On Monday Barbara Walters, 84, made headlines and late night show monologues when she discussed her vibrator that she has named "selfie" on The View.
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Once again, a senior woman is making the news for publicly discussing her sexuality. However, the news outlets that are reporting on Ms .Walters beloved sex toy don't seem to be taking her as seriously as she is taking herself. The Huffington Post's headline for their article writes off the selfie comment as a joke and other reports claim that Walters got "a little too personal" when she discussed her version of self love. Even Walter's cohost Whoopi Goldberg didn't want to linger on the subject of Walter's "selfie" and quickly moved on to the next available topic.
Now I realize that this might come as a shock to some people but 84 year old women are still capable and still desirous of sexual activity. There is a lot more complicated work and critical analysis to be done here but let me just start with this idea; the reason why Western culture seems to believe that senior women are incapable of sexual activity is because of the medicalization of women's health.
After menopause women are no longer physically able to reproduce children. Medical discourse tells our culture that the changes that take place in the bodies of post-menopausal and senior women also prevent them from having sex comfortably or can even remove the desire to have sex all together. In conjunction with this medical discourse is a discourse of sexual desirability that tells us older women are less sexually desirable. Cosmetics industries are big proponents of this discourse with their wrinkle banishing creams and age spot correcting serums. With all of these discourses floating around in our culture it is not that hard to imagine why Walters statement about desiring sex can be so easily dismissed as a joke. Granted I do think it is very possible that Walters was joking around by calling her vibrator "selfie". The joke does make a terrific pun. However I don't think Walters was joking about her desire for sexual pleasure. Statements of senior sexuality should be taken more seriously. If not problems begin to arise when we think about the young sex icons of today like Nikki Minaj, Katy Perry, Rihanna, Megan Fox (I could go on and on). What happens to those women who have built their careers around their sexual desirability when they age out and become too old for sex?
