Tapping and “Wrinkle Porn”

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Recently one of our weekly Vermont papers ran a review of And So It Goes, a film about two people in their late sixties whose relationship evokes such scorn in the reviewer that he must coin a new phrase, “wrinkle porn”, to express his disgust with this film and others whose characters are beyond middle age and still interested in sex.  I haven’t seen the film, not because of the review, but because it came and went in the blink of an eye while blockbusters showcasing ever more cleverly manufactured gory deaths, explosions, and earth ravaging have run at local theatres for weeks.  This post, however, isn’t about film; it is about language that suggests we should be ashamed of our passions once we reach what our culture calls Old Age.  Tapping helps us to claim our passion – for sex and for life – at any age; it also helps us to neutralize the negative effects of words used cleverly, if inaccurately, to describe the waters we navigate in our sixties, seventies, and beyond.

In the review, the description “wrinkle porn” is applied to several other films, including Quartet and Trouble With the Curve, films I have seen.  I am a person in my late sixties.  I have wrinkles,  and . . . , I am passionately in love with my husband and with life.  As I reflected on the reviewer’s new film genre, I wondered if he decided that passion in older people is pornographic because of his own discomfort with the idea of sensual, sexual passion in older adults.

Popular culture is full of one liners that indicate a collective discomfort around passion in general.  Cries of ‘get a room’, and ‘grossssssss’, and ‘no PDAs puleeze’ precede the laugh-track hilarity on many sitcoms.  We can talk about crystal meth labs and dead children and war without much emotional discomfort, but we find it very hard to talk about sex without becoming adolescent gigglers or puritanical shamers.  And when the passionate people are older and do not fit into the cultural stereotypes of the ever giving parent, caretaker, wisdom carrier, or helpless, addled victim, phrases such as “wrinkle porn” are born.

Last week, I wrote about using tapping to explore our personal deep-seated prejudices that lead to racial tension and violence.  This week, I suggest we use tapping to address the stereotypes that limit who we can be and become as we age.  I think of “Granny” Doris Haddock’s commitment to cleaning up the way candidates are funded by calling attention to election finance challenges on a walk across America when she was in her early nineties.  Who cares whether she was having sex or not.  When I look at a woman like that, fully committed to making elections fair, I say to myself, “I’ll have what she’s having!”

And what are the Madeleine Kunins, the David Suzukis, the Judi Denchs, and the Bernie Sanders of the world having?  The answer applies to every engaged citizen regardless of age:  a passionate love affair with life.  Tapping to neutralize the rage we feel when we are diminished by language because we are old and growing older frees up energy to engage in all kinds of intimate and public acts of deep connection.  Pornography is a word that, in its narrowest definition, is used to describe sexual exploitation for the sole purpose of arousing prurient interests for financial gain.  When we use this definition, we see that many movies with a PG 13 rating are pornographic.

Perhaps it is because of our Puritan roots here in America that human sexual encounters between consenting adults are described as pornographic if they occur outside a specific “moral” code or traditional view.  Calling sex between consenting older adults in their late sixties “wrinkle porn” is nothing if not a manifestation of this heavy handed Puritanism.  Tapping to dispel rage, to free energy for love and sex, for community involvement, and for general joy in Life as this wild ride comes to us, is one of the most effective ways to keep ourselves healthy and engaged . . . no matter the judgment of others.

Until next week

Jane

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Jane Buchan, MA, AAMET Advanced Practitioner, jane@winterblooms.net, 802-533-9277