Sex is good. What else can you say? We’re a species that gets to actually enjoy sexual activity. It makes babies. When consenting adults do sex-making, it is good.
Image: Edwin Torres/Wikimedia Commons
A new study suggests that when old people do sex, it is also good. Maybe even more good. The researchers behind a new study already knew that increased mental, social, and physical activity is associated with less cognitive decline. So, they posit, seeing as sex consists of mental, social, and physical activity, more sexing must also mean better thinking.
The study only had 73 people in it, aged 50 to 83, with an average age of around 62. The study recruited the frisky folks through “adverts disseminated by local community networks.” Each old person answered survey questions about their sexual activity frequency from the past twelve months, where “sexual activity was defined as engagement in sexual intercourse, masturbation, or petting/fondling,” according to the study. That’s also how I define it, by the way.
The researchers also asked questions about their participant’s educations, gender, and cardiovascular health, as well as other factors like their social wellbeing. Then, the older crew performed tests of their attention, memory, and other cognitive abilities. Ultimately, the study finds that the ability to articulate oneself, and the ability to determine how objects relate to each other in space increased the more people performed sexual acts.
Hell yeah!
Does the study have limitations? Of course it does. The authors point out that 73 isn’t a large number of people to generalise about something like this. They also don’t differentiate between different kinds of sexual activity. “This field of study is still relatively young, and we plan to address such details in our subsequent research,” they write.
Finally, and I’m so glad they point all these limitations out, it’s not a controlled experimental study, just a survey. “We cannot infer a causal relationship between SA and cognitive function,” just that the people who had better cognitive abilities also said that they boned more.
Maybe they bone more because they’re smarter, for all we know. The study does have another thing going for it, though: it’s a replication study of another one performed by the same team last year.
So, honestly, f**k it, grandmas and grandpas of the world. By “it”, I mean each other.