Patricia wonders: ‘Can you have an orgasm at eighty?’

I honestly wondered last week whether you can still have an orgasm at eighty. Lately, we’ve been talking a lot about sex in our house. Not because I’m yelling about the kale, but because my oldest daughter (11) has recently started getting a weekly hour of sex education at school. I’m very happy about that, because in my time in high school maybe one biology class was devoted to it and the rest had to be filled in by your parents. What on my fourteenth of course mega awkward used to be. Besides, I had figured it out myself by then.

Privately

“But,” a friend of mine said to me recently, when I asked her and a few other friends how often they masturbated, “isn’t it precisely the mystery that makes sex exciting?” Slightly disappointed at the lack of masturbation response, I was triggered by what she said. Because is it all still like that exciting if indeed everything out in the open is?

I think it’s important to instruct our children that there must be consent between the two (or three?) parties having sex. And that you can still change your mind halfway through ‘the game’ – those kinds of wise lessons. So my conclusion is that we can talk and educate our children about it, so that they know that sex has a whole range of variants. But I also think my girlfriend has a good point. That sex can also be small and private.

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Libido

Well, I would like to return to my initial question whether the elderly still have sex. I dug into the statistics and I have some good news: 51 percent of people between the ages of 70 and 80 are still having sex. In fact, a quarter of them even have sexual intercourse on a weekly basis. props for the elderly.

So if you’re reading this with a crying baby in your arms, four hours of sleep and a libido at a new low, we still have something to look forward to…