BY Lux Alptraum
June 7, 2007
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Not too long ago, I wrote a piece on aging and sex (or “twilight sex,” as I like to call it), and how I hope like hell that I’ll still be getting it on even when I’ve gone grey (or started dying my hair, as the case may be).

As more and more medical advances are made, and people live longer and longer, we’re spending a greater portion of our lives being “old.” Just think: if you give up sex at sixty (you know, when you’re officially “old”) and you live until ninety, that’s thirty years sans sex. I don’t know about you, but that’s a prospect I personally hope to avoid. We all agree that spending the first thirty years of life in a sexless wasteland is a kind of unappealing prospect… why should the last thirty years be any different?

Turns out, I’m not the only one who feels this way. Tristan Taormino recently penned a piece on “knockin’ vintage boots,” arguing that the sexual self doesn’t die after the age of sixty — and putting out several examples of women beyond the age of sixty who are still finding ways to fulfill their sexual needs (even after society has deemed them “dried up” and asexual).

Among the women Taormino mentions are Joan Price, author of Better Than I Ever Expected: Straight Talk About Sex After Sixty (as well as a blog of the same name) and (of course) Betty Dodson, the “Mother of Masturbation” and famed sex educator, who is still sexually active even as she approaches her eighth decade.

Though I’m quite a ways away from senior status (some days I even question whether I’ve actually reached adulthood), it’s comforting to know that these women are out there educating and raising awareness so that when that day comes, I won’t have to resign myself to a life of baking cookies and crocheting or, in the words of Joan Price, “retire [my] genitals” (perish the thought!).