Age, Desire, and Intimate Life: A Taboo That Deserves to Be Broken
A few weeks ago, I participated in a roundtable on sexuality in the later stages of life, organized as part of La GRAN Pantalla, the International Film Festival for Older People in Barcelona. Two deeply interesting and thought-provoking films were screened: Memories of a Burning Body (Memorias de un cuerpo que arde), by Antonella Sudasassi, and The Southern Brides (Las novias del sur), by Elena López Riera. Through different formats and styles, both invite us to face something that our culture has preferred to keep silent: the desire and sexual intimacy of older people — especially women.
The burning body in Sudasassi’s film is that of a 65-year-old woman who revisits her life story, marked by the restrictions of a repressive upbringing in which sexuality was taboo. The voices of three real women are condensed into this intimate portrait, full of silences and unspoken memories. Despite repression and past violence, the protagonist is capable of feeling, desiring, and exploring herself… “I’m still physically well-endowed. I’m alive, and as long as I’m alive, I won’t be an old woman,” the protagonist declares.
🔗 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zu7ao_BOeM8
The Southern Brides, meanwhile, gathers stories of older women who recall their weddings, their first times, their emotional education. Their testimonies reveal how generations upon generations have lived under the pressure of social mandates — mandates that some, like Pepita Bernat (a legend at the La Paloma dance hall in Barcelona, now 105 years old), have managed to overcome through self-awareness and the reclaiming of their desire and their bodies.
🔗 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndLpKLTLo4Q
What was interesting was that, after the screening, we didn’t just talk about cinema. With a theater full of people over 60, the debate could have gone on for hours. We talked about bodies and age, pleasure, shame, the urgent need for more sex education — not just for young people, but also for generations who never received it — and the need to break the taboo surrounding the body and sexuality in medical consultations. Often, it’s healthcare professionals themselves who ignore or avoid this topic, assuming that from a certain age onward, intimacy simply disappears. Yet another clear example of ageism in our society.
At that table, we talked about what people still desire, what they no longer desire, and how culture has built a thick silence around eroticism in old age. Why is it so uncomfortable to imagine a 75-year-old feeling sexual desire? Why is the aging body perceived as one that must be silent, covered, abstinent?
Sexuality in old age exists. Studies confirm it, though it rarely finds its way into public conversations. A 2007 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that 73% of people aged 57 to 64 and 53% of those aged 65 to 74 were still having sex. In 2012, The Journal of Sexual Medicine published an analysis of data collected in Spain on sexuality in old age, based on a sample of around 2,000 people. According to the results, 62.3% of men and 37.4% of women over 65 were sexually active.
Yet all this reality remains largely invisible in the media, in cinema, in advertising… Desiring bodies or sexually active subjects are almost always young. For women, the taboo — both in representation and in real life — is doubled: because they are older and because they are women. The older body is portrayed as desexualized, asexual. And yet, many women discover with age a new territory, where pleasure is no longer driven by the obligation to please or by reproductive urgency, but by what they truly want, feel, desire, and need.
We will explore sexuality in this stage of life in future texts, as a powerful ally in living a full and healthy old age. In the meantime, these two short films are an excellent starting point for reflecting, understanding, speaking about, and visualizing a vital part of life — at any stage of existence. Other titles on this topic include Cloud 9 (2008, Andreas Dresen) and 45 Years (2015, Andrew Haigh).
All of them make it clear that — just like talent (as we said a few days ago) — pleasure and desire don’t retire either.
