Sexual Health: Are you sleeping with the enemy?

The screwing I’m getting is not worth the screwing I’m getting,” growls Faye Dunaway’s character, Gwen, in the 1969 film The Arrangement. Today, a shocked older woman who gets an unexpected diagnosis of a sexually transmitted infection (STI) may well want to howl the same thing — provided the grandchildren aren’t around, of course.

So what’s the problem? Why are grown-ups setting themselves up for sorrow? Widowed or divorced on-their-own ladies, pleased they don’t have to worry about pregnancy any more, may not want to bother with condoms, especially if steady boyfriends or occasional lovers object. And older guys may be up for sex more often, thanks to a certain little blue pill.

A majority of Canadians aged 65 to 74 consider themselves to be sexually active — no doubt because it feels so good. An orgasm releases endorphins, chemicals that act as natural painkillers. Growth hormones and testosterone released by men during sex strengthen their bones and muscles, and there’s the fact that having sex keeps sex hormone levels higher. There’s one measure of the pleasure that may be revealing: since the late 1990s, rates of reportable STIs in Canada — chlamydia, gonorrhea, genital herpes and infectious syphilis — have been growing. And an STI makes a body more vulnerable to HIV infection.

But a 2003 Ekos Research Associates survey found that people over 45 don’t think of themselves as vulnerable to HIV. They think it’s a Third World problem or a disease suffered by gay men or junkies. Safe-sex programs are rarely aimed at the silver-haired crowd. And in the throes of passion, who can be blamed for forgetting that the bed is actually crowded with everyone a woman’s partner has ever slept with? The numbers back it up. Before 1997, 26 per cent of HIV-positive adults were 40 or older; by 2006, that figure had risen to 43 per cent. In fact, 29 per cent of women who tested positive in 2006 were 40 or older.

Mature femme fatales face more risk than their male lovers. In fact, the HIV and AIDS in Canada Surveillance Report, released in November 2007, notes that heterosexual transmission caused nearly 75 per cent of the new HIV infections recorded in women. Semen delivers a greater concentration of the human immunodeficiency virus than vaginal secretions and, without condom use, it stays in contact with bodies longer.
HIV affects already age-weakened im-mune systems, and the drugs needed to combat the virus complicate treatment for chronic diseases such as diabetes.

Older people are sometimes diagnosed well into an HIV infection while being examined or treated for other conditions. And like the patients themselves, health-care workers feel uncomfortable asking about the sex life of someone belonging to their mother’s generation.

In a 2006 news report, a gynaecologist who worked at a retirement village near Orlando, Fla., a favourite vacation spot for Canadian snowbirds, said she treated more cases of herpes and the human papilloma virus in the retirement community than she did in Miami.

— Jayne Macaulay