Journal of Aging Studies
17 (2003) 3 – 16
New sex for old: lifestyle, consumerism,
and the ethics of aging well
Stephen Katz*, Barbara Marshall 1
Department of Sociology, Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada K9J 7B8
Abstract
This article explores the convergence of consumer society and professional expertise in reinventing
notions of maturity, aging, lifecourse, and senior citizenry. As positive ideals of aging buoyed by
health agendas around independence, well being, and mobility replace negative stereotypes of decline
and dependency, market and lifestyle industries create an idealized culture of ‘‘ageless’’ consumers and
active populations. In relation to this culture, this article raises two issues. First, how are consumer
ethics associated with choice, risk management, and self-care built into new identities around the aging
body? Second, how have sexuality in general and new concepts of sexual ‘‘function’’ in particular
emerged as pivotal concerns for rehabilitating the aging body and negotiating successful lifestyles?
These questions are explored through an analysis of health, sexological, and marketing materials
directed at both men and women.
D 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Aging; Sexuality; Consumerism; Lifestyle
1. Introduction
Contemporary critical thinking on aging and on the lifecourse has sharpened our
understanding of how aging and old age are socially constructed within educational, family,
legal, welfare, and healthcare institutions, and socially regulated within demographic and
policy categories of risk and dependency. This article contributes to these areas by exploring
*
Corresponding author. Tel.: +1-705-748-1011x1621; fax: +1-416-493-4839.
E-mail addresses: [email protected] (S. Katz), [email protected] (B. Marshall).
1
Tel.: + 1-705-748-1011x1334; fax: + 1-705-748-1630.
0890-4065/02/$ – see front matter D 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.
PII: S 0 8 9 0 - 4 0 6 5 ( 0 2 ) 0 0 0 8 6 - 5
4
S. Katz, B. Marshall / Journal of Aging Studies 17 (2003) 3–16
what has been called ‘‘the new aging,’’ a buoyant and optimistic cultural imagery around
which marketing and consumerism have rallied. In particular, we examine the recent
emphasis on active sexuality (narrowly defined in terms of heterosexual intercourse) and
its promotion as a signal indicator of positive and successful aging.
Historically, sexual decline was assumed to be an inevitable and universal consequence of
growing older; thus, aging individuals were expected to adjust to it gracefully and to
appreciate the special moral benefits of postsexual maturity. As Stall (1901) reminded his
male readers in What a Man of Forty-Five Needs to Know, the diminishment of sexual vigor
is offset because ‘‘the stress of passion will be past, the imagination will become more
chastened, the heart more refined, the lines of intellectual and spiritual vision lengthened, the
sphere of usefulness enlarged’’ (p. 59). A century later, we find ourselves in a culture of
obsessive self-improvement where these assumptions have been completely reversed. Waning
sexual capacities associated with normal aging are now pathologized as sexual dysfunctions
that require corrective self-care practices, remedial goods and services, and expedient lifestyle
therapeutics (Marshall & Katz, 2002). On a larger scale, health promotion and marketing
discourses have embraced the language of ‘‘empowerment’’ to charge individuals to take
responsibility for their sexual well being as part of their commitment to the collective health
of the aging population. Our study highlights, therefore, the broadening connections between
the new and sexually fit aging; the marketing, pharmaceutical, and consumerist industries that
cater to it; and the concurrent neoliberal political agendas that require people to adopt riskaversive, active, self-reliant lifestyles. As background to these connections, we review two
emergent cultural conditions and their historical antecedents: postmodern timelessness and
posthuman bodies.
2. Aging and postmodern timelessness
The late 20th and early 21st centuries have been marked by profound changes in labor
relations, social services, retirement, and demographic patterns; the aging of Western
populations; and the medical and cultural stretching of middle age into later life. These
changes have led cultural gerontologists to observe that modern chronological and generational boundaries, which had set apart childhood, middle age, and old age, are becoming
blurred and indeterminate (Basting, 1998; Blaikie, 1999; Cole, 1992; Featherstone, 1995;
Featherstone & Hepworth, 1991; Gilleard & Higgs, 2000; Gullette, 1998; Hockey & James,
1993; Laws, 1995; Phillipson, 1998; Woodward, 1991, 1999).2 The modern lifecourse, with
its origins in the industrial standardization of age-graded institutions and populations in the
2
Gerontologists who champion positive images of aging have also contributed to this chronological blurring.
For example, the late Bernice Neugarten, a pioneer in social and psychological gerontology, was criticized by
fellow gerontologists and gero-advocacy groups for espousing the idea of an ‘‘age-irrelevant’’ society in her work,
which addresses American social policy in the early 1980s (Neugarten, 1982). For her own views on this
controversy and her influential conceptualizations of ‘‘young – old’’ and ‘‘old – old’’ demographic segments, see
Neugarten (1988) in Riley.
S. Katz, B. Marshall / Journal of Aging Studies 17 (2003) 3–16
5
19th century, has given way to a postmodern lifecourse organized around the priorities of
late-capitalist consumer society, the overpowering influence of the cultural sphere, and what
Turner (1994) refers to as the proliferation of ‘‘contingent life strategies’’ (p. 110).
On the one hand, this movement has inspired real estate, financial, cosmetic, and leisure
enterprises to target a growing and so-called ‘‘ageless’’ seniors market (usually pegged at
55+), and to fashion a range of positive ‘‘uni-age’’ bodily styles and identities that recast later
life as an active, youthful commercial experience (Meyrowitz, 1984). However, the postmodern lifecourse has created new avenues of self-definition that inspire seniors’ groups to
innovate imaginative arts of life for themselves and those who will follow. In both cases, the
mobilization of new retiree segments by the private sector, in anticipation of extracting the
‘‘gold in gray’’ (Minkler, 1991), has expanded the significance of senior citizenry from
professional and policy realms to include symbolic and cultural meanings. This transformation is accompanied by an explosion of popular demographic terms such as ‘‘boomers,’’
‘‘empty nesters,’’ and ‘‘third agers’’ that gloss over the negative realities of poverty and
inequality in old age. The advertising industry has chimed in with its portrayals of the new
antiageist, positive senior as an independent, healthy, sexy, flexi-retired ‘‘citizen,’’ who
bridges middle age and old age without suffering from the time-bound constraints of either
(Ekerdt & Clark, 2001; Hepworth, 1995; Katz, 1999, 2000). The overall characterization of
this period, as Gilleard and Higgs (2000) remark, is that ‘‘post-traditional culture extends
equally to life after retirement as well as before’’ (p. 25). Within this culture, timelessness,
impermanence, and simultaneity have become central and necessary assets because all
activities from leisure to education to healthcare, including, ironically, death and dying
(Wernick, 1995), have become personal, consumerist, and ‘‘lifelong’’ experiences.
Reaching beyond commercial interests, timelessness takes on an ethical dimension in
professional and political fields where the virtues of timeless, successful aging are merged
with self-caring, responsible lifestyles. For example, the Health Management Organizations
(HMOs) in the US, in expanding their power to normalize healthy lifestyles, have also
restratified them according to the ethical practices of prudential risk management and selfcontrol to avoid personal poverty, dependency, and illness (see Bunton, Nettleton, &
Burrows, 1995). Thus, older individuals must cope with the impossible burden of growing
older without aging, with a fundamental part of this burden attributed to the maintenance of
sexual functionality and ‘‘fitness.’’ As we argue below, sexual fitness has become fashioned
as a pivotal sex/age body-problematic, therefore, around which the cultural ideals of optimal
lifestyles, constant activity, and successful antiaging have coalesced and superseded the
historical concerns of an earlier era around population, nation, and regeneration. Central to
this problematic has been the development of the posthuman body, a second emergent cultural
condition underlying the new aging.
3. Aging and the posthuman body
The term ‘‘posthuman’’ appears in current critiques of technological expertise in the areas
of human reproduction, cyborgian prosthetics, computer-generated virtualities, robots, and
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S. Katz, B. Marshall / Journal of Aging Studies 17 (2003) 3–16
data-driven commodity forms. Informed by both science and science fiction, the literature
on posthumanity deals inventively with two important questions. First, how are computer
technologies resetting the traditional boundaries between humans and machines, and
consciousness and materiality? Second, why are instrumental utilities such as coding,
virtuality, patterning, networking, and feedback remodelled into desirable physical, social,
and economic resources? The human body is the focal point for both questions because it is
through the body’s technological reconstructions that the limits of human life are being
tested. For example, Squier (1995) claims that the posthuman is shaped by ‘‘the extrauterine
fetus, the surrogate mother, and the pregnant man’’ (p. 113). This means that new asexual
reproductive technologies now have the capability to move the body out of its biospecific
and gendered confines into lifeforms that are neither natural nor cultural, but both at the
same time.
The defining characteristic of the posthuman body is its connectedness, not only to
reproductive technologies, intelligent machines, and prosthetic extensions, but also to
changing informational patterns. As Hayles (1999) says in How We Became Posthuman,
‘‘the posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material instantiation’’ (p. 2),
while the posthuman subject is ‘‘a material–informational entity whose boundaries undergo
continuous construction and reconstruction’’ (p. 3). Furthermore, posthuman bodies, released
from their material and temporal constraints, become represented as accessible data
systems—genetically coded, cosmetically alterable, visibly formatted, and virtually preservable. In these ways, connectedness spatially redistributes human capacities. Thus, its adversary is the passage of time in the body or, in informational terms, the problems of decay,
mutation, and randomness (although for Hayles randomness is also central to a radical
cybernetics, pp. 285–288). Hence, for posthuman bodies to be effectively connected, they
cannot show signs of aging or fatigue outside the informational patterns that are constructed
to contain them. If posthuman bodies are never really born and never really die, their
insertion into lifecourses is not necessarily bound by time either. In the rather frightening
words of the editors of Posthuman Bodies, ‘‘you’re not human until you’re posthuman’’
(Halberstam & Livingston, 1995, p. 8). That is to say that human capacities are now valued
in terms of posthuman standards even if such standards are impossible to achieve. In this
sense, posthuman bodies are today exemplified by sexual functionality and the idealization of
its lifelong possibilities. It is through sexual functionality and the anxieties provoked around
its maintenance that the aging subject is connected to the wondrous, interlocking, and
illimitable worlds of cosmetic, prosthetic, virtual, informational, and consumerist technology
and, in turn, is rewarded with the promise of a direct channel to the secrets of posthuman
longevity.
4. From sexual decline to sexual dysfunction
While the contemporary conditions of postmodern timelessness and posthuman corporeality underlie antiaging culture, the movement from sexual decline and impotence to sexual
dysfunction is a unique historical development within the discourses of expertise in the 19th
S. Katz, B. Marshall / Journal of Aging Studies 17 (2003) 3–16
7
and 20th centuries. Nineteenth-century wisdom posited that a transformative midlife
climacteric stage occurred in both men and women from which sexual decline would
naturally follow in tandem with growing older (Haber, 1983). A prudent lifestyle might
defer sexual decline, but coping with it was part of the basic moral exercise of adjustment to
the effects of the aging process. In the early 20th century, the nascent sciences of gerontology
and sexology created a contradictory relationship between aging and sexual function. On one
hand, these sciences maintained that sexual vigor was biologically determined and that
acceptance of its decline was a mark of normal aging. On the other hand, early sex and age
experts, as self-defining authorities on modern progressive research, challenged the passive
acceptance of the worst manifestations of the aging process, thus sparking a professional turn
away from strictly biologistic, negative, and ageist ideas (see Achenbaum, 1995; Katz, 1996).
In the mid 20th century, this more positive scientific direction was enhanced by the
understanding that sexual decline had a psychological as well as an organic basis, especially
in the case of male impotence. Indeed, by the 1960s, therapeutic expertise had concluded that
psychological factors were primarily responsible for the loss of sexual function and, most
importantly, that to cease having sex would hasten aging in itself.
In the later part of the 20th century, gerontology and sexology continued to cross common
ground in claiming that sexual activity, particularly sexual intercourse, was a healthy and
necessary component of successful aging. The idea of personal acquiescence to age-related
changes in sexual capacity, characteristic of past expert advice, was roundly rejected and
recast as a repressive and pathological strategy rooted in ignorance and fear. In short, age
without sex was literally old-fashioned. However, in the 1980s, new developments from a
different direction effected a decisive change in locating the relation between aging and
sexual function that transformed the sexual capacities of the body in a technical, posthuman
direction. Specifically, urological research had reconceptualized male erectility as a vascular,
physiological event, and impotence—now referred to as ‘‘erectile dysfunction’’—became a
treatable, organic problem. According to the urologists, physical sexual decline was no longer
or necessarily the consequence of bodily aging or psychological problems. Rather, sexual
disorders could be seen as the effects of ‘‘modifiable, para-aging phenomena’’ (Feldman,
Goldstein, Hatzichristou, Krane, & McKinlay, 1994). In the place of conventional psychological ideas about the link between impotence and emotional distress, the new accent was on
the ‘‘potentially serious consequences of impotence’’ (Morganstern & Abrahams, 1988). In
other words, sexual dysfunction—now a modifiable and largely mechanical disorder with
profound repercussions for the physical and psychological well being of individuals and the
aging population itself—required a social response. And while male sexual bodies were first
reconceptualized in these ways, similar assertions about women’s sexuality were soon to
follow. The female corollary of male ‘‘erectile dysfunction’’ is Female Sexual Arousal Disorder (FSAD), a vaguely defined disease for which there is no agreed upon diagnostic criteria
and little normative data, but which is professed to be ‘‘highly prevalent and age-related,’’
nevertheless. By the 1990s, sexological, urological, and pharmacological expertise had transferred sexual disorders from therapeutic to technical fixes, a development seized upon by
marketing campaigns that could now add sexual function products to their lifestyle profiles of
aging consumers.
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S. Katz, B. Marshall / Journal of Aging Studies 17 (2003) 3–16
5. Marketing lifelong sex
The marketing literature on the new aging presents the posthuman body and its life in
postmodern time in time-fuzzy, demographic profiles. These are rich in consumer research
data that justify the new commercial emphasis on ‘‘uni-age,’’ retirement-fit desires, fashions,
propensities, and identities. Supporting this emphasis over the past decade has been a spate of
literature on the so-called ‘‘seniors market’’ that elaborates the connection among consumerism, successful aging, and physical health, e.g., Buck’s (1990) The 55+ Market: Exploring a
Golden Opportunity, Moschis’ (1996) Gerontographics: Life-Stage Segmentation for Marketing Strategy Development, and Gunter’s (1998) Understanding the Older Consumer.
These texts are accompanied by hundreds of journal articles and reports from recent
American consulting and marketing organizations such as AgeWave, Primelife, Lifespan
Communications, and Lifestage Matrix Marketing. Such literature outlines the kinds of aged
subjects, bodies, populations, and social spaces upon which competing industries are
converging in order to recreate (in both meanings of the term) later life in profitable ways.3
To convince the corporate world that marketing to seniors is a booming industry, this
literature has developed a sophisticated technical vocabulary that transfigures the lifecourse
into knowable, codable, and legible market trends, segments, and consumer profiles. As a
result, aging as a diverse chronological process and age-related problems based on class, race,
gender, and locality are obscured or disappear into coterminous market niches based on the
vagaries of ‘‘mature’’ consumer behavior.
For example, Flanagan (1994), in Don’t Call ’Em Old, Call ’Em Consumers, advises
marketers to recognize the spending potential of older consumers by targeting groups
according to their experiences of age, not their actual age. However, age does matter when
it comes to consumerism, because here, the over 75+ group is considered not to ‘‘have strong
customer potential’’ (p. 19). Similarly, Rohrich (1997), as a creative director with Maturity
Marketing (Toronto), writes in Marketing Magazine that generations can be classified
according to spending patterns. The group born between 1936 and 1946 is cautious ‘‘because
they have seen that life is a temporal thing often affected by events way beyond our control’’
and so they seek quality in products and are not ‘‘swayed by ads that attempt to create
urgency.’’ The group born between 1926 and 1936, having lived through the Depression, is
made up of savers and comparison shoppers, while the group born before 1926 has had their
attitudes ‘‘shaped by the roaring 20s when fortunes were made by a lucky few and everyday
3
Although we deal with later life here, similar conditions apply to younger consumer categories as well.
Children and teenagers, locked into the amorphous category of ‘‘youth,’’ are certainly the target of marketing
strategies because of the opportunity to build lifelong brand loyalties (even though younger people typically have
less income than their elders). For example, Chips and Pop: Decoding the Nexus Generation (Barnard, Cosgrave,
& Welsh, 1998) is a fascinating corporate survey of the newly minted nexus generation, an offshoot of Generation
X. For more caustic treatments on how consumerism has redefined youth and robbed it of political and
generational meaning, see the collection of ‘‘salvos’’ from The Baffler magazine, Commodify Your Dissent (Frank
& Weiland, 1997), and Kinterculture: The Corporate Construction of Childhood (Steinberg & Kincheloe, 1997).
S. Katz, B. Marshall / Journal of Aging Studies 17 (2003) 3–16
9
life was governed by the struggle to make ends meet. . . This is the toughest market segment
to crack, because they are conditioned not to spend’’ (p. 18).
In this world of senior marketing and consumer profiling, male erectile dysfunction and
FSAD have become represented by new disease models exemplifying the posthuman body
in techno-medicine. They emerge from a shared informatics of the body derived from
popular techniques of visualization and measurement of vasocongestion in body parts.
Above all, they aim to suffuse the posthuman aging body with an appeal to rejuvenation,
the timeless possibilities that come with the lifelong maintenance of sexual fitness. Of
course, the association between rejuvenation and restoration of sexual function is a longstanding one (Hershbein, 2000; Squier, 1999). Thinly veiled references to the ‘‘restoration
of one’s vital powers’’ have long been the stock in trade of the less reputable purveyors of
potions and therapies for regaining youth and potency.4 Yet it was the negative association
of aging and sexuality that made these therapies disreputable. George Ridley Scott,
reviewing the literature on rejuvenation therapies in 1953, suggested that ‘‘much of the
hostility towards rejuvenation has been engendered through its association with sex,’’ and
countered almost apologetically that ‘‘there is no way of extending the physical and mental
powers of the individual into advancing years without coincidentally keeping the sexual
and endocrinal glands functioning’’ (Scott, 1953, pp. 9–10). By contrast, there is nothing
coincidental (or apologetic) about the central place accorded to sexual function in
contemporary health promotion discourses and the growing market in supposedly legitimate
sex-enhancing consumer goods.
As sexual dysfunction in the late 20th century became fixed in men and women as a
potentially epidemic, progressive disease for which everybody is ‘‘at risk,’’ the onus
became placed on individuals to manage that risk through new regimes of bodily discipline
and physical activity that must start early in the lifecourse. Consequently, both commercial
and public health promotion discourses about positive aging have incorporated the fear of
sexual dysfunction into more general models of healthy living. Sexual dysfunction joins a
long list of other afflictions, like obesity, that are characterized as moral disorders
reflecting an individual’s lack of skillfulness in learning about, choosing, and consuming
appropriate lifestyle products (Slater, 1997, p. 92). Paradoxically, the image of the erect
penis, long the most vulgar of indecent ‘‘exposures,’’ is now elevated to the status of a
vital organ symbolizing the healthfulness of midlife successful aging. When Health Canada
introduced new, graphic warnings on cigarette packages in 2001, among them was a
picture of a drooping cigarette, with the warning that ‘‘Tobacco use can make you
impotent’’ (Fig. 1).
4
The British Medical Association (1914) waged a long (and ultimately unsuccessful) campaign in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to regulate the advertising and sale of ‘‘patent medicines.’’ Of key concern
were what were considered to be the dangerous claims of certain proprietary medicines to restore lost virility and
sexual powers. Insecurity over sexual potency has long been exploited by questionable commercial interests (Hall,
1995), and shows no signs of abating if the growth in Internet sites promising youthfulness, sexual vigor, enlarged
penises, and amazing stamina is anything to go by.
10
S. Katz, B. Marshall / Journal of Aging Studies 17 (2003) 3–16
Fig. 1. A fate worse than death?
This alarmist sentiment is echoed by Melchiode and Sloan (1999) who, in their
popular advice guide Beyond Viagra, suggest that ‘‘no malfunction of the human
apparatus—not even cancer or heart disease—can be more painful to the male ego or
catastrophic to the male psyche than sexual impotence’’ (p. 17). Men are thus exhorted to
eat a healthy diet, get lots of rest, stop smoking, drink in moderation, and engage in a
regular exercise program in order to minimize the likelihood of ‘‘problems that impede
blood flow to his penis’’ (Whitehead & Malloy, 1999, p. 169) and to ensure ‘‘penile
health’’ within a broader ‘‘virility program,’’ which includes a number of dietary
supplements and penis-conditioning exercises (Drew, 1998; Lamm & Couzens, 1998).
Thus, the marketing and advice literature has recast penile erectility not just as a benefit
of a healthy lifestyle but as a compelling reason for that lifestyle and the ageless
accomplishments that go with it.
Sexual function in aging and menopausal women, already a lucrative market for hormone
replacement therapies, has also become the focus of scientific and commercial interests.
Palmlund (1997), in a survey of ads for hormone replacement therapies appearing in the
Journal of the American Medical Association, notes that by the 1990s, women pictured in ads
‘‘smile, dance, and look for romance’’—a radical shift from the images of ‘‘lonely,
melancholic women staring into space’’ that characterized the ads of earlier decades (p.
161). No less than with men, women’s sexual function is now becoming part of a less rigidly
age-defined project for self-improvement. Women, too, can ‘‘postpone onset’’ of sexual
dysfunction and maximize blood flow to their genitals ‘‘by eating a low-fat diet, performing
cardiovascular exercises, reducing alcohol consumption and refraining from smoking’’
(Urometrics, 2001).
For both men and women, the marketing strategies for treatments for sexual dysfunction take the form of a ‘‘public service’’ educational campaign around the actual product.
The concept of sexual dysfunction as a discrete, unnatural, organic disorder, rather than as
a byproduct of natural aging or psychological distress, has to be sold along with the
remedial goods themselves to prescribing physicians and consumers. The former are
reached through aggressive commercial promotion at conferences and professional meetings and sales visits to doctors’ offices, while consumers are reached through extensive
editorial coverage in the mass media, as well as through advertising and informational
web sites. Certain studies have referred to the extent to which the demand for Viagra has
S. Katz, B. Marshall / Journal of Aging Studies 17 (2003) 3–16
11
been consumer-driven, rather than originating with the prescribing physician (Marshall,
2002; Skaer, Sclar, Robison, & Galin, 2001). As Tiefer (2000) notes, pharmaceutical
companies are increasingly attracted to the profits that can be made from lifestyle drugs
that ‘‘appeal to large segments of the general public rather than merely to people with
particular illnesses’’ (p. 273). An aging population presents new opportunities for the
development of such drugs to offset the maladies of loss related to normal aging (sexual
loss, hair loss, memory loss, muscle tone loss, sensory loss, bone density loss, etc.). In
the case of sexual dysfunction in the broadest sense of its meaning, prevalence rates are
estimated to be close to half of all adults over the age of 40 (Laumann, Paik, & Rosen,
1999). Even the wildly successful medication Viagra, which corporate producer Pfizer
estimates that 6 million men in the US have tried, is generally regarded as having only
tapped a very small corner of the potential market (Alger, 2000). A spokesperson for
Bayer, which is developing a potential competitor for Viagra, suggests that ‘‘90% of men
suffering from erectile dysfunction still are not treated for it’’ (Goetzl, 2000).
Women also represent a huge, untapped market, and considerable marketing effort is being
spent on female consumer and lifestyle education. For example, Urometrics, manufacturer of
the Eros Therapy device for women, has set up an extensive informational site on Female
Sexual Dysfunction (www.womenssexualhealth.com). According to the company president,
‘‘Our goal is to encourage women who think they may be experiencing Female Sexual
Arousal Disorder to become more educated and to help open conversations with their
physicians. Women should not have to forego this important part of their lives when there
may be physical problems that can be treated’’ (Urometrics, 2000). One can hardly imagine
that a product is being sold here at all.
These educational campaigns have been central to the marketing challenge to separate
the new sex-enhancing products from their historical association with more disreputable
potions and devices for sexual stimulation. In this sense, demographic market segmentation works to position the consumer as a subject who chooses between different types of
authorities and logics that define markets, rather than between functionally substitutable
products. Selling remedies for sexual dysfunction involves creating an aura of respectability and clinical endorsement so that such products are distanced from the hedonistic
netherworld of sex toys and fanciful aphrodisiacs. This distinction has emerged most
sharply for mechanical devices. For example, before the vacuum pump was hailed as a
‘‘revolutionary’’ clinical therapy for erectile dysfunction (as a hydraulic problem of
inadequate blood flow to the penis) in the mid 1980s, it was long used as a penis
enlargement and masturbatory device, especially in the gay community. This history and
context were entirely erased as the vacuum pump was introduced as a prescribed therapy
for a diagnosed physical disorder, to be used (primarily by older, heterosexual men)
under supervision by a physician. Even more striking is the reinvention of the clitoral
suction device as a treatment for FSAD. Marketed as the ‘‘Eros Therapy Device’’ and
FDA-approved as a treatment for FSAD, this expensive technology is available on a
prescription-only basis, costing several hundred dollars. Yet the idea of applying suction
to the clitoris for sexual pleasure is hardly new; a variety of devices designed for this
purpose have long been available as ‘‘sex toys’’ and inexpensively sold in the range of
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S. Katz, B. Marshall / Journal of Aging Studies 17 (2003) 3–16
US$20–30 (Marshall, 2001). Thus, the ‘‘framing’’ of the market (Slater, in press)
determines what are to be considered alternative technologies (if any), the motivation
and ethical positioning of the consumer, and the therapeutic status of the technology
itself.
Our argument is not that problems of male impotence or female sexual arousal have no
scientific importance or that people’s suffering from them is immaterial. Rather, we are
suggesting that the commercial successes of pharmaceutical and mechanical remedies for
sexual dysfunction rest on a recent cultural–scientific conviction that lifelong sexual function
is a primary component of achieving successful aging in general. The discourses of positive
aging have created the sexy ageless consumer as a personally and socially responsible citizen.
This is especially clear where scientific and commercial interests associate sexual competence
with family stability (with little empirical evidence in support). Obviously, this is a scenario in
which the consequences are dire for those who do not take responsibility to ensure their
continued sexual capacities or to secure a lifestyle that would sustain regular, heterosexual
sex. In Teifer’s (1995) words, ‘‘Sexuality is presented as a life problem and the modern
approach is to be rational, orderly, careful, thorough, up-to-date and in tune with the latest
expert pronouncements’’ (p. 146).
6. Conclusions: the active society and the sexual senior citizen
Despite the patronizing claims of much seniors’ lifestyle literature and related
marketing campaigns, such literature, along with new discourses of expertise and ethical
governance, serves to define distinctive ways of life—positive and posthuman—that
would safeguard aging individuals from the risks of dependency and decline. Retired and
older people face a complex challenge, therefore. On one hand, they are led to
understand that the expectations for them to be active (including sexually active),
mobile, autonomous, experimental, knowable, networked, and consumer-niched will
contribute to their care, well being, visibility, and inclusion within public worlds of
participation and care. On the other hand, retired and older people are governed within
lifestyle profiles allied with neoliberal and antiwelfarist agendas to restructure dependency and problematize their aging bodies and identities as vulnerable, risky, and in need
of self-vigilance. Indeed, all dependent nonlaboring populations—unemployed, disabled,
and retired—have become targets of state policies and their various programs to
‘‘empower’’ such populations (Cruikshank, 1999; Dean, 1995; Rose, 1999; Walters,
1997). However, more challenging than the issue of how to empower marginalized older
individuals to be active and independent is the problem of how to treat those who are
unwilling to be so empowered.
A similar question dogs the issue of late-life sexuality: How can one legitimately refuse
to be ‘‘functional’’? If the first sexual revolution succeeded in detaching sexuality from
reproduction, the second, so it seems, is aimed at liberating sexual performance from
whatever limits the aging body might impose on it through disease, genetics, or physical
defection. The refashioning of sexual dysfunctions as age-related organic diseases, yet not
S. Katz, B. Marshall / Journal of Aging Studies 17 (2003) 3–16
13
necessarily organic consequences of aging, consigns us always to think of bodies as
unfinished and puts all men and all women potentially at risk. Thus, this refashioning also
provides for an endless chain of possibilities for intervention. These are not just
hypothetical matters. Tiefer (2001) recounts a letter to the New England Journal of
Medicine drawing attention to an increase in vaginal irritation by middle-aged women
partners of men using erection-enhancing drugs and notes the possibly comical ‘‘infinite
regress’’:
The man’s pill makes the woman need a lubricant. The woman’s lubricant makes the man
need a penile sensory enhancer. The man’s sensory enhancer makes the woman need a
desire additive. The woman’s desire additive makes the man need an energy stimulant. The
man’s energy stimulant makes him need anti-anxiety medication. And so on. (p. 90)
There is no escape here since one cannot rationally choose to decline. In fact, individuals
skilled in the exercise of consumer choice must choose to be posthumanly and timelessly
functional and do so by embracing the benevolent promise of modern technology. Sexual
function, like physical fitness more generally, has become central to contemporary conceptions of the good life.
The cultural panic of midlife decline entwined with gerontological, sexological, and
other forms of expertise in the later 20th and early 21st centuries has attracted attention to
a new series of health risks about how to live properly, responsibly, and sexually. As
Rose (2001) has observed, the new ‘‘ethopolitics’’ demands that one act to improve
oneself, as the idea of health is reconfigured to encode an ‘‘optimization’’ of an
individual’s corporeality. Further, the promotion of successful aging lifestyles has
problematized midlife decline at increasingly younger ages despite the irony that people
are actually living longer (Gullette, 1998). As positive aging has loosened sexual decline
from the aging body in order to redress ageist stereotypes about sexual activity and
pleasure, sexual health has become reassigned to a broad range of factors considered vital
to identity in midlife and successful aging thereafter. By realigning sexuality, gender, age,
the body, lifecourse, and identity and in seeking ‘‘new sex for old,’’ our culture exposes
its impossible ideal that people live outside of time. However, this critical exposure
invites resistance from aging individuals in the form of inventing diverse new ways of life
that mobilize the true resources of time—tradition, wisdom, narrative, memory, change,
generation, leadership—against the constraints imposed on them by a postmodern lifecourse regime and its stifling posthuman codes of functionality. Perhaps, these ways of
life will also reclaim sexuality and healthy aging from the sophistry of a consumer society
that confuses age and maturity with risk and loss.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Health Canada for permission to use and reproduce the
health warning image in Fig. 1.
14
S. Katz, B. Marshall / Journal of Aging Studies 17 (2003) 3–16
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Stephen Katz, Associate Professor of Sociology at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, is author of Disciplining Old Age: The Formation of Gerontological Knowledge (1996). He has contributed essays to texts on
theoretical gerontology and cultural aging, and to journals such as Generations, Journal of Aging Studies, and
Journal of Women and Aging. He is currently working on a book on aging and lifestyle.
Barbara Marshall, Associate Professor of Sociology at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, is author of
Engendering Modernity: Feminism, Social Theory and Social Change (1994) and Configuring Gender: Explorations in Theory and Politics (2000), as well as various articles on feminism, social theory, gender, and sexuality. She
currently researches the historical and contemporary intersections of gender, sexuality, technology, and consumer
culture.