Category Archives: Ageing stereotypes

Insights into common stereotypes around ageing and older people.

69 Love Sex Senior

69 love sex seniorNone of us wants to think about our grandparents “doing it”. We pretend to ourselves that at a certain age, people lose interest in sex. We keep it in the realm of the young – those with firm bodies, unbridled passions and, well… flexibility.

In 69 Love Sex Senior, filmmaker Menna Laura Meijer not only challenges our denial of older people as sexual beings but also explores their broad variety of sexual and romantic experiences. She shows that sex and love continue into older years in just as many different forms as we see amongst the young. Together with her wonderfully warm and entertaining selection of older people she explores a broad spectrum of experiences and expectations. read more

HOME: An unusual arts project about ageing

My name is Brienna Macnish and I’m twenty-five. For the past twelve months I have been interviewing older people about their experiences of ageing as part of an arts project called HOME. I’ve heard lots of different stories, some uplifting, some deeply sad and have been struck time and time again by the generosity with which people have shared their stories with me.

HOME is the result of my interviewing. It is an audio work, experienced by one person at a time inside the home of a stranger.  Individually, audience members walk through a home, exploring and listening to a very personal and moving account of one woman’s experience of the years passing. read more

Wanted: A Wonderful Word For Us

I am searching for a word. No dementia jokes please. A word: glamorous, rich, evocative, that we can appropriate to give old age a better tint. Just as Gays did, and forever improved the image and the language. We need something to distinguish us, for example, as the last generation that experienced life in the home without computers, while being the generation that helped the invention to reach its present sophisticated state.

The man who invented the mouse, Douglas Engelbart, died only last year at the age of 88. I wonder if, in his later years, any patronising young git asked him if he knew what a mouse was. read more

The beauty of age

laughing coupleWorking in marketing and communications in the not-for-profit sector, I have am always considerate of how people are portrayed in both words and images. How we represent people to the rest of the community can have a really big impact on how that particular group of people, whether it is people experiencing homelessness, people with disabilities, people of different ethnicities or older people, are perceived by the general community. That perception in turn drives how those people are treated in society. read more