It’s clear she’s perfectly comfortable holding a rabbit vibrator up to her face to demonstrate size. She speaks breezily about the sex toys she recommends for seniors, talking for over an hour straight. Watching Joan Price give a webinar on sex toys for seniors, it’s easy to imagine that she was equally adept in two of her earlier careers: a high school English teacher and physical fitness instructor. Until now, this is something that demographic has been forced to navigate for themselves. It’s easy to understand why Ferry’s peers are having a hard time: There really aren’t many sex toys specifically marketed to older users. “I want one of those, how do I get one of those?” they ask her. “There were some items that someone say, ‘This would be good for older women,’ but there was nothing that had been manufactured with the older woman in mind.”Ī baby boomer herself, Ferry says that many women she’s spoken with in her peer group have expressed an interest in buying a real-life version of the product. “There was nothing that I could find that was aimed at older women,” said Ferry, estimating that her team charged 40 vibrators to the production studio as part of their research. Credit: Courtesy of netflixĮmily Ferry is the prop master on Grace and Frankie, and she scoured both the web and brick-and-mortar stores to find inspirations for the Ménage à Moi vibrator that would eventually appear on the show. Grace and Frankie inspect their creation. This is why advocates of a less ageist, more sex-positive culture say they’re hopeful Grace and Frankie can serve as a pivotal moment for making senior sexuality a more mainstream topic. “We have customers well into their eighties, and even their nineties.”īut often, she notes, they don’t know quite where to start. But sexuality most certainly doesn’t turn off,” said Lisa Lawless, a psychotherapist and owner of a boutique sex toy business and online resource center. “In our society and culture, we see sexuality displayed by a lot of very young people.
According to a 2017 survey conducted by the sex toy company TENGA, the average baby boomer reported masturbating an average of 3.3 times a week (compared to 6.3 for millennials and 4.6 times for Gen X-ers.) A 2010 study conducted by AARP found that 28 percent of older adults had sexual intercourse at least once a week, and 85 percent of these men and 61 percent of the women agreed sex is important to their overall quality of life. It’s almost enough to make you think that older people have lost their interest in sex, which is a generalization that’s simply not true. The most recent season of Broad City, for example, featured an older woman named Garol shopping for a comically large dildo.īut beyond jokes, there’s a persistent lack of representation of older adults in sexual scenarios. Senior sexuality is often used as an ageist punchline - even in some of the most “progressive” of shows. And having the sex toy be the brainchild of postmenopausal women who talk openly about their experiences developing and using it? Well, that’s pretty subversive.
#AND THEN THERE WAS LIGHT 2018 SEATTLE SERIES#
While sex toys have made a fleeting appearance in other popular TV shows, basing a major series storyline around them is on another level. 19) is in uncharted sex-positive territory. There’s no question about it, Grace and Frankie (which returns to Netflix for a fourth season on Jan. Sounds ideal - except no such thing exists in the real world. Their fictional creation has a soft grip gel sleeve, is lightweight, can be easily repositioned, and even features glow-in-the-dark control buttons.