The comedian Rodney Dangerfield famously said: “I’m at the age where food has taken the place of sex in my life. In fact, I’ve just had a mirror put over my kitchen table.”

While everybody worries about the young getting too much, nobody expects the old to get any at all.

The UK National Sexual Health Strategy does not even mention older people, and the National Service Framework for Older People does not mention sex. The UK National Survey on Sexual Attitudes talked only to people under the age of 44.

But behind the prim assumption that people old enough to be grandparents are too old to care about sex, there is plenty of it going on.

An American survey shows that sex looms large in the lives of the over-60s, with a high proportion of men and women remaining intimately active well into old age. Such evidence as does exist from Britain suggests that things are not very different this side of the Atlantic.

The survey of 3,000 Americans aged from 57 to 85, published in the ultra-respectable New England Journal of Medicine, found that age played a smaller part in sexual activity than attitude. You are as young, and sexy, as you feel.

Despite problems such as erectile dysfunction and lower desire, the spirit among these game American pensioners was still apparently willing, even if the flesh was weak. The majority of those under 74 claimed to be leading active sex lives, reporting engaging in sexual activity with “at least one partner” in the 12 months preceding the study.

Almost three quarters of men and women aged 57 to 64 (73 per cent) and more than half (53 per cent) aged 65 to 74, were leading active sex lives, or claimed to be. Even among those aged 75 to 85, more than a quarter (26 per cent) were still having sex.

Two thirds of those aged 65 to 74 and 54 per cent of those aged 75 to 85 reported having sex at least two or three times a month. Almost a quarter of sexually active septuagenarians and octogenarians claimed that they had sex once a week or more.

Researchers defined sexual activity as “any mutually voluntary activity with another person that involves sexual contact, whether or not intercourse or orgasm occurs”.

In the youngest age group, sexual activity “usually or always” involved vaginal intercourse. But a surprisingly large number – 60 per cent of sexually active participants in the youngest age group and 31 per cent in the oldest – said that they engaged in oral sex.

To what extent such claims are boasting or wishful thinking cannot, of course, be measured. But the authors, led by Stacy Tessler, of the University of Chicago, say that the interview methods they used “are well-accepted as being valid”.

Women of all ages were significantly less likely than men to report sexual activity, in part because they have often outlived their partners.

About half of men and women who were sexually active had experienced at least one sexual problem. Erectile problems affected 37 per cent of men, and 43 per cent of sexually active women reported low desire.

Almost one in seven – 14 per cent – of the men questioned said that they had used “medication or supplements” to improve sexual function.

Dr Tessler said: “We found that older adults remain interested and engage in sex, yet many experience bothersome sexual problems that can compromise health and relationships.”

The work was chiefly funded by the National Institute on Ageing, part of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Richard Suzman, director of the Social and Behavioural Research Programme at the institute, said that the study “suggests a previously uncharacterised vitality and interest in sexuality that carries well into advanced age, which perhaps has not been appreciated as an important part of late life”.

A much smaller British study, by two researchers from the University of Sheffield, Merryn Gott and Sharron Hinchliff, found very similar responses.

Pillow talk

Someone asked Sophocles: ‘How is your sex life now? Are you still able to have a woman?’ He replied: ‘Hush, man; most gladly indeed am I rid of it all, as though I had escaped from a mad and savage master’ Plato

It is an infantile superstition of the human spirit that virginity would be thought a virtue and not the barrier that separates ignorance from knowledge Voltaire

The only unnatural sex act is that which you cannot perform Alfred Kinsey

I don’t see much of Alfred since he got so interested in sex Mrs Alfred Kinsey

Sex at age 90 is like trying to shoot pool with a rope George Burns

As I grow older and older . . . I find I care less and less who goes to bed with whom Dorothy L. Sayers

Chastity. . . the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions Aldous Huxley

Of the delights of this world man cares most for sexual intercourse, yet he has left it out of his heaven Mark Twain

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