Sex Education For The Elderly Causes Controversy

65 percent of those people over the age of 50 are still sexually active

Manchester City Council has decided to confront an awkward problem face on by publishing a booklet specifically designed to educate elderly people about sexual issues. Most people perceive sexual education as something which is targeted at teenagers who are going through puberty, however over the last decade the statistics of elderly people who suffer from sexually transmitted diseases has risen much more significantly than any other group of people.

The reason for this increase in STD’s has a lot to do with the arrival of the drugs Viagra, Cialis and Levitra as well as a growing awareness that by living healthily men and women are able to have sex well into their golden years. Recent research published by Ukmedix News also shows that the most at risk group of people for sexually transmitted diseases are recently widowed men.

Not everybody is supportive of this initiative by the Manchester City Council and the Conservative Member of Parliament Ann Widdecombe claimed it was a “waste of money”. Elderly people however do not have the same amount of sexual knowledge that younger people tend to have because even those who lived in the 1960’s did not have such easy access to the vast amount of sexual research which has been done over the last few decades. 

The holiday company Saga which conducted its own research into elderly sexual activity recently claimed that 65 percent of those people over the age of 50 are still sexually active and almost half of them say they have sex weekly.  The problem is that many of them believe that the only risk they have to contend with is pregnancy and if the women are post menopausal they think nothing can go wrong.

Elderly people also have very little experience with condoms or have forgotten how to use them. Manchester City Council has published 5,000 copies of the sexual education booklet and hopes that they will have an effect on reducing the number of medical incidences of elderly men and women suffering from sexually transmitted illnesses.