Older Men and Sexual Health: Post-Viagra Views of Changes in Function
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In August of 2007, media attention was raptly focused on a new study out of the University of Chicago, which showed that while activity declines with age, many older people enjoy a variety of activities well into late life (Lindau et al., 2007). Sexed-up seniors do it more than you think proclaimed the headline on the website of NBC-News. Senior partners: Still randy declared Canada's Globe and Mail (Agrell, 2007). Both the study itself and the media coverage of it illustrated well what appears to be a new cultural consensus on sexuality and aging. While historically has been seen primarily as the province of the young, more recently the maintenance of active sexuality as a marker of normal aging has also been garnering attention. The University of Chicago study not only suggested that sexuality was important across the lifespan, but also dearly linked sexuality with overall and urged that increased medical attention be paid to late-life sexuality. The lead author suggested in an interview that she would like to see physicians begin asking patients if they are sexually active, how their lives are going, or if there is anything preventing them from having sex (Agrell, 2007). In a reversal of long-held beliefs mat older people just shouldn't be sexy, the onus is now on all of us to remain sexy. While certainly the positive image of elder promoted here is most welcome, implicit in the extensive media coverage of such research is an underlying view of those who choose to opt out of active sexuality as they age as victims of a pathology and a subtle reiteration of a message of risk and decline in the absence of appropriate intervention. It is against this backdrop that I explore in this article the medicalization of aging sexuality, in particular the rise of a post-Viagra men's health industry. This new addition to the aging enterprise has expanded the medicalization of masculinity and sexuality in later life, particularly via the recuperation of the male menopause as a hormonaUy treatable disorder. Finally, I explore how hormonal and other pharmaceutical therapies aimed at promoting masculine virility are deployed against the background of new understandings of risk, health, and surveillance in relation to aging function. NEW VIEWS OF AGE AND SEX Masculine life-courses have shifted in terms of aging and function (Gullette, 1997; Marshall, 2006,2007; Marshall and Katz, 2002, 2006). Victorian narratives of the spermatic economy (Haller, 1989) held that masculine vitality was a fixed resource that needed to be prudently managed if it were to be enjoyed into late life. If masculine vitality were squandered, decline could occur at any age. Even with careful husbandry, however, the waning of the impulse with age was treated as part of nature's wisdom, and counsel in the art of graceful acceptance was widespread. It was not until the early twentieth century that the idea of age-related midlifb decline took hold and was fashioned as a target for therapeutic intervention. Today, aging men are expected to remain forever functional (Marshall and Katz, 2002), and, as Calasanti and King (2005, p. 16) summarize it, sexual function now serves as a vehicle for reconstructions of manhood as 'ageless.5 In contemporary medicine, in aging men has become a canary in the mine indicator of their general in mid to late life. Sexual Is the Portal to Men's Health (Shabsigh, 2006) was the tide of the keynote speech at the Fifth World Congress on the Aging Male, held in Austria in 2006. A recent editorial in the Journal of Men's and Gender similarly proclaimed that ... is one of the gates to in general!'' (Meryn, 2006, p. 318). Yet the concept of health, once defined as reproductive and absence of sexually transmitted disease (Giami, 2002), is now narrowly focused on performance and desire. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".