Contexts

We all know that Americans are living longer. But some of us are living much, much longer.

According to the latest Census, the number of people living to age 90 and beyond has tripled in the past three decades — to almost 2 million — and is likely to quadruple by 2050. And 70 percent of
nonagenarians are female.

Studying the gender gap in aging, sociologist Meika Loe, in >Aging Our Way: Lessons for Living from 85 and Beyond, says that women may have a leg up when it comes to managing self-care in old age. Skills like cooking, cleaning, and caring for others clearly impact the ability to care for oneself.

In addition, nonagenarians maintain autonomy and control by asking others for help, which may be easier for women to do. But asking also requires good social networks. These tend to shrink as people age.

To counteract this problem, Loe shows how some elders have begun creating “informal care villages”— neighbor-helping-neighbor volunteer systems that allow individuals to share local resources at a cost savings or exchange personal services for free. They might trade driving or transportation for emotional support, for instance, or take turns delivering hot meals or checking in on one another.

Only 22 percent of elders live in institutional facilities. Forty percent of those 85 and older live by themselves. Informal care villages enable interdependence and actually increase elders’ ability to remain independent. They ensure that elders’ needs continue to be met, especially in a climate of limited federal support for aging at home.

It turns out that traditionally female skills, like asking for help, make a huge difference in the aging process. Men: take note.

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The issue of the sexualization of girls has made its way into scholarly and popular literature. The author discusses various media myths of hyper-sexuality in young girls and its potential problems.

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Monte Bute is many things: an admired sociology professor, a dedicated community activist, an author and blogger, and a friend and one-time board member of Contexts. He is also a dying man. Rather than keep his condition to himself, Bute, radically, chose to look at death as a fundamentally “teachable moment,” bringing it into his thought, his writing, and his classroom. In the process, Bute might just have become the ultimate public sociologist of the life course.

You can listen to this interview in its entirety here.

Jon Smajda: What’s going on with Monte Bute?

Monte Bute: Well, I have stumbled into the world of death and dying. It was never an academic specialty, but now it’s becoming an experiential reality. Turned out that I have one of the rarest forms of cancer that exists… the type of thing that just sort of controls a lot of your world pretty rapidly. I then went into really severe decline very quickly, but continued to teach through all of that. And more than anything else, what it turned into was sort of a subtext of all of the classes I was teaching—often, purely by serendipity, not by intent.

JS: Your experiences as a sociologist have caused you to look at sociology and see what sociology can do to understand what you’re going through, but you’ve said you’re not finding much.

MB: No. The parallel to Durkheim and Suicide really stood out to me. Durkheim, of course, made a great breakthrough by dealing with suicide sociologically, but he threw the baby out with the bath water! I’ve recently run across an article, “Understanding the Experiential World of the Dying: Limits to Sociological Research,” and it just struck a bell with me. That that is just a central issue.

JS: What exactly did Durkheim exclude? Writing on suicide, how did that create blind spots for sociology?

MB: Well, he wanted to create, to point out to people, the paradox of what was truly the field of sociology. And he did so by excluding anything to do with the personal aspects of suicide. He didn’t want to know any details about individual cases; he didn’t care about motive, intention, any of those things. He wanted only to look at statistical rates and to be able to set up a classical invariant model of research. His whole premise to justify sociology was to turn the tables… and deal only with the archives of statistics on suicides. And to some degree, a lot of the approach to death and dying has been the same way. Let’s look for regularity, let’s look for pattern, let’s look at massive numbers of cases. And there’s value in all of that, but what’s often lost is the truths that come from the individual case, the single case, the negative case. And much of that, especially with dying, no matter how much you turn it into a sociological research project to study, you don’t realize that this is primarily an emotional experience, to face death. There’s no experience more lonely than dying. It changes in different cultures, but that’s the central point of it.

JS: So it’s not something that individuals go through in a vacuum.

MB: No, no, no, the social context is very powerful, probably the most important aspect to this, to me, was I received this diagnosis of terminal cancer out of the blue, on a cell phone, the day of my 65th birthday. Within a month, anonymously, former students and some colleagues created a “Fan Club” page on Facebook. That sort of “outed” me. And this no longer became a lonely, singular journey. It became a community. Suddenly it was a wide array of people involved, at different levels, in creating dialog about this experience… this suddenly turned it into a sociological experience. What began to immediately happen, being a sociologist, is I became a participant and an observer at the same time. That sort of double consciousness about the experience I had, there is nothing you could be more involved in than facing your own death, but at the same time there was detachment. So I was observing myself and others. [Dying was] an experience among a community of people.

JS: One of the things I’ve heard you say is that dying is a stage of the life course, it’s a process that people go through. It’s not just something that happens to you.

MB: People who work in the death and dying field, they have spent so much time trying to explain what a “good death” is. And when they talk about a good death, [they mean] that you should know it’s coming, you retain control, you have dignity and privacy, control over pain, you’re in a secure place, and there’s emotional support, etc. All of that stuff. I’ve come to a very different conclusion. Those things are all well and good, but my experience and understanding of this is, in fact, if you know that the end is coming, and have some time, this can be a liminal experience. You have an opportunity to reexamine the meaning of your life, and even more importantly, the meaning of what does it mean to be human. And, to me, a good death can be a death in which you go through affective and cognitive dissonance. You’re… unsettled. Now I don’t want you to die in that state, but this should be a time to go back to first questions and to final things. You reexamine and maybe you retell the narrative of your life. But you also look at the social and historical context that you’re living in. You begin to look at the human relationship with the cosmos, you begin to look and see that you are an animal that’s in a lived body. So many things come to the fore, and I think we’re so busy turning this into a therapeutic experience and a medical experience that we sort of lose the tragic nature of life, a chance to become a lay philosopher, a public philosopher in an odd way, and a public sociologist.

JS: What do you mean by “public sociologist”?

MB: Being a public sociologist is taking all social phenomena and using it, any form of social interaction, to help people make sense of their lives. And there is no greater taboo than the process of dying. People flee from the idea of dying, and so they add to the loneliness of the process. So for me, once I was “outed,” it caused me to step back and say, “My god, this is a teachable moment.” I will turn this into… a learning experience for my students, for my colleagues, for the general public. This is probably the most important public sociology project of my life.

*JS: I think one of the striking things is the way you’re using literature.

MB: In this dying experience, I have found that literature and film have spoken more deeply to me and to the people around me than the social sciences. And that’s unfortunate. For instance, Kurasawa, the great Japanese director, had an early film called Ikiru. It is the story of a Japanese bureaucrat who just plods to work every day. One day, he discovers that he has stomach cancer and has a year to live. The movie suddenly shifts to a memorial service, and we only discover through the memorial service how he spent his last year. And it was the most powerful image of someone who confronted death, confronted the meaning of their life, what they’d been doing, and it was a moment of awakening. Now those are things that should be captured more often by sociological ethnographies, life stories, biography—and they are occasionally—but they’re not what we spend most of our time working with students on.

JS: One last thing I wanted to ask you about is the book Tuesdays with Morrie. And I bring this up because every sociologist knows about this book, and every sociologist gets asked about this book, because it’s about a sociologist, and most people cringe. And then you said you re-evaluated your opinion of this book.

MB: I had read it and written it off as sort of a trite self-help manual, but I went back and I’ve reread that twice during the past 15 months. [Tuesdays] is what sociology should be doing about the process of dying. It is a profound rumination on the biological, the social and cultural, the psychological, and the spiritual elements of your coming demise. I’ll bet 95 percent of people who read that book could not tell you that he was a sociologist. He wasn’t using “soc speak,” he wasn’t babbling with journal diagnosis and definition, he was a human being who used the sociological lens to bring his own lived experience of this tremendously solitary experience to readers, to viewers, to people who were terrified by death. And he managed to turn this into a Socratic experience with his former student. [Morrie] talks about love and marriage and death and happiness, all of these topics, and he constantly has the sociological framework there without ever telling anyone he’s using this sociological paradigm to explain lived experience.

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Drawing on classical sociology texts, Charles Lemert explores the necessity of a sociological examination of what he calls the Society of the Dead and how its memories impact social life.

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A closer look at Malcolm Gladwell’s “iron law of Canadian Hockey” reveals that birthday cut-offs in pee-wee leagues do not, in fact, predict eventual hockey stardom. The authors find that the Gladwell’s supposed bias levels out once players reach the major leagues.

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Working together, geneticists and sociologists are showing that there is a dynamic, complex relationship between genes and social behavior.

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To the casual observer of television, movies, or popular magazines, sexuality would seem like the province of the young.

And the first major national study of sex in the U.S., done in the early 1990s, stopped at age 59, as if sexuality did too.

Of course, as any Baby Boomer can now tell you, this isn’t the case. The aging of this cohort, combined with the development of medications to treat sexual problems common among older men, has brought the sexual interests of mature adults into public discourse. Several recent surveys of sexuality at older ages allow researchers to paint a detailed picture of sex at older ages—including attitudes toward sex, motivation to find a partner, sexual behavior, and sexual functioning. Although sexual activity declines and some sexual problems can arise with age, many older adults remain sexually active and satisfied into their 80s.

Two key factors set the course of sexuality over the second half of life: availability of a partner and health. Older men are more likely than older women to have partners and more likely to repartner should they lose one. Women tend to be younger than their partner and tend to live longer. So by ages 75-85, about twice as many men as women have a partner with whom they might have sex (clearly, that partner has to function at some minimal level or sex isn’t in the cards). Those in poor health face much worse prospects for an active sex life; diabetes, cancer, arthritis, obesity all make sex more difficult and less rewarding. Recent studies suggest that these challenges of poor health take a bigger toll on the sex lives of men than of women, perhaps because of men’s traditionally more active role in initiating sex and in intercourse itself.

So the chances of having a partner drop with age, and the chances of having sex (given that one has a partner) also decline. Adults in their 50s and early 60s who have partners are virtually all sexually active, regardless of their health. But by their early- to mid-80s, the picture changes, and trajectories of sexual behavior diverge for men and women, with health playing a bigger role. More than half of older partnered men in good health are sexually active, compared to about a quarter of those in fair to poor health. Four in ten older partnered women in the best health are sexually active in their 80s, but among those in fair to poor health, only one in six is. Despite these caveats, many older adults remain sexually active, and, for those who do, sex is generally more than a once-in-a-long-while activity; more than half of sexually active older adults in their mid-70s to early-80s have sex several times a month and about a quarter have sex at least several times a week.

Sexual attitudes and practices show a generational divide of sorts. Those who came of age in the 1960s or later are more liberal in their attitudes, more likely to masturbate, and more likely to include oral sex in their repertoire than those who grew up in an earlier and more conservative time. Older men are more interested in sex than are older women (paralleling the gender difference at younger ages), and interest in sex declines with age for both men and women. Older unpartnered men are much more likely to have had sex with someone in the past year—about a quarter said they did—than are older women, who almost never report this behavior.

And about half of older men and older women report at least one problem with sex that bothers them. Women are most likely to say that they lacked interest in sex, failed to lubricate, or had difficulty reaching climax. Men are most likely to report problems achieving or maintaining an erection, a lack of interest in sex, or climaxing too quickly. Those in poor health are more likely to have poor sexual function, some of which could result from the consequences of disease.

Careful consideration shows that sex among older adults seems like much else in life: functioning declines with age, but fairly slowly, and many people function well even at advanced ages. Further, despite our tendency to pretend otherwise, sexuality exists in a dynamic relationship, intimately connected with other aspects of good health over the entire adult life.

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Young women kissing—especially on college campuses—grabs male and media attention alike, but these kisses don’t mean that the women involved are lesbians. Interviews with college age women reveal the complexity and fluidity of female sexuality.

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From the Article

A few video clips referenced in the article:

• Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl"
• A clip from The Tyra Banks Show on girls kissing.

From her own memoir on dating between ages 55 and 60 to social networking, Pepper Schwartz discusses what we do and don’t know about sex over the life course. Along the way, she offers advice for sociologists hoping to engage public audiences.

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