CNN
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What does intimacy look like for seniors? Sex scenes and other steamy content featuring young, wrinkle-free people are plentiful, but past a certain age, popular culture either shuts it down or treats sex as a joke.
Last year, artist Marilyn Minter decided to change things by bringing together a group of men and women aged 70 and over in her New York studio to highlight a lesser-known side of sex and relationships. In colorful, erotic images, the seniors are seen in their underwear or briefs, embracing, kissing and caressing each other in the heat of the moment. The photographs invite us to question an aspect that is still considered taboo, showing moments of playful and affectionate pleasure.
“There’s so much disdain for older people’s sex. Even one of the models I worked with said, ‘Who wants to see all that?’” Minter recalled during a video call with CNN.
“I thought we were pioneers,” she continued, of the overtly sexualized context. “No one had ever photographed older people with affection and with any elegance. And that was my goal: to make them very desirable.”
A handful of these images were originally published in The New York Times Magazine, accompanying an op-ed on the sex lives of seniors. Now Minter is publishing the series in its entirety in the upcoming book “Elder Sex” and exhibiting them at the New York gallery LGDR. The show, which opened in April, is her first solo exhibition in the city since the Brooklyn Museum staged her retrospective “Pretty/Dirty” in 2016, and features highlights from her five-decade career, as well as other new works.
In “Elder Sex,” Minter tapped into one of her signature aesthetics, which she’s explored in both paintings and hyperrealist photographs: jewel-toned, close-up compositions of glistening bodies, as if seen through the foggy glass of a mirror or window. But despite her credentials as one of today’s most important and avant-garde artists—and despite the fact that stars like Lady Gaga and Lizzo pose for her—Minter couldn’t find enough real couples willing to participate.
“We wanted to include all ethnicities and genders,” Minter says. “We had a really hard time finding role models. I’m 74. I asked all my friends — in mixed relationships, in lesbian relationships — and none of them wanted to do it.”
Ultimately, Minter chose the actors and the few people who agreed. She paired them up in her studio, photographing them behind frozen glass—a trick for achieving a steamy, wet look without battling the transience of water vapor. During the sessions, Minter said, all of her models, who ranged in age from 89 to 90, told her they still had regular, enjoyable sex lives. Their sentiments echoed those interviewed for the New York Times Magazine article, who described deepening intimacy with their partners later in life and learning to manage and appreciate their needs as their bodies aged.
Minter believes there is a sense of freedom in sex later in life that, for many people, can take time to achieve.
“When you’re young and you’re having sex, it’s a little bit more performative than when you’re 80,” she said. As an older person, “you’re like, ‘This is me. Take it or leave it. I’m just going to have fun. I’m not going to pretend.’”
Minter acknowledges that sex and self-image are touchy subjects for women of all ages: Older women are rarely seen or taken seriously as having intimate needs, while for younger women, sexual autonomy is often a balancing act: If you do too much, you can be “skinned and branded as a slut,” Minter said.
“When you’re 25, there’s so much fear of young women having their own sexual autonomy – it’s just terrifying for people,” she said.
Marilyn Minter reveals steamy ‘shower’ footage
But the artist sees a shift in how people are perceived as desirable on our television screens, reflecting a broader and growing shift in cultural attitudes around sex. She showed photos in People magazine comparing the characters of “The Golden Girls” and “Sex and the City,” who were the same age when the latter was rebooted on HBO Max (which is owned by CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery). “The ’50s look a lot different in the 2020s!” one caption exclaimed.
While “The Golden Girls” also tackles romance and intimacy – and is widely considered to be remarkably sex-positive for its time – there is a stark contrast in how women in their fifties are portrayed in the two series.
“I thought, ‘Okay, here’s why it’s different,’” she said. “Number one: People are living a lot longer and healthier lives… Number two: There’s this thing called Viagra.” Minter laughed, adding, “But who retired at 54? In a house in Florida with three other women? What?”
She hopes that “Elder Sex” will not only serve as a much-needed visual reference for what intimacy can look like in old age, but that it will also resonate with people who feel like their desires — and their lives — are being neglected.
“It gives permission to people who are ashamed of their sexual urges,” she said. “I want it to give them permission to explore that and erase the shame.”
“Sex of the Elderspublished by JBE Books, is available now.
