Nineteen—Men Who Come
I should say something about age. Not as reassurance—I’m not in the business of reassurance—but as a correction of something that gets repeated so often it has acquired the status of fact.
My oldest regular client was ninety-two. He was still coming to see me at ninety-five. Still curious, still present, still perfectly capable of the full range of what the afternoon offered. He was not unusual among the men I’ve worked with—merely the furthest point on a curve that extended well into the eighties for many of them.
Statistics mislead. Not intentionally, not maliciously, but effectively. The average becomes the expectation. The median becomes the ceiling. A man reads that sexual activity declines significantly after sixty and files it away as a fact about his future, not a fact about a sample, and adjusts his expectations accordingly.
The less you expect the less you pursue. The less you pursue the less you find. The statistic becomes self-fulfilling.
My brother told me sex ended at fifty. He was reporting his own experience as though it were a law of nature. He was fifty-something, faithful, married, the less you get the less you get—and he had arrived, without drama, at a place where wanting had become so quiet he could no longer hear it. He assumed everyone had.
They hadn’t.
What ends, for most men, is not the capacity. Not the wanting. Not the body’s ability to feel pleasure or sustain arousal or arrive, given time and attention, at something worth having. What ends is the opportunity. The context. The person in the same room who is honest and present and genuinely interested.
Remove those obstacles—which is all I do, really, remove the obstacles—and you find men in their eighties who have more to say about pleasure and curiosity and the body’s surprising persistence than most men half their age.
The ninety-two year old was not a miracle. He was just a man who had never quite accepted the story he’d been told about when it was supposed to be over.
He was right not to.
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