The Centers for Disease Control has release a report of American drinking habits that “astounded” researchers. Note that word: researchers don’t normally admit it when they are astounded, unless it’s by something enchanting, like a new species or subatomic particle. When you say you are astounded by human behavior that you are supposedly an expert in, it makes you sound like an ill-informed layman, which opens you up to snickering comments from other researchers and which doesn’t help you get grant money.
Sometimes, though, even epidemiologists are swept away in the moment.
The research showed that America is a nation of binge drinkers. In an average month, one in six of us got hammered on an average of eight drinks. (“Hammered” is a nontechnical term; the CDC defines binge drinking as four drinks for women and five for men in a period of a few hours.)
Our feral youth are more likely to binge (a quarter of them do so each month) and they consume nine drinks when they do, so they lead the staggering pack. People 65 and up have the fewest binge drinkers in their cohort—only about 4 percent—but those bingers binge more often than any other group, more than five times a month on average. The 45-64 cohort landed between the young and old, with more than 13 percent of the group binging a little fewer than five times a month. And when they binged, they consumed nearly seven drinks.
Those numbers probably underestimate the frequency and impact of binge behavior, says the Associated Press. “Alcohol sales figures suggest people are buying a lot more alcohol than they say they are consuming. Health officials estimate that about half of the beer, wine and liquor consumed in the United States by adults each year is downed during binge drinking.”
Given that somewhere between 13 and 4 percent of seniors are getting regularly smashed, it follows that a lot of them are engaging in reckless sexual behavior. There also seems to be a lot of casual, non-drunk elder-on-elder action. According to one researcher, “with divorce rates increasing, older people are re-partnering, joining online dating services and some are engaging in casual sex, often with multiple partners… There is a sentiment that says, ‘Let’s not waste what limited time we have left, let’s use it to the full.’”
For the oldest women (over 80), sexual activity is quite satisfying. (That is to say, they aren’t doing it out of habit, and they aren’t trying to jumpstart emotional intimacy by suffering through a less-than-gratifying night in an adjustable bed when they’d rather be reading Jane Austen.) According to one study of sexual activity and older (40-plus) women, half had some sexual activity in the past month and while “frequency of arousal, lubrication, and orgasm decreased with age, the youngest (<55 years) and oldest (>80 years) women reported a higher frequency of orgasm satisfaction.”
As horny as American olds are, they seem restrained compared to their counterparts in Korea. According to the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s survey of 500 Koreans (436 men and 64 women) aged 65 and older, two-thirds of the subjects were sexually active. But the stunner (according to the Korea Times) is that 53 percent of the sexually active study subjects (which is 35 percent of the total of those surveyed) said they had hired prostitutes. (There’s no mention of the timeframe, but another study noted in the Korean Herald found that 16.2 percent of older folks had paid for sex in the past two years.)
This is kind of interesting, if for no other reason than it provides a baseline for future studies. It would be fascinating to learn how this has changed in recent decades, because of the aforementioned online dating services, erectile dysfunction drugs and attitudes about what it means to be, say, 80.
Painting “Flora’s mallewagen” by Hendrik Gerritsz Pot (1580-1657) via Wikimedia Commons. In this allegory of the Tulip Mania, the goddess of flowers is riding along with three drinking and money weighing men and two women on a car. Weavers from Haarlem have thrown away their equipment and are following the car. The destiny of the car is shown in the background: it will disappear in the sea.
