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Safe Sex for Grown-Ups
When dance instructor Joan Price of Sebastopol, Calif., met the love of her life at 57 in her line dancing class, she was already wise to the steps and spins of modern dating, especially when it came to sex. She had been dating for years following her divorce, mostly short-term relationships, and was always careful to use condoms in bed.
Price, author of Better Than I Ever Expected: Straight Talk about Sex After Sixty, explains that when she and her now husband were ready to get intimate, she asked him point blank: "Shall I get the condoms or will you?"
Not all single women or men over 50 are so forthright. Some, perhaps divorced or widowed, find themselves newly single after years of marriage. The last time they had to deal with meeting potential partners, they were more worried about getting pregnant than catching sexually transmitted infections (STIs) like herpes and HIV. So talking openly about safe sex and a partner's past may be unfamiliar territory for the over-50 crowd.
Even if it's not making the evening news or getting featured in a trendy sitcom, the sex life of the 50-plus set is alive and well. "Society's view of aging women as sexless is wrong, wrong, wrong," Price writes. "Many of us are having the best sex of our lives. We're the Love Generation. We practically invented sex."
No Time to Play Coy
At monthly gatherings called "Sex on the Porch," Katherine Forsythe, MSW, a sex educator and sex coach in San Francisco, hosts an open forum for women 50 and older to discuss sexuality. She urges these women to ask their partners to prove they've been tested for STIs.
"Many of them say, 'I can't ask that,'" Forsythe says. "I ask them how they'll feel telling every sexual partner for the rest of your life you have HIV. These women have to realize it's a matter of protecting their most precious possession - their bodies."
Forsythe wants to educate the generation who was taught good girls don't have to ask. "Good girls really will finish last," she says. "This is no time for coyness, pleasing, and unbartered trust."
She drills into them the same message she taught teenagers in sex ed classes: "If you're going to play grown-up games, you have to play by grown-up rules. Today, that means a condom until you see the paperwork and have been monogamous for three months. No papers, no naked penis."
The Numbers Don't Lie
Even though safe sex for older adults doesn't garner much media attention, the risks are real. For instance, an estimated 16% of new U.S. HIV/AIDS cases are among those age 50 and older and 25% of people living with HIV/AIDS are over 50, according to the CDC.
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