Still Going Strong: Sexuality in Older Adults | Tuuli Kukkonen | TEDxGuelphU

so we get back to picturing those participants who come into my lab I want you to think about what age group immediately pops to your head when I talk about the research that I do so I'll roughly divide our adult lifespan into three categories eighteen to thirty four thirty five to fifty and fifty plus so with a show of hands how many of you immediately thought of my participants as being in that 18 to 35 year old range okay how about 35 to 50 anybody how about 50 and over all right there's some representation there for the older group as well but what we see here is that the majority of you immediately pictured my participants to be in that younger age group why is that one of the anonymous reviewers I had for a grant that I once submitted perfectly wrote out and highlighted this bias that we have against sexuality and older adults and I'm paraphrasing they said I can't imagine that an older adult would want to come into the lab have their genitals filmed and watch pornography this just does not seem feasible so what message was descending to me one that I didn't get the grant and two that we have this bias in society against older adults engaging in this process of sexual expression and sexuality that either older adults are too old to have sex that they are tool to be interested in promoting sexual arousal and understanding of sexual arousal in their demographic or that they're just not able to come to the lab anymore again presumably because of their age what this reviewer was indicating and the messages that we're receiving within society those implicit messages those conversations we have about sexuality those popular representations of sexuality is that our sexual lifespan is incredibly limited so if we look at this representation of let's say the human average human lifespan we have a very small WTF window to fornicate that's what it stands for and this very small exclusive wTF is is incredibly limited to individuals again that are relatively young and within this reproductive age the more popular interpretation of WTF is the expression that I have when I look at this vast expanse of nothingness of sexlessness that we're supposed to endure again according to these popular representations of sexuality that this pleasurable window is really for a very elite group of individuals of a certain age and the rest of us must injure decades of nothingness I for one won't take it and in fact when I've talked to my classes about this bias against against sexuality in older adults and asked you know what are some of these popular representations one that was thrown out to me was that well once you are once you've had children you don't need to have sex anymore which again is incredibly exclusion excluding to a whole group of individuals who don't want to engage in sex for procreation but also as somebody who has had children I can personally assure you that that is not the case that sex does not end once I have been pushed out of this window and I feel we have an obligation to push back and say that we need to expand this window across the adult lifespan unfortunately what we see in those popular representations is echoed and biases that individuals have when we look at the research so here this was a study on individuals aged 66 to 90 in depth interviews about whether or not these patients had had discussions about sexuality with their physicians how their physicians broach the topic with them and what we see is that it none of my physicians has ever talked to me about sex they look at my white hair and they stop asking I can't recall ever discussing sex with a doctor I guess since my wife had a baby 45 years ago so this message again is saying that somehow we as patients cannot talk to our health professionals openly about sex and that we shouldn't be talking to our health professionals about sexuality unfortunately when we look at research on the flip side so when we look at physicians and their experiences they echo a lot of these sentiments that as physicians the common themes that came up in research were that sex is not actively broached with the topic is not broach with older adults that it is not an appropriate topic of discussion with older adults and that it is a matter best left to the pressing needs of younger individuals and again not all physicians are like this right this is just the general consensus that's coming out of the research what this suggests is again that we have a strong bias against having those open discussions with with health professionals and sexuality and this goes completely contrary to the World Health Organization definition of sexual health which highlights that it shouldn't be just the absence of disease or infirmity or dysfunction that rather sexual health should include those conversations about having pleasurable and say sexual experiences that we should have a positive approach to sexuality and sexual relationships and that we need to really respect the sexual rights of all persons in order to be able to promote sexual health so we have this obligation to really move forward from these biases and to have these open discussions we should be having these open discussions in addition to this obligation what we see is that in fact the research really supports sexual satisfaction as being linked to a number of positive outcomes related to quality of life so research spanning you know spanning the different age groups has demonstrated the sexual satisfaction is linked to greater life satisfaction it's linked to greater relationship satisfaction it's significantly related to greater mental health physical health and overall happiness now when we look at this we understand that the research here is correlational that this isn't implying causality but this is saying that if you have higher sexual satisfaction you're going to have higher quality of life so it seems all an obvious way to promote higher quality of life by having again those open discussions and promoting sexuality in older adults and this is particularly relevant when we think about our rapidly growing population of individuals over the age of 65 the greater life expectancy of individuals as compared to our predecessors and this idea that we need to promote active aging so when we look at health professionals we often talk about promoting you know physical activity exercise in older adults healthy eating those social connections those cognitive challenges in order to have this holistic understanding of active aging yet somehow we leave out this whole conversation about sexuality when sexuality is linked to all these positive outcomes for individuals so again we have this bias that somehow maybe older adults are just not having sex and there isn't a need to address this because again that engagement isn't there that's completely false so if we look at a large nationally representative study done in the states of over 3,000 individuals aged 57 to 85 what we see here is I'm giving you a snapshot of the oldest age group so this is just 75 to 85 year olds we see that yes they are in fact still engaging in sexual activity and although it is significantly less than younger age group so we see engagement in sexual activity declines significantly with age those who are engaging in sex are more than half of them are having sex two to three times a month 75 to 85 year olds and a fifth of them are having sex at least once a week or more these rates are comparable to younger populations of individuals so what this is telling us is that we really have to start challenging those biases that individuals who wish to engage in sexual activity are going to continue doing so it up into those ninth decade of life I can only hope that's the dream right what we also need to do is start focusing more on that pleasurable approach we need to start thinking about okay we know that individuals are engaging in sexual activity we also know from this study that more than half of these individuals indicate that they have a sexual dysfunction that they find bothersome also significantly increased rates of physical health conditions so we know that despite these barriers individuals still want to engage in sexual activity we have to think of what is it about sexual activity what is it how can we take that pleasurable positive approach to understanding sexual expression in older adults so researchers at the University of Ottawa doctor climb climb flats and her colleagues have looked at what constitutes great sex they looked at individuals over the age of 60 who've been in a relationship for 25 years or more and who indicate that they are still having great sex and what they found is a number of different themes come up in these interviews this idea of individuals being authentic with their partners having a connection with their partners during sexual activity being fully present in the moment having deep intimacy exploration and risk with their partners being able to be vulnerable in that relationship and vulnerable in those sexual activities and of course having that extraordinary communication between partners and that sense of transcendence during sexual activity what I find so inspiring about this particular work is that it's taking that positive approach it's saying okay we know individuals are enjoying sex let's find out what it is that's so wonderful about it and what gets me excited is taking this research and then bringing it into the lab and saying okay we have this picture of great sex how does that relate to our physical experience how does our physical body so you know this this entity that is providing us with those sensations and that sensory information how does that interact across the lifespan to create these experiences so if we get back to those original questions of can I get people to come and do research in my lab the answer is yes and I'm putting up this graph here which is you know here to demonstrate to us that in fact if we look at the different age groups so here in purple I have 18 to 28 year olds in blue 30 to 45 and in red I've got the 50-plus year olds what I want to highlight here is that there are no differences in self-report when individuals are coming into the lab so those 50 plus year olds ours are just as relaxed as those younger individuals when they're coming in and having sexual arousal measured they're enjoying it to the same extent so again these are not significant differences they're enjoying it to the same extent as those younger populations and their self-reported sexual arousal is just as high as it is with those 18 to 28 and 30 to 45 year olds and in fact if we ask them I ask my participants to compare their sexual arousal to how they feel when they're with a partner what we see is on average again there are no age differences so here we have much less sexually arousing much more sexually arousing and no different there are no differences across age groups and what this shows us is again we have to start pushing back against those stereotypes and biases we have to move beyond these ideas that we have about sexuality in older adults and move forward as educators as health professionals as citizens as researchers to embrace and promote sexual health and sexual education across the adult lifespan because with any luck we're all going to be there one day and I'm hoping we're all going to enjoy that that time frame that we have thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 853,298

Rating: 4.6250696 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Canada, Social Science, Science, Sex

Id: pqLhPPOEJB4

Length: 14min 49sec (889 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 20 2017