You Should Want Old People to Have Sex

You best start believing in stories about old people humping--one day, you'll be in one!

Photo by Matt Bennett on Unsplash

Well, it’s official: I’m entering my Sex Era. I can’t seem to stop writing about sex. I did that twice this week already, to much commotion, and last week I wrote a whole article about cringe kinks, plus something about men’s height which wasn’t explicitly sexual, but purposefully opened with the title, Could Five Inches Change Your Life?

I’m not a “sex writer.” For those new to this Substack, I write about all forms of social dynamics from friendship to dating to parenting (and rarely, but occasionally, politics—although the last time I did that, I wrote about Trump being the dom in a BDSM relationship with Elon Musk, oops.) And yes, occasionally I write something about gooning. But lately, especially, I have been writing a lot about sex.

Some people—especially some people under the age of twenty-five—are not pleased to hear someone “my age” writing about sex (I’m 35.) Although I’ve mostly resisted sharing details about my sex life on Twitter, I do make plenty of sex jokes, as I am a, well, humor account (I learned recently that my faux-humblebrag bit about “being bullied in high school for having the tightest pussy” has been taken seriously by a couple people.) And when all of the hullaballoo about Sabrina Carpenter’s recent provocative album cover dominated (no pun intended) my feed, I made plenty of sex jokes about that too, while making it clear that I think women enjoying consensual sex however they want to is a good thing.

A couple Gen Z posters more or less told me that coming from someone my age, this was very gross. They do not want to think about old people (myself included) having sex. One told me that the “millennial obsession with sex” needs to end. Many of them don’t want to think about sex at all—I recall someone a while back insisting that sex scenes in books violated the consent of the characters who didn’t agree to be part of the reader’s “voyeurism.” A recent viral Substack note has decried “38-year-olds” writing about Gen Z’s lack of sex, while suspiciously not denying the lack of sex. But anyway, many of these anti-sex young people said that sex was fine in theory, but it was gross to hear about, or think about, anyone over the age of thirty doing it. Basically, it’s okay if I have sex, but I should know better than to joke about it in a place where 24-year-old minors might be traumatized by the unbearable cringe of it.

Only one problem: sometime, possibly very soon, they will be too old to have sex without being equally cringe.