Kink, Sex, and Aging:
“The things they do look awful c-c-cold. I hope I die before I get old.” Peter Townsend (1965)
This article is a brief overview of some of the ways aging interacts with being kinky. Such a summary calls for two caveats up front:
Kink is a subculture, and not just one community, but many small ones. That means that many of the strengths and problems of the general culture infiltrate kink subcultures. Social problems and prejudices from the general society do not stop at the dungeon door. Communities vary, and not all dungeons are the same.
Kink is not a panacea, and where kink communities and values are potential resources, it can still be quite challenging to find and use them. Your experiences may vary from examples cited here. Just as I cannot promise that if you just want it badly enough, you can become a Cirque du Soleil acrobat, I can pretty much guarantee that you cannot do so without intention and dedication. Anecdotes presented here are not intended to norm kinky sexual experiences but to alert you to what might be possible when you set your goals. When participation in the world of kink does provide skills and advantages in dealing with the challenges of maintaining sexual satisfaction as aging advances, I do not mean to imply that the communities of alternate sexuality are the only places that such advantages can be attained.
Aging:
The model of aging implicit in this essay derives from Erik Erikson. Childhood and Society (1950) is great for further reading, although it is not about elder adjustment per se. Erikson transformed Freud’s developmental theory – think; oral, anal, phallic, and Oedipal phases — which was originally a biological theory of development, into a social theory, and then expanded it to cover the entire lifespan. For a more practical and less theoretical reading, I would also suggest Joan Price’s Naked at Our Age (2011) for a non-kinky discussion of sex and aging.
