"YOU probably haven't got the nerve to ask your elderly granny if she has had sex lately - not that it would ever occur to many of us to ask. The insidious ageism which colours attitudes to sex means that we tend to assume that sexuality fades with youth, but a new Swedish study shows that this is not necessarily the case. According to a study of 321 85 year old Swedish men and women by Dr Ingmar Skoog of Goteborg University in Sweden, who wrote about his research in the New England Journal of Medicine, elderly men are twice as interested in sex as elderly women.
Among 76 married men and women, 22 per cent of the men and 10 per cent of the women reported having sexual intercourse during the previous year. Nearly 46 per cent of the men and 24 per cent of the women reported having sexual feelings. Among the 245 unmarried elderly, 13 per cent of the men but only one per cent of the women were sexually active. This imbalance was explained by the fact that there were five times as many unmarried - elderly women as men. Asked if they had sexual feelings in the past year, 37 per cent of the men and 15 per cent of the women said that they had.