April 2009
M	T	W	T	F	S	S
« Mar		May »
	1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30

Pharmacy Links

SEXUALITY AND EMOTIONAL GROWTH IN MENOPAUSE: STUDIES

April 21, 2009

Professor Marjorie Fiske, who initiated a long-term study of life changes among Californian adults, believes that developmental models based on men may be misleading where women are concerned. ‘The assumption that men and women undergo similar processes in terms of developing, coping, and “declining” has turned out to be fallacious. In nearly all ways of living, thinking and feeling, a young woman is far more likely to resemble an older woman than a young man her own age. Similarly, differences between groups of men in various periods of life are less significant than their differences from women in their own life stage.’

While women within male-female relationships have been largely overlooked by theorists, homosexual women and heterosexual women without partners have fared even worse, having had almost no attention paid to them in traditional analyses of sexuality after menopause. Simone de Beau voir made the point in her book The Coming of Age that enjoyment of sexual activities takes many forms, has many motivations, and is not necessarily extinguished with age. ‘It is understandable that a man or woman should be bitterly unwilling to give it up, whether the chief aim is pleasure, or the transfiguration of the world by desire, or the realisation of a certain image of oneself, or all this at the same time . . . The old person often desires to desire because she retains her longing for experiences that can never be replaced and because she is still attached to the erotic world she built up in her youth or maturity — desire will enable her to renew its fading colours.’