Q My lady is 60, 15 years younger than me. She wants more sex and thinks I should eat more meat to boost my libido. I don’t want drugs; is she right?

DR THOMAS STUTTAFORD

A You are doing well, keep it up. At your, or as I should say our, age, well over 60 per cent of men are too impotent to have penetrative sex at all. When they are first married, more than 95 per cent of couples have sex at least once a month, many once or twice a day, but, by the age of 70, only one man in four has an active sex life.

As there is a 15-year age gap, it would have been totally unrealistic of you both not to have expected some disparity in your sexual needs and drives as you got older. Usually these differences in desire are no more than a passing irritation that shouldn’t cause distress. When balanced against the lasting comradeship and friendship that 30 or 40 years of partnership and shared experiences have engendered, the inability to be as good a stud as you were in your youth should be as nothing. Anyway, in most partnerships, the age gap becomes less important with time.

By the age of 75, the majority of men are suffering from some degree of erectile dysfunction and haven’t had spontaneous erections with a regular partner for 15 to 20 years. From about the age of 50 onwards, when contemplating sex with his regular partner, a man doesn’t need to have had his libido boosted by fillet steak for lunch and dinner, day after day, to have effective sex. What he needs is to have a partner who realises that he requires tactful, nondemanding physical stimulation before he will have an erection. And, at your age, even a man with the most splendid arteries and sensitive nerve endings will need a little help.

Many women who are in their sixties were brought up to expect men to be the instigating partner. They are not always used to holding male genitalia and, therefore, often tend to hold it like a dirty dish rag between their finger and thumb. This is unlikely to arouse.

The three most common sexual problems that a man may suffer in older age are impotence, delayed or nonexistent ejaculation, and loss of libido. The loss of libido may be a factor that increases either the problems of impotence and/or delayed ejaculation. Even if you were to take pills, such as Viagra and Cialis, which you say you don’t wish to, it might have little effect on libido; though your potency would improve. That said, sometimes libido is stimulated to a limited extent, as an improved potency boosts self-confidence. I’d suggest you do try them, provided that your doctor approves.

As testosterone falls in older age, so does libido. Doctors are always chary of prescribing testosterone for men in their seventies for fear of stimulating dormant cancerous prostatic cells. Two other causes of loss of libido in older men are often missed. Depressive states are more of a problem (although not always recognised) in older men than in older women and, despite suggestions to the contrary, are amenable to treatment. It may, however, be less easy to hit on the correct drug immediately, and several different ones may have to be tried before a suitable one is found.

However, one common cause of loss of libido is medication. Many drugs – taken to treat high blood pressure, heart or renal failure – reduce libido. I hope that you have talked to your GP about your problems.

Dr Thomas Stuttaford, the Times doctor, spent many years working in a genitourinary clinic

SUZI GODSON

ASaints alive; where will it all end? There was a time when women of 60 were forgiven for wearing skirts with elasticised waists, and men of 75 were expected to sit by the fire and smoke a pipe. Now, senior citizens run marathons, take up Mandarin, join online dating agencies and hustle their doctor for Viagra prescriptions.

Yes, yes, it’s all fabulous, but shouldn’t reaching 75 afford you a little respite from the relentless pressure to keep up with men half your age. What’s wrong with slowing down when you’re a septuagenarian? All parts eventually wear out – especially moving parts – and if you expect the same performance from yourself at 75 as at 45, you only set yourself up for failure.

Sure, it’s great that drugs like Viagra, Cialis and Levitra can put lead in the old pencil, but the downside of their success is the fact that these drugs have inadvertently raised the sexual bar for everyone. In preViagra America, only an estimated 18 million men were receiving treatment for erectile dysfunction. Now, according to the National Institutes of Health, 30 million men – nearly a quarter of the male population of the United States – suffer from total or partial dysfunction. Curiously, the majority of them are aged 65 or older, an age at which partial erectile dysfunction might realistically be considered the norm rather than the exception.

Isn’t there something slightly sinister about any pharmaceutical solution imprinting itself in our psyche to such an extent that we end up defining natural side-effects of ageing as a medical condition? Will wrinkles become dermatological dysfunction? Will menopause become infertility dysfunction? If we allow ordinary signs of ageing to be viewed as a disability, we’re all buggered because inflated expectations breed nothing but dissatisfaction.

You are still perfectly capable of having sex at an age-appropriate frequency but, unfortunately for you, your woman has been seduced by the notion that things between the sheets would be better, firmer or more frequent if you could “boost your libido”. Besides the fact that a diet rich in red meat is more likely to give you indigestion than an erection, telling a man of your age that his performance is inadequate suggests, dare I say, a certain degree of insensitivity. I know she isn’t advocating drugs, but her demands have sown the seeds of doubt and the fact that you are seriously considering dining at the Aberdeen Angus steak house indicates that you are already questioning your performance.

Once a person starts consciously trying to “improve” anything about himself, he starts noticing small failures and finding fault where none was found before. If you don’t nip this in the bud, soon you will be asking your doctor for a prescription. And then what? Well, the hydraulics may improve but the sexual frequency won’t necessarily. Erectile dysfunction drugs affect the body but they don’t affect the mind, yet many men who decide to take the drugs realise this only after the fact. In a recent US study, 42 per cent of men who had tried such drugs had stopped using them because they had no impact on their levels of desire. Popping a pill can help to maintain an erection, but only if you feel turned on enough to get an erection in the first place.

Suzi Godson is the author of The Sex Book (Cassell, £16.99) and The Body Bible (Penguin, £16.99)

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