everlasting love

I think these images are challenging -- not at all offensive. Challenging because in my culture anyway we pretend that older folks have no sex drives and we fetishize youth to such a degree that women especially are encouraged to spend tons of money on surgery and anti-aging products so that they will retain their attractiveness.

Challenging because the only bodies we tend to see portrayed as desirable are young ones. And challenging because the aged are ridiculed way more often than they are lauded. 

I recently overheard a colleague of mine teaching a social work class on working working with the elderly and when she addressed the fact that the elderly have sex lives and that those sex lives need to be acknowledged by social workers who are working with them, I could hear from across the hall the squeamish giggles and the "eww gross" shrieks. They were profoundly uncomfortable even acknowledging that elderly folks have sex.

I've said before that i don't think we need less sex in advertising but that we need a wider range of sexuality and beauty depicted in advertising. I'd say this Virgin campaign is certainly doing that. It seems to present these couples in a way that makes it hard to laugh at them or ridicule them. They are clearly presented as happy and ordinary, not as clownish or freakish. 

...because public space really matters!

Elizabeth

I admit to being very curious about all kinds of things based on that quick story. I'd love to know how you met, what drew you together ....

I hope you're enjoying SitPS. We'd love to hear more from you!

...because public space really matters!

Elizabeth

The year was 1973.  I was a second mate on a schooner sailing the Bahamas.  A big boat, 286 feet long, four masts.  Years later, she went deep off of Hounduras in Hurricane Mitch;  it was like finding that an old lover had died.  I grieved for months.  Pls do not allow me to get ahead of myself.  (will willingly submit to a sound breast-whipping if I do it again).

The Bahamas had recently become independent  from Great Britian, and was going through 'the change'.  The British American Hotel was a fine place to place your feet on the balcony rail and sit under the ceiling fan, drinking 25 cent St Paulis, as long as you didnt mind the passersby below looking up your skirt.

I was on my way there, following a woman with an exceptionally eye-sweet transom.  She suddenly turned and sed

'Look here, Fuckie, why are you followin' me? 

Well, it was Katherine, and her face revealed 50 years of fine Irish skin that had lived in the sun.  Not what I had expected.  I sed,

'Well, I was hoping you would accompany me to the BA for some..'  

"Some what?  Some T & A?  Get it? T & A at the B & A?  Ha!'

'Sure, why not?'

So we retired to Montgomery Place, and the Hotel.  We kicked the empties and the magnolia branches off of the balcony and sat down.  What unfolded was the tale of action and adventure, courage and bravery, lust and romance; the tale of how K had shown up when she was my age, and lived there through the end of prohibition, through hard times, through a war, through the arrival of tourism as a way of life, and into a life where menopause was a distant memory, as were men;  they were all dead or beheath the ability to imagine an evening with such a strong, self-determined, sexy, vibrant, saggy and wrinkly and old, darling self of a beautiful woman who had lived where allegedly tougher guys had been too afraid to ever go.  What was to begin was the sleighride of my early life.

There is more.

Your turn.  Where are you, who are you, what are you about? 

Go

O

Otis

Katherine and I were most pleased to be seen in public.  I was with her when I was not at sea;  'three weeks on, three weeks off-Good God, Man!  A girl needs a rest!'  Her house had been inherited from her father decades before; she was the oldest of eight, it turned out, but they were in Australia, The United States and Ireland.  It was on a spit of land, with the sea on three sides.  I remember when it occurred to me that she had spent the better part (I should say the Lioness' share) of the last four decades, surveying all that she owned, naked.  God, what A Thought.

Well, on the morning of January 12 of that year, 25 years to the day, and a day, after my birth, I was struggling to get a few minutes of sleep.  Someone had gotten it into her head that what I really needed for my birthday was a night without sleep, a night with Katherine's undivided attention.  I was largely unable to move.  But there was a short (tiny) aged figure, the color of my wallet, every hair white or stained by it's proximity, nudging its foot into my head.

'Get up, Fuckie!'  She liked to call me Fuckie.  I had forgotten that the last two survivors from her youth that she had known in Ireland were coming to dinner that night.  It meant clothes, but not right now.  Right now, it meant work.

It was a winter's day in the tropics.  The air was 78, the breeze strong.  Massive clowds tore across the sky. plunging us into chills, soon relieved by the returning sun.  We made for the beach, K with a net bag for conch, and me with a trident for lobster.  It was a roiling surf that we plunged into, each on their own mission.  Finally, we sputtered to the surface, Katherine with four good sized conch. and a lobster on my spear, so big that it looked like it needed license plates.

On the beach, I noticed how chilled she was.  I put my arm around her, and at moment the Devine took her arm and swept away the clouds, both warming and illuminating us in the moment's perfection.

More

Otis