When we talk about ageing, we talk about health, pensions, housing, and care.
We rarely talk about sex.
The silence is revealing.
Older adults are still portrayed as vulnerable, dependent, and increasingly disconnected from desire. Popular culture celebrates young bodies while treating older sexuality as embarrassing, amusing, or invisible.
Yet the evidence tells a different story.
Many older adults continue to experience attraction, intimacy, desire, pleasure, and love throughout their lives. The desire for connection does not disappear simply because someone turns sixty, seventy, or eighty.
The problem is not ageing.
The problem is ageism.
Ageism teaches us that growing older means becoming less relevant, less attractive, and less fully human. It encourages younger people to fear ageing and older people to internalise limitations that may never have existed in the first place.
The pandemic exposed this clearly. Older adults were often spoken about as though they were a single vulnerable population rather than individuals capable of making decisions about their own lives. Protection frequently slipped into paternalism.
The same dynamic exists around sexuality.
Older adults are offered care but denied desire.
Love but not lust.
Companionship but not eroticism.
Yet intimacy remains important throughout life—not only because sex can be pleasurable, but because touch, affection, connection, and desire contribute to wellbeing, identity, and quality of life.
Growing older should not require giving up an essential part of being human.
Old age is not a waiting room for death.
It is still life.
And life deserves pleasure.
Involution Labs 