CNN
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What does intimacy look like for older adults? There's no end to sex scenes and other hot content featuring young and smooth people, but after a certain age, popular culture is mostly left blank or treats sex as a highlight.
Last year, artist Marilyn Minter decided to change that, bringing together a group of men and women aged 70 and over in her New York studio to showcase lesser-known sides of sex and relationships. In erotic and colorful images, older people are stripped down to their underwear or panties; they hug, kiss and caress each other passionately. The photographs draw our attention to challenging something that is still considered taboo by showing playful, loving moments of pleasure.
“There's so much disdain for older people's gender. Even one of the models I worked with said, 'Who wants to see all that?'” Minter recalled during a CNN video call.
“My whole thought process was that we are pioneers,” she continued, referring to the unapologetically sexualized context. “No one had ever photographed older people with love and with any elegance. And that was my goal – to make them look very desirable.”
Several subsequent images were originally published in the New York Times Magazine along with frank editorial about the sex life of older people. Minter is now publishing the series in its entirety in a forthcoming book, Sex for Older People, and exhibiting it at New York's LGDR Gallery. Exhibition, which opened in Aprilthis is her first solo show in the city since the Brooklyn Museum held her 2016 retrospective, “Pretty/Dirty.” It features highlights from her fifty-year career, as well as other new works.
In Sex for the Elderly, Minter employed one of her signature aesthetics, which she explored in both hyperrealistic paintings and photographs: close-cropped compositions of shiny bodies in jewel tones that appear to be shown through the glass of a fogged mirror or window. But despite her reputation as one of the most important and revolutionary artists today – and despite such stars as Lady Gaga And Lizzo posed for her – Minter couldn't find enough real couples willing to participate.
“We wanted to (include) all races, all gender types,” Minter explained. “We had a lot of trouble finding models. I'm 74. I asked all my friends – in mixed-race relationships, in lesbian relationships – and none of them did it.”
In the end, Minter chose the actors along with the few people who agreed. She stitched them together in her studio, photographing them behind a panel of frozen glass—a trick for achieving a dewy, dewy look without fighting the ephemerality of water vapor. During filming, Minter said that all of her models, who were 89 years old, told her that they still had regular and enjoyable sex lives. Their feelings were consistent with those interviewed for a New York Times Magazine article, who described deepening intimacy with their partners later in life and learning to navigate and appreciate their needs as their bodies age.
Minter believes that later in life there is a sense of freedom in sex that may take time for many people to achieve.
“When you're young and having sex, it's a little more spectacular than when you're 80,” she said. As an older person, “you think, ‘That’s me. Take it or leave it. I'll just have fun. I’m not going to pretend anything here.”
Minter acknowledges that sex and self-esteem are fraught for women of all ages: Older women are rarely considered or taken seriously as having intimate needs, while for younger women, sexual freedom is often a tightrope walk—too much of it and you can be “berated and shamed,” Minter said.
“When you're 25, there's so much fear of young women being sexually active that it just scares people,” she said.
Marilyn Minter presented piquant photos from the shower
But the artist sees some progress in who is seen as desirable on our TV screens, reflecting a growing and broader shift in cultural attitudes towards sex. She pointed to photos in People magazine comparing characters from “The Golden Girls” and “Sex and the City,” who were contemporaries when the latter was rebooted on HBO Max (which is owned by CNN's parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery). “The 50s look completely different in the 2020s!” – exclaimed the signature.
While The Golden Girls also delved into romance and intimacy—and was considered by many to be extremely sex-positive for its time—there is a stark contrast in how women in their 50s are represented in the two series.
“I thought, 'OK, that's why it's different,'” she said. “Number one: people are living much longer and healthier… Number two: there's this thing called Viagra.” Minter laughed and added, “But who retired at 54? To a house in Florida with three other ladies? What?”
She hopes that “Sex for Older People” will not only serve as a much-needed visual example of what intimacy can look like in older age, but will also resonate with people who feel like their desires and lives are being ignored.
“It gives permission to people who are ashamed of their sexual urges,” she said. “I want this to give them permission to look into it and erase the shame.”
“Older Sex“, published by JBE Books, is available now.
