Sexuality in Older Women and Their Partners

Sexual Desire and the Sexual Response Cycle

Along with the startling myth busting around sex and aging, even the sexual response cycle has been recently reevaluated and reconstructed to more accurately fit women's sexual functioning.

For many women, particularly postmenopausal women, drive fades and is no longer the initial step in the response cycle. The classic Masters and Johnson model first developed in 1966 suggested a linear model of the sexual response cycle -desire leading to arousal and plateau then to orgasm and resolution. While they did suggest that women had the potential to experience this cycle in an infinite variety of ways in contrast to men who only differed in duration, they still put forth a linear model. Sexologists improved this somewhat in the 90's by including satisfaction as a necessary component to fulfill the cycle. And more recently, Rosemary Basson offered an alternative model to understanding the sexual response cycle that suggests that for women, it is not linear and many women begin a sexual encounter from a position of sexual neutrality with desire developing only after sexual activity stirs physiologic arousal. Arousal may come from a conscious decision or as a result of seduction or suggestion from a partner. This is extremely important to understand because this validates the reality for many women who have come to believe that because the initial drive has gone they are no longer sexual beings and it reassures their partners that it is not that they have lost desirability.

Last Modified: September 5, 2006