Deep-seated ageist beliefs would have us take for granted that ‘sexy expires’, in the words of poet Leanne Simpson. According to this logic, as bodies age they become less attractive, less desirable, and less desiring of sex. This logic of ‘sexy expiring’ is deeply grounded in gendered and ageist colonial ideals of beauty and sexuality. The idea that with age ‘sexy expires’ is also, though less obviously, tied up in compulsory sexuality (Przybylo, 2011; Emens, 2014; Gupta, 2015) – or the idea that a person needs to be sexy and have sex in order to attain optimal health, vitality, and a ‘successful’ ageing process.

In this chapter, I unpack how compulsory sexuality operates alongside desexualisation for ageing adults in western countries at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries, where the pressure to have sex and remain vigorous into late life looms strong. Following asexuality studies and critical disability studies scholar Eunjung Kim (2010), I mark a difference between asexuality and desexualisation. Asexuality, or low-to-no sexual attraction to others, I take for granted as a real sexual identity and orientation that can exist at any age as well as emerging later in life (Przybylo, 2016). Further, I mark desexualisation as a harmful process of barring or preventing access to sex, sexual fulfilment, and sexual identity. Understood in this way, asexuality and desexualisation are not one and the same, since asexuality is affirmatively embraced as a component of identity, and desexualisation is a process by which equitable access to sex and sexual expression is prevented.

Desexualisation is at work in a complex way in contemporary western contexts in relation to older adults. On the one hand, through being encouraged not to have sex – through being desexualised – older adults are left out of the fold of full social and intimate participation. In this sense, the desexualisation of ageing adulthood is a form of harm.