We Don’t Age Out Of Our Sexuality

We Don’t Age Out Of Our Sexuality February 4, 2016

This post is part of a weekly Her.meneutics series called The Sex We Don’t Talk About, designed to feature female perspectives on aspects of sex and sexuality that can go overlooked in the church.

During the season 6 premiere of Downton Abbey, head housekeeper Mrs. Hughes confides to her friend Mrs. Patmore, the house’s cook, that she is concerned about intimacy in her impending marriage. “Look at me,” she says. “I’m a woman in late middle age.” Hughes wonders if it would be better to leave that side of their relationship dormant, living instead with her older husband-to-be as a “very loving brother and sister.”

At the episode’s end, the older couple has a tender conversation about whether their aging bodies would be desirable. The pair’s final embrace leaves no doubt that they will be living not as brother and sister but as husband and wife.

That was 1925, Since then, a whole sexual revolution has taken place. But in our contemporary discussions of sex, the topic of later-in-life sex remains an awkward afterthought. [Read more]


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