(EVER)Lasting beauty...

It was the father of abnormal sexuality studies, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who first sketched out this condition of being aroused primarily by the elderly, offering a few impromptu case reports and a rather bland definition of gerontophilia as “the love of persons of advanced age.” In 1981, the sexologist John Money clarified this by defining gerontophilia as, “the condition in which a young adult is dependent on the actuality or fantasy of erotosexual activity with a much older partner in order to initiate and maintain arousal and facilitate or achieve orgasm.”

The critical point is that gerontophiles are largely dependent on having (or imagining) sex with an elderly partner in order to achieve orgasm, not simply that they are willing to do so. It is not about love alone.

@scientificamerican

So here's the deal: I am writing this because I could not find an old post where I talked about this movie. I watched it years ago and I thought it was really thought provoking (leave it to @brucelabruce to come up with this idea) and very unusual as subject. Now it came again to my mind after a fellow blogger (hey, Jon!) mentioned he's having conversations online with a (much) younger man. 

You see, older people are most often seen as non-sexual. Like we die when we turn, what? fifty? Sixty? Seventy? Especially gay men. Gay men have this tendency to worship youth and the attributes associated with it: potency, elastic skin, visible muscles, low body fat index, stamina, supposedly strong libido, etc. So when an older gay man gets attention from a much younger suitor, our skepticism raises like foam in a bubble bath. And so do our suspicions: is it money? Is it ill intentions? WHAT is it?

Full disclaimer: I have dated older men all my life. I dated a man much, much older than me when I was a teen (older enough to raise many eyebrows). I have only dated men younger than me four times in my life. So I kind of understand feeling attracted to someone older than myself. I don't mind the gray, I don't mind the wrinkles, I don't mind many things associated with 'aging'. Now, I have never dated anybody forty years my senior, but you get the picture.

And why this? And why now? Well, it seems that that fellow blogger I mentioned has a -much- younger suitor and we have all kind of been low key warning him it could be a scam. But what if it IS real? What if Mr. Cleveland is actually interested in J because he finds him attractive? What if it's a paraphilia? We don't know. Historically there's been many famous May/December romances in the queer world. There's people writing about M/M romances with an age difference. It's not that unusual. Is our personal bias weighing heavy here? Is it because we think that older gay men are not attractive and all their have is their money because their looks are gone?

And no, those are not rhetorical questions.

XOXO

P.S. And M/M fiction is apparently full of this topic! Gimme!