Youthfulness without Youth

摘要

In 2006, an Orlando, Florida, news station ran a story entitled, "STDs Running Rampant in Retirement Community." The article cited a gynecologist at the world's largest retirement community, The Villages, stating that she saw more patients with diseases like herpes and HPV there than at her Miami practice. Health professionals attributed this surge to three factors: the use of Viagra, the low risk of pregnancy, and the dearth of sex education among residents. This explanation brings to the fore characteristics of a cohort whose formative years occurred prior to the first sexual revolution and the emergence of HIV-a cohort representing a new market segment referred to as the "ageless consumer." In their article "New Sex for Old: Lifestyle, Consumerism, and the Ethics of Aging Well," sociologists Stephen Katz and Barbara Marshall relate this ideal-a posthuman subject emancipated from decline-to "broadening connections between the new and sexually fit aging; the marketing, pharmaceutical, and consumerist industries that cater to it; and the concurrent neoliberal political agendas that require people to adopt risk-aversive, active, self-reliant lifestyles." This emerging ethos, they say, "liberat[es] sexual performance from whatever limits the aging body might impose on it through disease, genetics, or physical defection."