Sexual Ageism or Sexual Stigma? Sexual Double Standards and Disgust Sensitivity in Judgments of Sexual and Romantic Behavior
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As the U.S. population continues to age, it becomes critical to understand the sexual and romantic needs of older adults. Sexual ageism, or negative attitudes toward the sexuality of older adults, can serve as a barrier to sexual and relationship quality. This stigmatization is often dismissed, minimized, or denied altogether – like many aspects of older adults’ lives. This experimental study examined interpersonal evaluations and risk perceptions of target adults that varied in age, gender, and sexual or romantic expression and the role that participants’ disgust sensitivity, a key variable related to social attitudes and stigmatization, played in these perceptions. Across two studies (total N = 678), participants read one of four flyers introducing a 25- or 65-year-old woman (Study 1) or man (Study 2) with information on the target’s sexual or romantic lives. Although results were nuanced, sexual women and men of both age groups were rated more negatively and as riskier compared to their romantic counterparts. In Study 1, respondents’ disgust sensitivity was related to more negative interpersonal evaluations and heightened risk perceptions of the sexually open women, but in Study 2 was related to more positive interpersonal evaluations of the sexually open men, with no relationship to how risky the men were rated. Overall, negative evaluations of the sexual targets were not limited to older adults, providing support for sexual stigma rather than sexual ageism. Disgust sensitivity was differentially related to perceptions based on the target’s gender, advancing evolutionary perspectives on the gendered nature of disgust.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".