Older adults emphasize that sexuality and the search for one’s own pleasure is also lived in old age, so it is necessary to “tear down myths” that leave them in a “passive” social position and show them not being “desirable or desired”, at the same time that highlighted the need for a Comprehensive Sexual Education (ESI) that contemplates them, on the eve of the International Orgasm Day in people with vulva.
Delia Gallardo is a 58-year-old psychologist who, after going through her menopause, began to ask herself “many questions” that led her to specialize in sexology and create the Instagram account @menopausiaysexualidad.
“As a result of that, I found a publication on the web of ‘The Revolution of the Old Women’. In some way it showed what I had been thinking. I joined a (virtual meeting via) Zoom and heard about sexuality. I couldn’t believe: wonderful. We were a lot of old women putting sexuality into words”Gallardo told Télam.
For Delia, the objective of the organization “La Revolución de las Viejas” is “to put in capital words that old women are also sexually active, that we do not close ourselves off, that we continue with a lot of questions and that we want to be active in all spheres. of life”, in addition to seeking to vindicate and use the word “old”.
Different specialists and old women pointed out to Télam that there are still “many myths and prejudices linked to sexuality in old age”.
In this sense, the lesbian activist Norma Castillo, who turned 80 last March, shared with Télam an experience that worries her to this day.
“I think I was still in high school when science – not to mention religion, which directly castrates sexuality from a young age – said that women lost their sexual desire with menopause. I can’t forget that they tell us a lie as big as that. But it was what was lived, what was said and what had to be obeyed, “he reflected.
The experiences of old women and the word of specialists deny this statement. “People with vulva can reach orgasm at this stage of life. There is a thinning of the walls of the vagina and for hormonal reasons less hydration and lubrication, in addition to requiring a little more time for stimulation, lubrication, masturbation, games, caresses and hugs, “sexologist Andrea Orlandini.
And he remarked that “Although it requires a little more time, you can have orgasms as pleasant as those you had at another time in life”. However, for the sexologist, “the search for female pleasure was censored and repressed for many years.”
Norma, for example, always felt guilty about having a “strong sexual desire.”
“In the ’50s and ’60s, science said that we were sick. We very hot women were nymphomaniacs or had uterine fever,” Castillo said, while noting that during her education – from elementary school to university – “she never the word clitoris was spoken”.
Throughout her life, Norma explored her own pleasure, especially through masturbation, a practice that she continues to this day. “For a long time it always seemed to me that I gave more than I received. masturbation was always a relief”said the militant lesbian, and clarified that although she fell in love with many men, “the moment never came to say ‘how rich, how good I am’, until I discovered my true sexuality.”
“When I was able to meet Cachita just there I saw what it really was to have pleasure,” he recalled about the woman with whom he shared his love for almost forty years, Ramona Arévalo.
As a young man he used his innate artistic ability to create pornographic comics, making use of his imagination since in his environment he did not find information about sexuality: “Regarding the clitoris and masturbation, I grew up in the closed world as ‘a doll’s tail’. They were all impositions against sexuality and in favor of stimulating the phallus, dominating the man and denying sexuality to women”.
“Education in general was closely linked to procreation. We want to value the eroticism of sexuality, the enjoyment: remove sexuality from this coitocentric issue,” said Gallardo, who coordinates, together with the biologist Aída Gotlib, the ESI space that contemplates the elderly of “La Revolución de las Viejas “.
And he warned that “in old age we continue to run the risk of sexual transmission.”
“The ESI does not talk about old bodies: it does not talk about menopause, about andropause. It is an avant-garde law, but it is an old-fashioned law”, highlighted the psychologist with a degree in ESI and a master’s degree in Old Age Law, Caroline Iglesias, in reference to the term “viejismo” (ageism), coined by the psychiatrist Robert Butler in the 1970s and introduced in Argentina by the psychoanalyst Leopoldo Salvarezza, to talk about “discrimination due to old age”.
For Iglesias, it is necessary to talk about gender stereotypes because “being an old woman is not the same as being an old man” since “we have been dragging discrimination from our beginnings in the world and when we get old it multiplies”, which it can be seen, for example, in the “invisible work of grandmothers”.
“The work that is least talked about is that of grandmothers. We talk about unpaid care work and we put young women in images. Older women feel guilty about this mandate. It is not something minor because when one takes care of the tasks of care is leaving part of her days for herself. And this also has to do with sexuality,” she explained.
In this line, Gallardo added that “the majority do not fantasize, there is no place for that.”
“Actually, it is the moment in which we have more time because we are approaching or have already reached retirement. But there are social roles anchored in the belief that this moment is here, that it is the moment for the grandchildren… A very passive,” he said.
Stereotypes also impact the images associated with older women.
“What the magazines convey to us is that the woman’s body has to remain intact, young, and our body is changing. We also have to feel erotic and desirable. That is a change of mentality, a job that has to be done Gallardo said.
About the orgasm, Norma has many things to say: “The moment of shared orgasm is so, so lowering borders, limits. At the moment of making love and having an orgasm, everything else is erased and something deep and wonderful is experienced. It is a health injection. And it is the most stimulated thing in men and the most forbidden thing in women.”
In that sense, he warned that “it is still difficult to talk about the subject, as if it were something shameful.”
The women interviewed also pointed out that orgasm “is not the ultimate goal” of any sexual act since there are many ways to enjoy sexuality, and they warned that “in old age we have to do something like a ‘rewrite’ around sexuality because our body image changes.
“If we manage to understand that sexuality, enjoyment, has to do with timing, caresses, a look, enjoying oneself… we are on a better path. Sometimes you can be with a couple for hours caressing each other and have a wonderful time Gallardo concluded.
