Julie Burchill on elderly sexuality
Julie Burchill vents about celebrations of elderly sexuality. Enough with the celebrating already!
It's only a recent development that middle-aged women are expected, to the extent of having nerve-deadening poisons injected into their faces, to maintain the smooth skin and silhouettes they had as 20-year-olds; is it really progress to impose this sexual drudgery on the old, too? And now a new book, A Round-Heeled Woman, by Jane Juska, and a film, The Mother, by Hanif Kureishi, bravely proclaim a woman's right to get jiggy in the bedroom, even if she does have to use a Stannah stairlift to get up there. And maybe I'm a killjoy, but I do feel a certain weary dread at the idea of yet another "taboo" being broken — and yet another group being co-opted into society's insistence that everyone be permanently "up for it".
[...] In the face of this, would it hurt elderly sexuality not to be celebrated? Those sprightly old ravers who want to keep on doing it will do it anyway — and the rest of them won't feel like undersexed squares.
