Redux: Sex & Aging

Dear Sugars

WBUR

Boston, Wbur, Sugar, Cheryl Strayed, Society & Culture, Dear, Relationships, Advice, Steve Almond

4.6 • 5.9K Ratings

🗓️ 15 March 2025

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This episode was originally released on May 25th, 2018.

When two women in their sixties start losing interest in sex, their sex-starved partners become increasingly frustrated. Both women blame old age for their waning libidos. But is their diminished sex drive because of age or something else?

The erotic lives of senior citizens are typically made invisible by our culture, which can lead to confusion and misinformation. Dr. Pepper Schwartz, the love and relationship columnist for AARP, joins the Sugars to dispel certain myths about sex and aging: Do libidos change after menopause? How does the aging body affect the way we feel about sex? Should medical interventions be considered for a declining sex drive?

Dr. Schwartz is a professor of sociology at the University of Washington and has written more than 25 books on love and sexuality. She’s also an on-air expert for Lifetime TV’s “Married at First Sight.”

The Sugars Recommend

“Our Souls at Night,” by Kent Haruf

“Scary Old Sex,” by Arlene Heyman

Transcript

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0:00.0	WBUR Podcasts, Boston.
0:04.0	The universe has good news for the lost, lonely, and heart sick.
0:20.5	The sugars are here, speaking straight into your ears.
0:24.1	I'm Steve Alman.
0:25.3	I'm Cheryl Strayed.
0:26.4	This is Dear Sugars.
0:30.1	Oh, dear song, won't you please?
0:41.3	Share some little sweet days with me I check my bellbyes every day
0:50.3	Oh, and the sugar, you see in my way.
0:59.8	Hi, Steve.
1:00.9	Hi, Cheryl.
1:01.8	So today we're doing one of those episodes, like so many of our episodes,
1:06.2	that really rose out of our inbox.
1:07.9	Mm-hmm.
1:08.3	I was going through letters and preparation for this season, and I came
1:14.1	upon really a whole trove of messages from people in their 50s, 60s, 70s and beyond who were
1:22.7	asking us about sex. That's right. I mean, this is the thing. We have a culture that neuters anybody who's
1:29.4	above 50. We certainly don't discuss and we don't show images of people of that age,
1:35.3	having an erotic life, having an erotic imagination. And when you suggested the show, I thought
1:40.3	about two books that I'd read within the last year, both of which I think are so brilliant
1:45.3	at bringing out of the shadows the reality that we're going to have a body our whole lives and
1:49.5	therefore desires and an erotic life. And the first one was this novel Our Souls at Night by the
	...

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