Do Men Have a Sexual Advantage in the Post-Viagra World?

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This matters when looking at the differences between older men and older women, because heterosexual women, on average, partner with men older than themselves. As the lead author of the study, Stacy Tessler Lindau, notes: "Women outlive their marriages and their relationships." Sex with a partner is tricky to arrange if you no longer have a partner or if your partner is older than you and in poor health. One survey found that among the 75-85 age group 72 percent of men but only 39 percent of women had a partner.

What happens to that male "advantage" in sexual life expectancy when this difference is taken into account? The one those headlines trumpeted?

It disappears. Partnered men and women can expect roughly the same average number of sexually active years, both at age 30 and at age 55 (the ages for which the study applied the calculations). Older women, too, might go out with a smile on their lips if they were all provided with suitable partners. 

Or might they not? After all, the study does establish that about half of sexually active older women report that the quality of their (partnered) sex life is not good. One half! But wait a little: Almost a third of older sexually active men report the same thing. Thus, while there is a clear gender difference in reported satisfaction with partnered sex, it is not one where all older men have a good time and all older women do not.

Could this quality difference have anything to do with the introduction of Viagra and other treatments for erectile dysfunction? Better still, could Viagra-and-friends, first introduced in 1998, explain why the two data sets the study used produced different results on older mens' interest in sex? "Significantly more men aged 57-64 in the later life cohort reported an interest in sex than men of the same age surveyed 10 years earlier" says the study. In contrast, the reported sexual interest of women did not change much between the cohorts.

This casts further doubt on the essentialist theory that the quality of one's sex life matches the presumed life cycle of one's fertility. If the greater sexual interest of older men is purely evolutionary, it should not change in a mere decade. But change it did, and at the same time as drugs allowing penetrative sex for many more men entered the marketplace. Coincidence?

There is no Viagra for those older women who experience problems with penetrative sex. Even estrogen replacement therapy -- which can help with such problems as vaginal dryness --has now been found to have health risks and is no longer recommended as a long-term strategy.

What is a woman going to say about her interest in partnered sex if the sex itself is uncomfortable, never mind how high her libido might otherwise be? Practical problems with sexual intercourse are likely to decrease expressed desire in both sexes, but only men currently have good medical solutions to some of them. Add that consideration to the greater probability that older heterosexual women either no longer have sexual partners or have partners too ill for sex and the essentialist explanation looks even less essential.

Finally, there's the question of getting honest answers about sex and the related question concerning gender differences in what the respondents might believe is expected from them. Women in the oldest cohort in the study may have been brought up in a world where a lady just did not talk about sex. And men are taught from adolescence that sexual prowess is the ultimate measure of their masculinity.