts them as MILFs, not average women. I think many people are comfortable with the idea that men would be having sex later in life, but we often see them paired with much younger, hot women, not women their own age.

I went to BHF’s website. There is a page called Sex and Heart Disease. They also have a DVD available about sex and recovering from heart disease.

You might use these for a discussion of older couples and sexality, and how uncomfortable we are thinking about older people having sex in our culture. It would be a good topic to tie in to myths about sexual activity among older people. According to this Washington Post article, about 75% of people aged 57-85 who have partners are sexually active. About half of those aged 75-85 who are sexually active report having sex 2-3 times per month, and nearly a quarter have sex at least once a week. And yet our cultural images are generally that either older people don’t have sex at all, or that when they do, it’s gross. We also often assume that all older men have problems with impotence; certainly many do, but it’s not universal and often occurs much later in life that we might expect.

The American Psychological Association has a bibliography of journal articles related to older people and sexuality available here. Although they’re all from a psych perspective, they might be useful for gathering some basic data about the topic.

And, as I tell my students when we talk about aging and sex, I wouldn’t enter Grandma and Grandpa’s bedroom without knocking.

See also this post about a company that used stories of happily sexual older couples to sell mortgages.