Gendered Neutral? Medical Representations of Senescent Sexuality

By Sarah Goodfellow

In 1956, physician William H. Masters, of Masters and Johnson renown, addressed the International Association of Gerontology, and referred to people over sixty as “a third sex or neutral gender” (Anonymous). Was he truly proposing that there are three sexes?

First, one should note that “third sex” and “neutral gender” are not the same thing. Historically, the term “third sex” was used throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, most notably by German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, to refer to individuals then believed to possess the sexual characteristics of both males and females--for example, hermaphrodites and homosexuals. 1 More recently, historian and developmental biologist Ann Fausto-Sterling stirred some waters by proposing that biological sex encompasses at least five sexes. 2 And on a more popular level, Hedwig and the Angry Inch has revived Plato’s idea that there were originally three human sexes: male, female, and a third sex that was half male and half female. “Neutral gender,” on the other hand, would seem to imply a different sort of sexual status--one which is neither male nor female.

Returning to 1956, though it is doubtful that Masters meant to imply that the elderly are either homosexuals or hermaphrodites, his word choice merits examination. The very ambiguity of Masters’s statement illustrates the various and sometimes contradictory ways in which senescent sexuality has been represented. What, then, have been the beliefs about the aging process that have made medical authorities cast about for terms different from those generally used to describe the two sexes and genders?

Historically, the threat that old age has posed to gender identity has been profound, and the sexual status of the aged has been problematic. For a number of social and cultural reasons, the elderly have not been supposed to have or to want to have sex. As a result, popular and medical literature has widely prescribed an end to sexual activity for the elderly--ostensibly for their own peace of mind and physical well-being. As French physician Louis Noirot observed in 1873, in old age “like our hair, our desires should wither” (Noirot quoted in Stearns, 243). The prescriptive flavor of this statement is telling: he is stating not that desire does wither, but that it should. For theories about sexuality being deeply embedded within a paradigm of reproduction, there has seemed to be no biological reason for the elderly to be sexual at all. Menopause has thus been interpreted as a “natural” mandate for women to cease all sexual activity, and aging men have been assumed to follow a parallel course into impotence and infertility. It was, therefore, a common observation in medical literature throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that aging women lose their “feminine grace” and grow more “masculine.” The corresponding belief that old men become more “feminine” in behavior, if not also in appearance, was also a mainstay. The fact that echoes of these ideas can still be heard in the twenty-first century speaks to the enduring power of preconceptions of old age as sexless.

The de-sexing of the aged body was often quite literal in descriptions of senescent physiology: the genital and reproductive organs were said to shrink, shrivel, and atrophy. Interestingly, there have been two schools of thought with regard to the physiological transformation of the male in old age. One maintained that both sexes display stronger masculine characteristics. The other held that men become more like women. At the turn of the last century, for example, popular advice author Sylvanus Stall cited the greater “tenderness” and lack of zeal that rendered old men “unfit for war.” Drawing on contemporary medical authorities, Stall was explicit about the androgynous nature of late life:

When the period of reproduction is passed and the climacteric period of life has been attained, there are again numerous physical changes. Instead of assuming more marked sexual characteristics, each of the sexes then seems to tend measurably to assume the characteristics of the opposite sex.

In contrast to the male, there was no lack of agreement about the transformation of the aging female. Medical writers unanimously agreed that she grew physically more masculine. Menopausal changes, including fat deposits at the lower part of the back and neck, flat and hard breasts, facial hair, and a deepening voice, were supposedly a direct consequence of the cessation of menstruation: no longer taxed by monthly blood loss, the body grew stronger, but also, more mannish (Stall). As Edward Tilt, a pioneer in menopause research remarked in 1857, “the invigoration of health is bought at some sacrifice to feminine grace.”

The blurring and fading of sexual characteristics was said to be manifest not only in the body but also in the mind. This meant that masculinization could be insidious--an aging woman who appeared perfectly feminine could yet experience a masculinization of her inner psychology. One authority claimed that post-menopausal women “feel the ground grow steadier underfoot,” and are consequently less prone to flights of fancy and passion. In the 1930s, sexologist Havelock Ellis also noted the advantages of menopause, including “clarity, objectivity, a sense for conceptions of abstract justice, toleration, business aptitude, [and] general social as well as political aptitudes” all supposedly typical masculine characteristics.

The ambiguous and supposedly non-reproductive sexuality of the elderly has also been reflected in discourse about their sexual behavior. With nothing to limit post-menopausal women’s desires to reproduction, they were believed to be likely to exhibit any number of transgressive behaviors, from sadism to campaigning for the right to vote. 3 I maintain that, because of its non-reproductive nature, senescent sexuality was often equated with “perversions,” such as masturbation and homosexuality, or with the immature and objectless sexuality of children. According to one authority from the 1920s, for example, a woman who had led a “serene and monogamous sexual life” might at menopause be plagued with an “extraordinary hyperexcitability” of “the delicate and numerous nerves in the external genitals,” compelling enough to launch her “upon evil courses” (Marañon). He hinted that she may even resort to masturbation.

Around the same time, Sigmund Freud described how the post-menopausal woman loses her “womanliness,” and either reverts to an infantile, anal-erotic stage, or to deviance:

It is a well-known fact…that after women have lost their genital function their character often undergoes a peculiar alteration. They become quarrelsome, vexatious and overbearing, petty and stingy; that is to say, they exhibit typically sadistic and anal-erotic traits which they did not possess earlier, during their period of womanliness.

The “masculine” sexual behavior of aging women included increased sexual aggressiveness. This might go so far as to cause them to be attracted to other women. Such sexually aggressive older women were sometimes described as suffering from sexual virilism or labeled viragos. Viragos occupied a sexually ambiguous position between male and female sexuality-- masculinized women, they were lesbians or lesbian-like in their behavior and appearance--in other words, Hirschfeld’s “third sex.”

The idea of a sort of sexual inversion or reversal of gender roles among the elderly remained current throughout the twentieth century. A 1962 study paved the way by suggesting that a lessening of sex-role differentiation was related to “successful aging,” meaning adaptation to a time of life when gender roles are not as rigidly defined. Building on this work, a 1977 paper examined the varying importance of sex-role differentiation over the life span. Betraying an assumption that gender identity is unimportant in late life, the author expressed dismay that the aged to cling to traditional sex roles, “in spite of their general lack of relevance” (Sinnot). Relevance to whom?

The champion of androgyny in old age, however, has been gerontologist David Gutmann, whose model remained popular into the 1990s. Basing his work on cross-cultural studies, Gutmann demonstrated in 1958 that middle-aged people perceive men as becoming passive with age (Gutmann 1961). In 1976, he proposed that older men have a more diffuse and less phallic sexuality, taking more pleasure in things like food, pleasant sights, and human association. Aggression, as well as pleasure, played a significant role in Gutmann’s conception of gender. He found that in the U.S., Italy, and Japan, male aggression declines after about age 55 to a level below that of the average female, and that these men then cultivate a previously undeveloped capacity for cherishing, appreciating, and bringing together. In contrast, Gutmann posits to a universal “sergeant virility of the older woman” who, according to him, ages “psychologically in the reverse direction.” By this he means becoming more aggressive, less sentimental, and “more managerial” (Gutmann 1979). Gutmann not only speaks specifically of androgyny in late life, but he refers to the process by which it is reached as “involution”: 4

Thus, over time and across sex lines a massive transcultural involution takes place: during the post-parental years the husband comes to be more dependent on the wife; he tends to defer to her wishes and requirements... The older wife becomes something of an authority to the husband; and through these various sex-role changes the normal androgyny of later life is ushered in. (Gutmann, emphasis added)

The idea that life follows a curve, or even a circle, is far from unique to the biomedical perspective. The similarities between youth and old age that medical authorities have emphasized, however, is revealing of the way in which they have theorized old age, and these in turn have repercussions in the conceptualization of late-life sexuality. “Involution” began to be used in biomedical literature during the mid-nineteenth century to refer to the physical process of aging. It was used to describe the time when an organism ceases to grow or develop, and begins to turn in on itself, or “involute.” Involution reflects a nineteenth-century tendency to conceive of physiology as a closed system with limited energy; in the beginning, an organism’s energy went to growth, then reproduction, and finally to simple survival. Involution in senescence, therefore, implied a turning inward or even reversal of direction.

Not unrelated to the idea of involution, it is significant that old age has often been referred to as a “second childhood.” This phenomenon deserves specific attention within a discussion of androgyny and old age. The idea that old age represents a return to childhood is one of the ways in which the elderly have been theoretically de-sexed. The infantalization of the elderly portrays them in such a manner that it is very difficult to imagine them as fully gendered, sexual adults. I propose that one underlying reason for the perceived androgyny of late life has been a formulation of senescent sexuality that echoes a pre-Freudian model of childhood sexuality: dormant, immature, and of little import. Because they are (theoretically) not reproductive, the sexuality of both the elderly and children have been seen as undifferentiated and insignificant. Herein too can be found a source of the confusion as to whether the elderly constitute a “third sex,” or no sex at all.

Before the general acceptance of Freud’s theories, children, though clearly sexed and gendered, were not perceived as sexual beings in the sense of having a definite (hetero)sexuality, experiencing sexual desires, and partaking in sexual behavior. It was supposedly the physiological changes of puberty and the arrival of fertility that rendered one sexual in any meaningful way. Thus, comparing the aged with the very young not only infantalized the former, but bestowed upon them a particular (pre-Freudian) childish sexuality. Gutmann, for example, claimed in 1976 that older men seek pleasure in “pregenital directions” such as food and pleasant sights and sounds (1979, 152).

The trajectory of life has been seen as linear, and also as curved, and though it goes in only one direction temporally, this does not mean that it cannot involute physiologically and psychologically. The rhetoric of the “curve of life,” however, is one of simile, not metaphor. The elderly were said to be like children, not to be children. In the post-Freudian era, the elderly continued to be infantalized, with the addition that their “second childhood” was no longer seen as a harmless, dottering return to the beginning of life, but rather a “regressive” or even neurotic state.

What, then, would constitute age-appropriate sexual behavior for the elderly? While ideas about childhood sexuality changed dramatically after the dissemination of Freud’s psycho-analytic theories, this change in sexological thought did not inspire a (re)examination of the theoretical model for sexuality in old age. Late-life sexuality remained, and to a large extent remains, critically unexplored, and the elderly continue to inhabit an ambiguous sexual space describable as, indeed, “a third sex or neutral gender.”

Notes

1. Interestingly, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, an even earlier usage of the term “third sex” referred to eunuchs. The reference cited is from the poet Byron in 1820: “A black old neutral personage Of the third sex stept up.” I would note, however, that though the Oxford English Dictionary claims that this quotation illustrates a use of “third sex” in reference to a eunuch, this is not necessarily obvious. Is a person who is “old” and “neutral” a member of the “third sex” because literally castrated, or can this phrase refer to a more general desexing of the aged as discussed in this paper?

2. Fausto-Sterling argued that along with male and female, the medical term “intersex” is a catch-all category that encompasses at least three distinct other sexes: herm, merm, and ferm (hermaphrodites, male pseudohermaphrodites, and female psuedohermaphrodites, respectively).

3. Marañon attributes the activities of the English suffragists to “the influence of a sexual disturbance of a hypogenital type.”

4. The Oxford English Dictionary defines involution as a biological term referring to “a retrograde process of development; the opposite of evolution; degeneration” and in physiology as “the retrograde change which occurs in the body in old age.”

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