Obstetric research is vital. It provides insights into normal physiological responses of the body, the impact of pathology on those responses and understanding about how to diagnose and treat disease.

If youth is associated with sexual vitality, older people are thought to represent the death of sexuality (Mahieu et al, 2014). There are few media images that validate older people as sexual beings, and the physical, aesthetic and status-related losses associated with age contribute to thinking of them as unattractive and thus uninterested in sex (Garrett, 2014). It is unsurprising then that older people come to internalise beliefs concerning their non-sexual or post-sexual status (Garret, 2014; Simpson et al, 2018).

The ageism just described appears thoroughly normalised. Indeed, what I term ‘ageist erotophobia’ (Simpson et al, 2018) that is disgust at, refusal or more often failure to imagine or acknowledge older people as sexual beings, finds resonance in the observation that sex and intimacy have largely been ‘designed out’ of social policy, care practice and academic research concerning later life (Hafford-Letchfield, 2008). See also Bauer et al (2012) in Australia, Doll (2012) in the US and Villar et al (2014) in Catalonia/Spain). Despite an emerging international scholarship on ageing sexuality, on rare occasions when the subject has been acknowledged in the professional practice literature, it has largely been framed as counterintuitive, inappropriate, or a threat or problem to be managed (Doll, 2012). This applies especially to individuals affected by a dementia/loss of cognition (Drakeford, 2006). Recognition as an older sexual being seems rare. At best, there appears grudging respect for if not pathologisation of the predatory, middle-aged, middle-class ‘cougar’ (Kaklamanidou, 2012) and the ‘randy old goat’ still interested in sex despite advancing years (Simpson et al, 2017). Yet, pressures towards what I would call ‘compulsory non-sexuality’ can have serious ramifications for the mental health/self-esteem and quality of life of older people (Hinchliff et al, 2019).

The stereotypical thinking outlined earlier is damaging not just because it demeans but also because it obscures understanding of the realities of older people's lives (Simpson et al, 2018). Older people's accounts range from elected or compulsory non-sexuality, to a desire for sexual opportunity, through to continuation of sexual relations (Bauer et al, 2012; Simpson et al, 2018). Indeed, it is possible that sexual experimentation may be more available to older people with more time and leisure than younger people with jobs, caring responsibilities and various social demands.

This Sex and Intimacy in Later Life book series will explore, interrogate and enlighten on the sensual, sexual and intimate lives of older people. The motivation for launching this series was a concern with the relative lack of attention in public, professional and academic/intellectual spheres to sex and intimacy in later life (indicatively, Hafford-Letchfield, 2008; Simpson et al, 2018a, 2018b). The series is intended to contribute to and enrich the development of the field of studies composed of the intersections of age, sex, sexuality and intimacy as a critical and important area of scholarship. It is only beginning to be recognised as an important social, cultural and political domain of study within and beyond the ‘Western’ academy, from which it has emerged. Its earliest contributions, of which this volume is a part, are motivated by a desire to recognise and reject the pathologies and prejudices that have infused this intersection – what Simpson has termed ‘ageist erotophobia’ (Simpson et al, 2018b, p 1479) – and fuel the failure to acknowledge older people as sexual agents. This is both an intellectual and a political agenda, to question and evaluate the impact of real rather than assumed losses of cognitive, physical, social and sexual capacity, and to recuperate older people as sexual agents from dismissal, ridicule and trivialisation.

If the latter half of the twentieth century was characterised by challenges to the pathologies of social identities – particularly gender, ethnicity and race, disability, sexuality – and struggles for recognition, rights and liberties, more intersectional struggles and recognitions characterise the twenty-first century (on intersectionality, see indicatively Hancock, 2016; Hill Collins and Bilge, 2016). Significant among these has been the re-evaluation of what it is to age and to be an older agent in contemporary societies. Older people have historically experienced both veneration and respect and neglect and pathology, largely based on differing cultural stereotypes of the value of age (Ylanne, 2012). The most common characterisation is that older people are not sexual, past being sexual or represent a problematic sexuality – or their sexuality is a superficial concern and secondary to concerns of health, care, life course and support by public services and engagement and pensions/resources.

This volume was curated to launch the book series Sex and Intimacy in Later Life and aims to provide a coherent, critical overview of scholarship focused on the identitarian and intersectional experience of age, sex and sexuality. As identified in the Series Introduction, it forms part of a broader intellectual project that aims to put sex back into sexuality. With such considerations in mind, we wanted to produce a text that demonstrates that this emerging field of knowledge (covering a relatively neglected set of cross-cutting concerns) contains some vibrant scholarship and is starting to set an agenda for further and future research. Our hope is that such an agenda can be articulated into policy and practice that, in time, could help validate, support and enrich the sexual and intimate lives of older sexual agents.

In effect, this volume has showcased a variety of work by emerging and established scholars based in Europe, Australia and the US, who are interested in later life sex and intimacy in various ways. As such, it has featured a mix of theoretical and theoretically informed empirical work that has variously drawn on a wide vista of thought. This theoretical purview encompasses thinking mainly from social gerontology, structuralism, poststructuralism, anti-racism and various feminisms. For example, the chapter by Debra Harley productively draws on feminism and antiracist theory and would add to knowledge in social gerontology, where accounts of the obstacles and opportunities for agency for older black women as quotidian sexual agents seem lacking. Generally, the chapters in this volume are very much part of an uncovering of the intersecting influences that help to make up later life sexuality as it enmeshes with other forms of difference. The character of a volume that foregrounds diversity in later life sexuality inevitably commits itself to an identitarian focus and, if more ‘savvy’, an intersectional one in various ways.

The main foci of this volume (the recuperative and intersectional projects) rest on a threefold justification. First, it is important both to dispel the stereotypes, pathologies and prejudices that impose upon ageing sexualities and to understand some of the complexities of older people's sexuality, sexual desires and pleasures.

Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 suggests a recognition of finality, mortality and the changes that ageing brings, with a plea for love (and respect?) from those who are younger, through the certain knowledge that they will miss those who are ageing when they pass, and will experience ageing and its vicissitudes themselves. This is ageing as natural cycle and selfaware progression through the life course. It appeals to naturalised and normalised contours of the process of ageing, which are ‘coloured in’ by cultural representations of how we are seen to age. Older people should ‘grow old gracefully’, both experience and express that ‘slow journey into the twilight of their lives’.

While the sentiment of the sonnet might be regarded as romantic in its appeal to the recognition and acceptance of naturalism and the character of love and respect across generations, it betrays both a naivety and a danger. Its naivety lies in its ‘rose-tinted’ characterisation. Generally, in more economically developed societies, age is more a subject of pathology, prejudice and crude cultural stereotypes – the irrelevant or burdensome rather than the experienced or useful, the decaying rather than the preserved and venerable, the infirm rather than the healthy within the life course, the decrepit or absent-minded rather than the eccentric or the wise. These are real dangers to older people's agency, dignity and (self) respect. Their roles are simultaneously and contradictorily seen as celebrated and wasted, cherished and abandoned, loved and left behind.