Sex and the Senior Woman: Pleasure and Danger in the Viagra Era

Abstract

This article reveals women aged 67 to 86 making sense of sexuality in the Viagra era. Drawing from interviews, survey data and content analysis of newspaper advice columns, I argue that senior women use Viagra as a vehicle to discuss and critique sexualized masculinity, sexualized culture, sexual obligation in marriage, and sexual health and pleasure. This data complicates and fills out existing qualitative research on aging and sexuality, while rejecting popular assumptions that the elderly are asexual. These women use Viagra to discuss pleasure and danger in their lives, to tell sexual stories, to build community, to critique social institutions, and even to promote social change in the 21st century.