Sex/uality Artifacts

Hey class, my name is Lauren Still and I presented my artifact during yesterday’s class in relation to the reading, “An Affair to Remember.” I thought that this reading was an interesting one as it expressed the controversy present within sexuality and older adults; mostly in relation to those older adults with dementia and/or Alzheimer’s. In the reading, the son of a dementia patient had walked in his father’s room to find an elderly woman performing oral sex on his father. The son then felt as though his father needed to be monitored more closely as he believed that his father may not have given appropriate consent before the sexual act had occurred.

The controversy present in this situation is related to the question, “Do these elderly patients need to be monitored/supervised, and if so, how much supervision is appropriate without breaking the boundary of privacy?” What I found to present as my artifact in class was a news broadcast of two news reporters discussing this controversial topic and how sexual acts shared between elders (and dementia patients) may lack a sense of consent prior to engaging in the sexual act due to the patient potentially being unable to think clearly enough to choose to engage in a sexual act with another person. In the reading specifically, the two had claimed that they had liked each other and portrayed a mutual want to be together. However, some may believe that this simple mutual feeling may not be enough to be considered as consent to a sexual act.

I was curious as to what the class thought about this controversial topic and fortunately I received some feed back from classmates. Most class mates felt empathetic with the elderly patients in terms of their privacy. Both classmates that engaged in followup discussion felt that it was sad to possibly have these patients monitored, especially if it meant separating the two from each other. It seemed that those who shared their opinions on the topic felt as though the elderly couple deserved their privacy boundary and that the mutual feeling of liking each other was enough to let the two engage in sexual acts without the assisted living staff knowing if they had both agreed on the act or not.

The link to the news broadcast that I shared is listed below if anyone is interested in viewing the rest of it.