NATSAL and older people

One of the difficulties of writing about sex in later life from a UK perspective is the lack of systematic, population-level data. In particular, older people have been excluded, to a greater or lesser extent, from the three existing waves of the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (NATSAL)

This is one of those background facts that I keep using whenever I’m writing about later life sex, but I always find it difficult to check out exactly which waves had which age limits. So I am going to collect it here, for my own future reference, and in case it is useful for anyone else.

(cc) Peter Kaminski

NATSAL I was carried out in 1990. It sampled people aged 16-59

NATSAL II was carried out in 2000. It sampled people aged 16-44  ‘in order to focus survey resources on a group at greater risk‘ though how you know who is at greatest risk if you haven’t surveyed anyone over 60 to start with, I don’t know…

NATSAL III is being carried out between 2008 and 2013.  It will sample people aged 16-74. Two cheers.

I hope there is a NATSAL IV. I’m not a statistician or a survey-expert, so I realise there may be technical reasons why you need to put an upper age limit, to do, I imagine, with getting enough respondents for the findings to be generalisable. But surely there must be ways round that? The danger of putting an upper age limit is that is suggests that sex is not something of relevance to older people.

British Society of Gerontology conference 2012: Part 3 Notes

Second Plenary

Murna Downs

University of Bradford

From invisible patient to citizen and activist: Dementia comes of age

Giving a plenary as a coming of age marker for an academic lifecourse?

Don’t know as much about user-involvement in dementia care as we do about stigma.

New policy statement [missed source – something govtmental] 9 ‘I’ statements which indicate good quality care ‘I can enjoy life’ ‘I was diagnosed early’ etc. Alzheimer’s Soc now using a similar series of I statements

Usual thorny issues of user-involvement:

• Who is involved?
• Serving whose agenda?
• At what pace are we working? Going too fast is a problem
• With what resources?
• With what adaptions and accommodations? Going to people’s homes and day centres really important. Not privileging the verbal and articulate people.
• Real or tokenistic?

Dementia is progressive – how long through the journey do people stay with you [also the case for e.g. M.S. and old age]

If you’re a dementia activist in care, do you end up being put on anti-psychotic drugs to stop you being a nuisance?

Earlier diagnosis of dementia means that there are people in circulation with dementia who are ‘just like us’ researchers. This creates a danger where we think we are including/consulting PWD when actually it’s only the most able. Maybe Arts kinds of activities are a better way of involving people with more advanced dementia than membership of advisory groups and working groups. [Maybe arts kinds of activities are better way of involving all sorts of non-verbal, MC semi-academic people]

Chris Phillipson: danger that bids to NIHR and ESRC scheme will be a muddled mix of bio-medical model and critical perspectives (because the field is like that).

British Society of Gerontology conference 2012: Part 1

Here are some more personal notes from a conference. As ever, they are in no sense a representation of everything that was said, just some of the things that struck me as interesting or connected with my own work. Things that are my thoughts rather than what other people said are in square brackets. The conference is the:

British Society of Gerontology

41^st Annual Conference

University of Keele

10^th-12^th July 2012 

The conference got off to a great start for me when my fellow-CABS member, ex-colleague, ex-PhD supervisor and, I hope I do not presume too much to say, friend, Bill Bytheway was presented with the BSG’s Outstanding Achievement Award for his contribution to British gerontology. I’ve written more about that over here on the CABS blog. But it made a very happy start to the conference for me.

More note form from now on:

Opening Plenary

Prof Toni Calasanti

Virginia Tech, USA

Different or unequal? Considering power relations

Existing critiques of ‘successful’ ageing [Katz, Minkler and Holstein, all the stuff I wrote about in K319 LG2 final section] . What happens if you put these critiques together with gender analysis?

Sexualised vulnerable older women in Life Alert ads (call buttons)

Youth based standards of sex. Seeking to show OP have sex too or something ‘just as good’ e.g. non-PIV but still sex. This retains insidious ageism.

Why not see elders’ sex as more valuable? Link w reproduction is broken anyway. More sensual? More pleasure-seeking?

Let old people be old and that be valuable.

Chris Gilleard

Sex in later life: From sex to salvation

Non-sexual nature of later life used to be morally virtuous, because sex was sinful. So a virtuous old age was non-sexual. Inversion of nowadays.

Sexual activity as cause of ageing – using up moisture and heat. Hippocratic theory of humours. Sex is hot and wet (blood and air), ageing is dry and cold (black bile and earth). Continuing influence into the medieval period and up to 17^th C

Then 17^th C onwards, sex less sinful and less harmful

Harvey’s circulation of blood shows that blood is not used up but continuously circulated so impacts on ideas of sex in old age.

But old ideas continued anyway.

18^th C physiology developed, awareness of glands – realisation that sexual activity can be separated from reproduction and that sexual fluids do things other than aid reproduction.

19^th C increased regulation of sex. But age related decline in sexual function is noted but not mandated

Lots of interest at turn of twentieth century and early twentieth C in prolonging youth through organotherapy, rejuvenation techniques [like now anti-ageing medicine]

Audience member: presentation blind to gender – it was all about men

CG: could have talked about extract of ova for women in 20^th C but before that it was all focused on men.

Ann O’Hanlon

Dundalk, Ireland

Exploring and measuring age-friendliness amongst older people.

Age friendly communities. Dundalk was one of the 35 cities and towns in the 2004 WHO study

Discussion: Ann O’Hanlon’s question: why hasn’t the older people’s movement taken off in the way that feminism did?

Me: because it’s not grass-roots.

Audience member: because of internalised ageism

[I thought: but feminism was partly about excavating internalised sexism through consciousness raising – OP could do that]

Audience member: Group of 50 older feminists, met recently to apply CR techniques to own internalised ageism. But what they are focusing on is supporting one another, not changing the world. Is this something to do with ageing [No! Not if, by that, you mean something inherent to the ageing process]

[Should the question actually be ‘why did the feminist movement succeed (in some ways though obviously not all), when black rights did less well (although don’t forget end of segregation in US), class struggle died with Thatcher / the end of communism in Europe, and other social movements never got off the ground?

What happened to the grey panthers?

There are, at least, activist groups of disabled people.

It is just because the historical moment when movements around identities could make significant impact has passed, because we’ve all (some of us) got so post-modern and fractured in our identities?]

Cassandra Phoenix

Pennisula College

Research design: Attend people’s usual exercise session, take a photo, download to iPad, immediately discuss pictures during interview.

This design proved impractical – turned into too much discussion of the quality of the photos + post exercising participants didn’t want to be interviewed – tired!

So instead researchers selected 8-10 photos and emailed them – look at photos, answer question ‘what is it like to [insert sport]’ then some more prompting questions, including  prompted them to talk about five senses. So got written data in the end.

People didn’t comment on the images very much – tended to do so at end. Whereas researchers intended it to be photo-elicitation. Did caption some photos – doesn’t seem very phenomenological. But actually quite telling, like small stories in identity construction. Captions often about the body rather than life through the body

Some people made references to the pictures in their writing.

Q ‘what it is like to’ was understood as ‘why do you like?’

Another list of resources: Bisexuality and ageing

Here’s another one I prepared earlier (actually, just now). It’s a handout for the talk I’m giving at the British Society of Gerontology conference at Keele University next week. I’m part of a double symposium on LGBT ageing and I’m talking under the title ‘The disappearing B in LGBT ageing’. I’m not only going to talk about that – for those of you who were at the Critical Sexology Up North seminar in Huddersfield a couple of weeks ago, this paper covers the same kind of ground as that one, but tweaked a little, so this list might also be of interest.

Further reading on bisexuality and ageing

On what is distinctive about bisexuality:

Barker, M., Richards, C., Jones, R., Bowes-Catton, H., Plowman, T., Yockney, J., et al. (2012). The bisexuality report: Bisexual inclusion in LGBT equality and diversity: The Open University.

Available here: http://bisexualresearch.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/the-bisexualityreport.pdf and elsewhere – just google it.

Guidelines on researching and writing about bisexuality

The guidelines: http://bisexualresearch.wordpress.com/reports-guidance/guidance/research-guidelines/

Accompanying article:

Barker, M., Yockney, J., Richards, C., Jones, R. L., Bowes-Catton, H., & Plowman, T. (in press, 2012). Guidelines for Researching and Writing about Bisexuality. Journal of Bisexuality, 12.

Empirical studies of bisexuality and ageing

WEINBERG, M. S., WILLIAMS, C. J. & PRYOR, D. W. (2001) Bisexuals at  midlife: Commitment, salience and identity. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 30, 180-208.

JONES, R. L. (2012) Imagining the unimaginable: Bisexual roadmaps for ageing. IN WARD, R., RIVERS, I. & SUTHERLAND, M. (Eds.) Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender ageing: Providing effective support through understanding life stories. London, Jessica Kingsley.

JONES, R. L. (2011) Imagining bisexual futures: Positive, non-normative later life Journal of Bisexuality, 11, 245-270.

Speculative literature

(Not empirically-based but suggestions based on evidence about ageing lesbians and gay men and younger bisexual people)

DWORKIN, S. H. (2006) Aging bisexual: The invisible of the invisble minority. IN KIMMEL, D., ROSE, T. & DAVID, S. (Eds.) Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender aging: Research and clinical perspectives. New York,ColumbiaUniversity Press.

FIRESTEIN, B. (Ed.) (2007) Becoming visible: Counseling bisexuals across the lifespan, New York, Columbia University Press.

KEPPEL, B. (2006) Affirmative psychotherapy with older bisexual women and men. Journal of Bisexuality, 6, 85-104.

For ‘Muriel’ case study and general discussion of the disappearing bisexual:

Jones, R. L. (2010). Troubles with bisexuality in health and social care. In R. L. Jones & R. Ward (Eds.), LGBT issues: Looking beyond categories (pp. 42-55).Edinburgh:Dunedin Academic Press.

Older bisexual people: In a nutshell

Here’s one of the bits of The Bisexuality Report that I wrote.  It’s a very concise summary.  I would have said much more if there had been more space.

For older bisexual people there may be increased invisibility due to assumptions that older people are no longer sexual, as well as the multiple discriminations of biphobia and ageism. The commercial gay scene, which some bisexual people access, is highly youth centric and may be hostile to older people, even those as young as their thirties [158]. The age profile of those attending bisexual events is somewhat older than that of the commercial lesbian and gay scene but is still fairly young (17-61, but with the largest group in their 30s)[159]. While there is a growing body of research into the impact of ageing on LGBT people in general [160], there is hardly any research on bisexual ageing specifically [161], and a great need for more information and understanding about the needs of older bisexual people.

The footnotes are:

158 Ward, R., Jones, R., Hughes, J., Humberstone, N., & Pearson, R. (2008). Intersections of ageing and sexuality: Accounts from older people. In R. Ward & B. Bytheway (Eds.), Researching age and multiple discrimination, 8, 45–72. London: Centre for Policy on Ageing.

159 Jones, R. L. (2011). Imagining bisexual futures: Positive, non-normative later life. Journal of Bisexuality, 11 (2), 245-270.

160 Stonewall (2011). Lesbian, gay and bisexual people in later life. London: Stonewall.

161 Weinberg, M. S., Williams, C. J., & Pryor, D. W. (2001). Bisexuals at midlife: Commitment,salience and identity. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 30 (2), 180–2

This summary leaves out lots of  interesting stuff  about identity politics and different generations of sexual minorities, and what it means to look back on a life course from later on. But, for now, I will put just that up in case it is useful to anyone looking for a succinct summary of some of the issues.

Some gerontological thoughts on The Iron Lady

I went to the cinema this week and saw The Iron Lady, Phyllida Lloyd’s biographical(ish) film about Margaret Thatcher. There’s lots I could comment on, but I’ll limit myself here to some things that struck me as a gerontologist and someone who is particularly interested in normative and non-normative life courses.

(cc) Joybot

One of the things I really liked about the film was the fact that the central character was (when not in flashback) an old woman. So few films have protagonists even in mid-life that it was really refreshing and interesting to see one in deep old age (for further discussion of older people in films, can I recommend ageing, ageism and feature films and the work of Josie Dolan at UWE). One of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about in the last couple of years is how people can be enabled to better imagine their own ageing and eventual old age. Fictional portrayals of later life are an obvious way of helping with this but there aren’t many out there (although the FCMAP project has a collection of novels here). While I loathed the real Margaret Thatcher in her heyday with all the fervour of a leftie teenager and young adult, I found the fictional portrayal of her old age deeply moving and sympathetic.

As I understand it, hallucinations are rare in most common forms of dementia, including the form that Margaret Thatcher is thought to have, but I’m not talking here about the reality or correctness of what is portrayed. As a way of representing the sheer impossibility of believing that someone who has been an intimate part of your life for 50 years is no longer there, I thought the hallucinations of Dennis worked really well. I don’t know whether that is how people feel after such a bereavement but it certainly made me imagine being in that situation.

I also thought the film did a good job of conveying the ways in which older people are so often treated as incompetent, irrelevant and foolish. Scenes such as the one in the corner shop – when she is pushed out of the way by the man on his mobile phone – are entirely everyday. For example, the Research on Age Discrimination research, undertaken by some of my colleagues from the Centre for Ageing and Biographical Studies (and me, in a minor way) found that being treated as seemingly invisible was reported as one of the most prevalent forms of everyday ageism. But seeing this happen to someone who used to be the prime minister makes even clearer the fact that it doesn’t matter who you used to be, once you are put in the category ‘old person’ you are at risk of being treated in this way.

(cc) rileyroxx

I was also interested in (but much less keen on) the way the film ended up focusing so much on her personal life, especially her relationships with her father, husband and children. I am suspicious that one of the reasons the film-makers decided to do this was because if they had failed to do this for a woman who was known to have been married and to have had children, it would have felt like too incomplete an account of her life. Filming a biography of a male public figure with only passing reference to his private life would probably be unremarkable but, since they wanted to make her at least somewhat sympathetic, I wondered whether this partly pushed them into featuring her private life more heavily. I don’t know. I may be coming over all second-wave feminist on this one. It has been known.

And this made me think about the cultural difficulty of telling a story of someone’s old age that doesn’t make it seem as if it was their family and any descendants that really mattered in the end. In societies such as the UK, where paid employment is so highly valued, I wonder whether, once you are beyond paid employment, the main culturally available narrative is of the significance of family. Certainly my colleague Jill Reynolds has found that some older people without children report that their friends with children and grandchildren seems to have lives (boringly) limited to their families. I’m sure that, for many people, their family does become the main focus of their lives when they are old. And that’s fine. But for other people, such as those who haven’t had children, who are estranged from their families and whose lives have not revolved around their families, such as Margaret Thatcher, I’d like there to be a greater range of ways of telling the story of someone’s life.

End of life care for LGBT people

I’ve been at a seminar on End of Life Care for LGBT people today, mostly focusing on older people, although with briefer mention of younger people who are also coming to the end of their lives.

I’m no specialist in end of life issues, although I know a bit because of knowing about later life, which is when end of life issues come up for most people. I went along partly out of guilt because one of the organisers had asked me for help with recruiting older bi people to attend and I had tried but (as far as I know) failed.

(cc 19melissa68)

We started by going round the table, saying what our particular interests were in later life and why we were there. At the beginning of that process someone said ‘same sex partners’ as if that was a common experience to all of us and I prepared to start banging the bi and trans drum of ‘same sex partners does not cover us all, all of the time’. But then someone said how important it was to include trans issues in our discussions and gave some examples of how and why. And then someone else said that they particularly wanted to include bi issues because they are bi. And then someone else mentioned bi stuff again, and someone else trans and, really, by the time it came round to me, I felt almost redundant. Which was very nice indeed, and very encouraging. We also had some good discussion of particular issues for LGBT people of colour and people who have been living with HIV for decades.

Someone other than me was talking about the importance of separating out data from bi people from data from lesbians and gay men, which was very encouraging in terms of the likely reception of BiUK (and friends)’s forthcoming The Bisexuality Report (watch this space) which is going to argue just that.

I was delighted to hear that Age of Diversity, which is the successor organisation to Polari, are going to launch their website next month (it’s still in construction at the moment, but you can find it by googling).

There was quite a lot of discussion of the issue of people using a different name than their official name and the difficulties and distress this creates when someone is not fully compos mentis, or when their friends ring the hospital to ask after them but don’t know their legal name. I don’t know whether using a name other than your legal one is particularly common in the LGB community (I know it is in the trans community). I can imagine that it might be, but to me it feels an entirely standard issue in later life because, I now realise, 3 out of my 4 grandparents/pseudo-grandparents went by a middle name, so it’s an old chestnut to me (but none the less important).

People also talked about the importance of debunking the notion and scrapping the phrase ‘next-of-kin’. It has no legal meaning when someone is alive, only once they are dead, and it’s one of the main routes by which LGBT people do not get to have their nearest and dearest involved in their care. Lots of (sadly familiar to me) stories of estranged family turning up and making decisions for someone they had not seen for twenty years, while their partner or close friend is shut out.

I loved a passing comment made by a hospice chaplain when introducing himself and his organisation ‘we’re lovely. In fact, like most hospice people, you could say we’re terminally nice’.

One of the outcomes of the meeting was that the organisers are going to collect together useful resources on this topic. I’ll post the link for that once I know it. But for now, a few resources that I managed to jot down:

• REGARD (organisation for LGBT disabled people) and their campaign for ‘Sue’s Law’ (if you just search for ‘Regard and Sue’s Law you should find it)
• Kathy Allmack published a lit review on End of Life Care for LGBT people about three years ago
• NHS (don’t know which bit) has apparently just produced a guide on bereavement for (re?) trans people.
• Report on palliative care for LGBT people: National Council for Palliative Care (2011) Open to all?, NCPC and Consortium of LGBT voluntary and community organisations, London ISBN 978-1-898915-89-8
• Opening Doors Camden (part of Age UK) is launching a checklist for care homes and care providers on practical ways to be LGBT friendly. Out next week, should be available as a pdf on their website.

Quotable ageing

Need a way to get going writing on a topic? Why not start with a quote.

Null points for originality but full marks for doability in very little time, thanks to the wonders of the internet (I particularly rate The Quote Garden). Also, sometimes the old ones are the best (I meant writing techniques but this is itself a quote about my topic). So this afternoon I’m looking for quotes about ageing.

There are an awful lot out there. Here are some of my favourites, not properly attributed unless the website did so for me:

• Old age is no place for sissies – Bette Davis
• Growing old is mandatory. Growing up is optional – Chili Davis
• In youth the days are short and the years are long; in old age the years are short and the days long.  ~Nikita Ivanovich Panin
• Age does not diminish the extreme disappointment of having a scoop of ice cream fall from the cone.  ~Jim Fiebig

(cc) Spookygonk

• There is no pleasure worth forgoing just for an extra three years in the geriatric ward.  ~John Mortimer
• Old age isn’t so bad when you consider the alternative.  ~Maurice Chevalier, New York Times, 9 October 1960
• The first sign of maturity is the discovery that the volume knob also turns to the left.  ~Jerry M. Wright
• There is always a lot to be thankful for, if you take the time to look. For example, I’m sitting here thinking how nice it is that wrinkles don’t hurt.  ~ Anon
• Grow old with me!  The best is yet to be.  ~Robert Browning
• I advise you to go on living solely to enrage those who are paying your annuities.  It is the only pleasure I have left.  ~Voltaire
• An archeologist is the best husband any woman can have:  the older she gets, the more interested he is in her.  ~Agatha Christie, news summaries, 9 March 1954
• Old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.  ~Quoted by Francis Bacon, Apothegm

(cc) osmium

• First you forget names, then you forget faces, then you forget to pull your zipper up, then you forget to pull your zipper down.  ~Leo Rosenberg
• The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest.  You are always being asked to do more, and you are not yet decrepit enough to turn them down.  ~T.S. Eliot, quoted in Time, 23 October 1950
• Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that happen to a man.  ~Leon Trotsky (Lev Davidovich Bronstein), Diary in Exile, 1935
• Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty.  ~Henry Ford

And of course, my particular favourite, after which this blog is named:

There is a wicked inclination in most people to suppose an old man decayed in his intellects. If a young or middle-aged man, when leaving a company, does not remember where he laid his hat, it is nothing; but if the same inattention is discovered in an old man, people will shrug up their shoulders, and say, “His memory is going.”

Boswell, J (1791) Life of Johnson Vol IV, p.501

When I say they’re my favourites, I don’t mean I necessarily agree with them. In fact, I’d be rather muddle-headed if I did since several of them contradict each other. Rather, I mean that they strike me as pithy and well worded and revealing of everyday societal sense-making about ageing and old age.

Problems of old age to-day

One of my colleagues, Joanna Bornat, gave me this as she was clearing out her office prior to retirement. She didn’t really have a use for it herself, but couldn’t quite bear to throw it out, and thought I might be interested. She was quite right.

Did you spot that date? 1954! The typography, in particular, makes it look so recent, at least to my non-expert eyes.

We probably wouldn’t say ‘old age’ these days, more likely ‘later life’ or ‘older age’, and it would be a brave course that used the word ‘problem’ in the title nowadays when we are all so careful not to imply that older people are problems. And you certainly wouldn’t hyphenate ‘to-day’ today.

But the contents look not unlike an introductory course in gerontology, if you tweak the wording a bit. I like the idea of that continuity in education.

I’m also interested to see some of the speakers – Marjory Warren who later became known as ‘the Mother of Geriatrics’ and Alex Comfort, more famous for sexier things but in his own estimation a sort of gerontologist.

Having uploaded a scan of it here, I now propose to recycle the original, so if anyone wants it, speak now, before I write a shopping list on the back of it.