Common myths about sex and aging
The biggest myth, as measured by square footage, is that as you grow older, you gradually lose your interest in sex. This myth probably got started because younger people seem to want to have sex with each other at every available opportunity, including traffic lights, whereas older people are more likely to reserve their sexual activities for special occasions, such as the installation of a new pope.
But there`s no reason for us to feel that getting older should stop us from having sex. Our role model in this area should be such biblical stud muffins as Job, who, if I remember my Sunday School lessons correctly, remained sexually active for several hundred years. Of course, I vaguely recall that at one point in the story all of Job`s cattle and relatives died and he got boils all over his body, which should serve as a reminder to all of us, no matter what our age, of the importance of practicing safe sex.
With that in mind, there`s no reason why we can`t continue to lead sexually fulfilling lives well into our Golden Years, as millions of older people have done before us, including, for all we know, your own parents. Yes! It`s possible! Your parents having sex! I realize that this is difficult to accept. Most of us have trouble believing that our parents ever had sex, even when they conceived us. Deep down inside we believe that our mothers got pregnant because of fallout from atomic testing during the Truman
administration.
But the truth is that our parents were probably engaging in sex, and some of them still do, and we can too. Physiologically, there is absolutely nothing to prevent us from remaining sexually active into our 60s and 70s and even 80s, except, of course, the possibility that Doing It will cause sudden death. This has been known to happen. In the interest of common decency I am not going to name any names, but this is apparently what happened to a billionaire who was vice president of the United States under Gerald Ford and whose name rhymes with ”Pelson Pockefeller.” He was allegedly working late one night on a book with a ”research assistant,” and all of a sudden, probably right in the middle of an important footnote, bang, so to speak, old Pelson WAS gone.
But this is unlikely to happen to you. For one thing, you don`t even HAVE a research assistant.
Health advice for people turning 40
You should definitely schedule a thorough medical checkup. Notice I say
”schedule.” I do not advise that you actually submit to a thorough medical checkup, because when you reach age 40 the medical profession suddenly develops an intense interest in a bodily region that I will not name here except to say that the procedure for examining it is so humiliating that even if the doctor says you`re perfectly healthy you will probably want to kill yourself.
Also, you should learn to recognize the various warning signs of heart attack, such as that you feel sharp chest pains, or dizziness, or certain familiar printed words suddenly start to appear diffonable and remulations weedle volcrantitude understand them. That is definitely the time to get help. Your disintegrating body
One of the more traumatic aspects of reaching age 40 is the realization that you no longer have the same body you had when you were 21. I know I don`t. Sometimes when I take a shower I look down at my body and I want to scream: ”Hey, this isn`t my body! This body belongs to Willard Scott!”
But this is perfectly natural. Screaming in the shower, I mean. Reaching age 40, however, is not natural. I base this statement on extensive scientific documentation, in the form of a newspaper article I vaguely remember reading once, which stated that the life expectancy for human beings in the wild is about 35 years. Think about what that means. It means that if you were in the wild, even in the nonsmoking section, by now you`d be Worm Chow. So we can clearly see that going past age 40 is basically an affront to Nature, with Exhibit A being the Gabor sisters.
Nevertheless, we ARE living longer. Thanks to modern medical advances such as antibiotics, nasal spray and Diet Coke, it has become quite routine for people in the civilized world to pass the age of 40, sometimes more than once. As a person reaching this milestone, you need to take the time to learn about the biological changes that are taking place within your body so that you will be better able to understand and cope with the inevitable and completely natural elements of the aging process-the minor aches, pains, dental problems, intestinal malfunctions, muscle deterioration, emotional instability, memory lapses, hearing and vision loss, impotence, seizures, growths, prostate problems, greatly reduced limb function, coronary failure, death, and of course painful hemorrhoidal swelling-that make up this exciting adventure we call ”middle age.”
Beauty tips for the more mature gal
Or: Don`t Discard Those Grocery Bags!
Women, let`s be realistic: You still want to look good. This is not to say that you assign the same priority to mere physical appearance as to being an independent, fulfilled person. No, you assign a much HIGHER priority to mere physical appearance on some occasions, such as when you`re at the beach, idly pummeling your cellulite and wondering whether your varicose veins, if stretched end to end, would reach Japan, and suddenly you notice that your husband, who has been pretending to read page 13,462 of James Michener`s recent blockbuster epic novel ”Cleveland,” is in fact ogling a 19-year-old Barbie-shaped woman wearing a bathing suit the size of a hospital
identification bracelet.
In situations like this it`s quite natural for you to feel insecure, to wonder if your husband secretly wishes that YOU had the body of a 19-year-old. Trust me, this is not the case: He secretly wishes you had the body of a 16-year-old. The slimeball. I mean, exactly how does he think you got your current set of hips? You got them bearing his children, that`s how.
And, OK, even since the birth of your children, you have, on occasion, been guilty of snacking. Why? Because you were stuck in the damned kitchen, that`s why. Because all of the grand claims your husband made, back when you were dating, about how you two were going to be Equal Housework Partners, turned out to mean in actual practice that he occasionally, with great fanfare, refills the ice-cube tray.
Anyway, here you are, at the beach, stuck in a body that looks somewhat alien to you, a body that seems so large that you`re afraid to go swimming for fear that the Coast Guard will attempt to board you, and this is at least partly the fault of your husband, who promised to stick by you in thickness as well as health and who has not maintained his own body in exactly Olympic diver condition, and the s.o.b. has the nerve to sit right next to you and stare at this bimbo so hard that his eyeballs have actually left their sockets and are crawling, crablike, across the sand. (Not that you are bitter.)
Oh, sure, the women`s magazines keep saying that it`s no longer important to look young, that maturity is ”in.” But they never use normal mature women to illustrate this point. They use women such as Sophia Loren, an obvious genetic mutation who will continue to have the skin of a child long after the Earth has crashed into the sun. Or they use Jane Fonda, who is so obsessed with remaining inhumanly taut by working out 92 hours a day that it took her more than a decade to notice that she was married to a dweeb. Or they use Cher, for God`s sake, a woman who has had so much cosmetic surgery that, for ease of maintenance, many of her body parts are attached with Velcro.
So we have to face up to the fact that there is still a flagrant double standard, wherein porky gray men like Raymond Burr are considered physically attractive, whereas women are considered over the hill moments after they reach puberty. Of course you already know this, which is why, like most middle-aged women, you`re probably determined to battle the aging process unto death and beyond if necessary. Fortunately, thanks to the selfless, caring people who make up the cosmetics industry, it is now possible for you to remain surprisingly youthful-looking for at least a little longer, with no more of a daily investment in time and money than would be required to build a working steam locomotive by hand.
Aging gracelessly
The central point is that-follow my logic carefully here-unless you die, you will continue to get older. (It`s insights like this that separate the professional author from the person with a real job.)
Of course we can`t say exactly HOW old you`re going to get without knowing certain scientific facts about you, such as your genetic makeup, your medical history and your tendency to wager large sums of money with men named ”Snake.” But if you pick up any current actuarial table and look up the average life span for a person of your particular age, sex and weight, you`ll realize that, statistically, you have to squint like hell to read the numbers. This proves you`re already older than you think. And it`s just going to get worse because of a law of physics discovered by Albert Einstein, the brilliant physicist who not only invented the White Guy Afro haircut but also discovered the Theory of Decade Relativity, which states: ”Each decade goes exactly twice as fast as the decade before.” This is why so much more seemed to happen in the `60s than in the `70s, and why your only truly enduring memory of the `80s, when all is said and done, will be Tammy Faye Bakker.
So now here we are in the `90s, which means that regardless of how many gallons of Oil of Olay you smear on yourself, you`re going to start aging faster than a day-old bagel in a hot dumpster. You need to think about this. You need to decide how you`re going to deal with the fact that you`re becoming an Older Person.
Sports for the over-40 person
(Or: God had a reason for creating the Barca-Lounger)
In the Pantheon of Sports Heroes (which is located next to the Skeet Shooting Hall of Fame), you`ll find the names of many legendary athletes who remained active in sports well after they turned 40-Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Picasso, Secretariat-the list goes on and on.
What do these great competitors have in common? Right. They`re all dead. So you see how important it is for you to slow down as you get older, to abandon the active sports you enjoyed so much in your youth-basketball, tennis, racquetball, drinking a quart of Jim Beam and leaping naked into the motel pool from the eighth-floor balcony, etc. It`s time for you to start
”acting your age” by getting involved in the kinds of sports activities that are more appropriate for mature, responsible adults, such as:
Shrieking at Little Leaguers
To participate in this highly popular sport, all you need to do is get a small child who would be infinitely happier just staying home and playing in the dirt, and you put a uniform on this child and make him stand for hours out on a field with other reluctant children who are no more capable of hitting or catching or accurately throwing a baseball than they are of performing neurosurgery. Then you and the other grownups stand around the perimeter and leap up and down and shriek at these children as though the fate of the human race depended on their actions.
The object of the game is to activate your child if the ball goes near him, similar to the way you use levers to activate the little men in table-hockey games. Your child will be standing out in right field, picking his nose, staring into space, totally oblivious to the game, and the ball will come rolling his way, and your job is to leap violently up and down and shriek ”GET THE BALL! GET THE BALL!!” repeatedly for several minutes until your child finally is aroused from his reverie long enough to glance down and discover, to his amazement, the ball. The ball! Of all things! Right here in the middle of a Little League game! While your child is staring at the ball curiously, as if examining a large and unusual tropical insect, you switch to yelling: ”THROW THE BALL! THROWTHEBALL THROWTHEBALL THROWTHEBALL! THROW THE BALL, DAMMIT!!” After several minutes of this, an idea will start to form somewhere deep inside your child`s brain: Perhaps he should throw the ball. Yes! It`s crazy, but it just might work!
And so, seconds before you go into cardiac arrest on the sideline, your child will pick up the ball and hurl it, Little-League style, in a totally random direction, then resume picking his nose and staring off into space. As you collapse, exhausted, the ball will roll in the general direction of some other child, whose poor unfortunate parent must then try to activate HIM. Meanwhile the other team`s parents will be shrieking at THEIR children to run around the bases in the correct direction. It is not uncommon for 150 runs to score on one Little League play. A single game can go on for weeks.
Other good sports for older people
Probably the fastest-growing sport for the over-40 person is one that combines the advantages of a good cardiovascular workout with the advantages of looking like you have a bizarre disorder of the central nervous system. I refer, of course, to:
Walking like a dork
Walking like a dork has become very popular among older people who used to jog for their health but could no longer afford the orthopedic surgery. The object of dork-walking is to make a simple, everyday act performed by millions of people every day, namely walking, look as complex and strenuous as Olympic pole-vaulting. To do this, you need to wear a special outfit, including high- tech color-coordinated shorts and sweatclothes and headbands and wristbands and a visor and a Sony Walkperson tape player, little useless weights for your hands and special dork-walking shoes that cost as much a pair as the roundtrip air fare to London.
