Sex after 40?: Gender, ageism, and sexual partnering in midlife

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Abstract

This article examines the relationship between gender and heterosexual partnering in midlife, using survey data from 1240 women and men aged 40 to 59. Although older ages are associated with lower numbers of sexual partners for both genders, larger proportions of women report having no partners, and at earlier ages than men. Sexual conservatism and non-cohabitation predict lower numbers of partners for both genders, albeit in different ways. Age's differential effects by gender are not reducible to greater conservatism among older cohorts of women or to age-gender patterns in cohabitation, suggesting that ageism and sexism combine to middle-aged women's particular disadvantage.

Section snippets

Aging and sexual activity

Most research on aging and sexuality has focused on the physiological aspects of sexual life. Physical changes associated with normal aging, including menopause and the male climacteric; aging-related illnesses; and the treatment of those illnesses have all been shown to inhibit sexual desire and function (Calasanti and Slevin, 2001, Schiavi, 1994, Segraves and Segraves, 1995).1

Data and methods

Data for this study come from the National Health and Social Life Survey (NHSLS), a unique project that gathered a wealth of detailed information about sexuality not available elsewhere. Designed as a “broad investigation of sexual conduct in the age of AIDS” (Laumann et al., 1994, p. 52), the NHSLS was conducted in 1992 by the National Opinion Research Center. The research team conducted in-person interviews with 3432 respondents randomly drawn from a national sample of U.S. households, using

Hypotheses

Based on our review of the literature, we developed four hypotheses about differences in numbers of sexual partners in midlife. H1: Married and cohabiting people will be more likely to have a sexual partner than their non-cohabiting counterparts, but less likely to have multiple partners. (We expected cohabitation status to explain much, but by no means all, of the observed variation in sexual partnering.) H2: Holding other factors constant, later midlife adults will have fewer sexual partners

Findings

Our analyses sought to identify factors that predict the number of sexual partners (none, one, two or more) respondents had in the twelve months preceding the survey. At the bivariate level, numbers of sexual partners were patterned by gender and age (Table 2). About three fourths of respondents reported having one partner in the previous year. Women were more than twice as likely as men to have had no partners (21.8% and 9.7%, respectively), whereas men were almost three times more likely than

Discussion

As we anticipated, cohabitation status and age significantly predicted the number of sexual partners for middle-aged women and men (H1 and H2). The effect of non-cohabitation on having no sexual partners was more pronounced for men than women (44 vs. 29 times higher odds), whereas the effect of non-cohabitation on having multiple partners was more pronounced for women than men (22 vs. 8 times higher odds).8

Conclusion

The most important finding of this study is that aging affects the sexual lives of heterosexual women earlier and more adversely than it affects the sexual lives of heterosexual men. This differential effect of age by gender is not reducible to greater conservatism among older cohorts of women, or to age-gender patterns in cohabitation status, and it merits further scrutiny. We believe that ageism and sexism, which together promote a view of older women as undesirable or inappropriate sexual

Acknowledgments

The first author was supported by the Social Science Research Council-Sexuality Research Fellowship Program (postdoctoral fellowship) and NIA-sponsored training grant number T32-AG00237. The authors would like to thank Peggy Thoits and Karen Campbell for their helpful comments.

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