Male, Sexually Active Octogenarian in Senior Home - Sweet & Harmless, or Predator?

In My Humble Opinion
41

More agreeing with @Saintly_Loser than @ThelmaLou in the last couple of back-and-forths. So I’ll not rehash that but will pick at this one:

" ‘Take advantage of’ the girls" sure sounds paternalistic to me. As in they’re too innocent / stupid / unable to form ideas to be accountable for their own lives. So somebody else has to do it for them. Namely the clucking prudes who declared all sexual activity by young consenting women was an affront to nature and god. And indoctrinated a few generations of women with that nonsense from birth.

Thank goodness that too has mostly gone by the wayside of history.

As applied to folks of a fully sound mind. My earlier comments stand solidly in favor of protecting people not of sound mind. So I’ll answer your

… What constitutes “taking advantage of” in the context of the senior home?

that it’s about obtaining sex (or gifts, or money, or …) without willing consent knowingly given by someone competent to give it.

“Willing” is pretty easy to measure if you’re a third party witness. The devil lies in “knowing” and “competent”. And as always lies in the very gray middle, not at the white or black end of the spectrum.

If everyone on both sides is capable of consent and actually does consent, by definition it isn’t a predator.

There’s an old saying about women’s opportunities for finding a male mate in Alaska:

The odds are good but the goods are odd.

The point being that when / where women are in short supply they can “write their own ticket” and have their run of the willing men if they so choose. Again setting aside dementia, the elder living facilities are an example of the same odds, but favoring the male demographic.

Someone of either gender can “take advantage” of the demographic situation without “taking advantage” of any person in it. IOW “take advantage” has two meanings: “make legitimate use of a fortunate situation”, and “abusing”. One neutral, the other pejorative. We need to keep straight which flavor we’re each talking about.

42

A bit on terminology here in FL and in at least as much of the rest of the USA as I’ve researched. Which is several states.

Where my aged MIL lives they have two sections: “independent living”, and “assisted living”. At 95, MIL is in the former. The two groups of residents interact, but not a lot.

IMO/IME …

“Independent Living” is a LOT more like living in a college dorm than it’s like living in a hospital-lite. You have a 1BR apartment with living room, bedroom, bathroom, and kitchenette. You’ve got a reasonable amount of space and a reasonable assortment of your own furniture, clothes, tchotchkes, and all the rest. The cafeteria / dining hall is just down the hallway. As is all the various entertainments and all your friends.

These people may be mobility-challenged or ambition-challenged, but there’s not necessarily much wrong with their mind other than holding old fashioned notions, being long-retired and hence lazy, and general forgetfulness of minor details. They’re more wrinkly 8yos than anything else; not reliably responsible adults fully engaged in the world anymore, but they’re also not uncontrollable mischievous 3yos nor drooling incompetents. They retain almost all their critical faculties and rightly bristle at any suggestion they’ve already lost them. They’re doddery, not demented.

Like kids in a grade school (or underclass at college) they’re all effectively at the same stage of life even if the age range is a little wider than you’d find at college. So there’s lots of chrono-cultural commonality.

Conversely Assisted Living is much closer to hospital-lite. The residents there are much more helpless / needful of care. There is much more continuous oversight of people who’re so mentally or physically frail that can’t be left unmonitored for more than a few minutes. Somebody else feeds them, bathes them, ensures their pills get taken on schedule, moves them from place to place, interacts with them, etc. Resident care / management there is a lot closer to overseeing a 1-2yo than an 8yo.

“Nursing homes”, “dementia care”, “memory care”, and Alzheimer’s wards are yet further steps on the ever-descending staircase to oblivion.


When discussing any specific event, such as in the OP’s cite, IMO it’s important to apply the right ruler to the situation based on the nature of the facility and the types of folks typically living there.


As a very, very rough rule of thumb I’d suggest anyone well enough to live in a properly administered independent living facility is as capable of willing, knowing, competent consent to sex as is anyone reading this thread. At least as a default we should assume “Yes, they can consent” until a specific evaluation of a specific individual says otherwise.

It gets real iffy in assisted living, where the smart money would be the opposite default: “No, they’re incapable of consent” until specifically evaluated and found to be otherwise. Given that sex is always a bit of physical exercise I find it only marginally plausible that folks with a good enough physical body and good enough mental state to be having consensual sex would be in assisted living unless the lesser option of “independent” just wasn’t available in that part of the country. And them being placed in assisted when too well to be there would be subjectively worse than being in prison.

43

Mom lives in an “active senior” community. She told me awhile ago she gave up on " dating" . She divorced my now deceased dad years ago and had a healthy love life afyterward but never remarried.

But oh lord how she talks about these widows…any healthy male widower with a drivers license and can fix a leaky faucet. it is go time.

Dementia and Consent are different. But old people have sex.

44

I got into a lot of trouble with my step daughter for having a little fling with my ex who has dementia. We were married for over 20 years and she still had a vivid memory of our marriage and liked to talk about the romantic aspects of it. She would wear negligees and nighties around me and I eventually started having sex with her. My step daughter pretty much labeled me a predator and has not spoke to me in 2 years. In all honesty I wasn’t really turned on to her as I had much younger women I was seeing at the time. But a combination of curiosity and not wanting to hurt her feeling got me involved. I still don’t see anything wrong in what I did. She shared with her daughter that we were seeing each other that way and the shit hit the fan. . .

45

“works his way through the female population?” WTF does that even mean?

Is a woman who “works her way” through a hypothetically male-populated senior home a predator as well? Or is she just the tragic victim of sequential acts of predation by all of those predatory male predators?

If, as you posit, “everyone on both sides is fully capable of consenting and has consented”, then why is there any room at all for any of the participants to be labeled a predator?

46

That’s not the question on the table. My question was kicked off by the HuffPost article about a man.

It would make a good question for a new thread.

I don’t think there is.

Ask @HoneyBadgerDC’s stepdaughter what she thinks.

47

That seems like an unnecessary indignity for an adult in an assisted living facility having already suffered from an ignominious loss of their independence. I didn’t like assigned seating at lunch when I was in 8th grade and I would sure resent it like hell when I’m 76.

48

Setting aside the COVID-era precautions …

When my MIL lives it isn’t exactly assigned seating. Breakfast and lunch are not heavily attended and are sit where you like with who you like when you like. Dinner is crowded and they have to run the dining room through two cycles of people. Two cycles of very slow moving, slow eating, slow thinking people. Not stupid; just slooooow.

So your seating time is set. Folks can trade to the other seating if they can find somebody to trade with. Or can get on the waiting list and will be accommodated the next time there’s an opening in that seating due to resident turnover. Which is of course constant, and not only via death.

Left to their own devices many folks would eat alone and there’s simply not room and time to have 4-tops occupied by one dawdler. Efficiency also sorta demands folks not dither for 20 minutes deciding who’s going to sit with who tonight. The elderly in a group can dither like nothing you’ve ever seen. These are almost all 85+. Anyone younger is conspicuously youthful and probably lives there because of major physical mobility issues from stroke, car accident, etc.

So you’re expected to sit at your assigned table with your assigned tablemate(s). But if anyone is unhappy with their tablemates the staff will rearrange things next week and keep trying until everyone is happy enough. The end result is the seating arrangement is fixed and predictable, but not coercive (much).

It seems to work with not much grumbling. Well, not much more than typical oldsters do about everything anyhow. :slight_smile: IME.

49

I should have added that I had been her primary caregiver for almost 5 years before anything happened and she was flirting with me every day. Another mitigating factor was that while I took care of her I gave her no drugs to calm her emotions because they exaggerated the effects of dementia. When she went with her daughter she would immediately put her back on sedatives which made her an entirely different person. As long as she was not sedated she could still carry on pretty normal conversations.and had good memories of our marriage and up until about age 35. She did not remember getting divorced.

50

His stepdaughter apparently thinks his ex is too demented to be fully capable of giving informed consent.
This doesn’t fit your precondition of “everyone on both sides is fully capable of consenting”, so isn’t really relevant to your question.

AL varies on a sliding scale depending on needs. When my parents first entered AL, my dad just needed someone to manage his meds, but my mom needed high levels of assistance with all things physical. Several years later, my dad now needs help to safely shower and dress/undress. He is still able to walk the grounds solo (albeit with a walker), and he and his friends visit in each other’s apartments and in common areas without assistance.

51

ETA: Meant as reply to @HoneyBadgerDC 2 posts up.

Fascinating. Thank you for bravely sharing your story. That might have elicited a lot of attack here and I’m glad it has not.

If I may ask, how does your step-daughter fit into this family? Was she an adult when you married her Mom? or 5? If you were her parent for awhile, how did that go? Is step-daughter generally a sensible person or generally a flake? Pre- this blow-up how was your relationship with her? How long after the sex event(s) did daughter in law find out? Did you keep having sex with your ex-wife after step-daughter found out and started shunning you?

Just trying to gauge how much of step-daughter’s reaction is just her being her and living out her baggage versus a generic “reasonable person” reacting to the true facts on the ground.

At the risk of a small joke, I’m sure plenty of divorced people wish they couldn’t remember ever being married.

Seriously, this may be the brightest spot in the whole thing. That she forgets first the bad and only later the good is about the best that can be hoped for.

52

That’s very interesting.

Everything you’re describing is consistent with what is called “Independent living” where we are. To which one can (and often does) add a part time drop-in aide to ensure meds get taken, or showers are done safely, as well as a daily general welfare check.

As described, your dad’s current situation is still well short of needing “Assisted living” as it’s usually defined around here. If he’s happy and well-cared for that’s all that really matters; names mean nothing.

53

That certainly is a wrinkle in the situation. Does someone who doesn’t remember getting divorced, a major life milestone, really suffering from only mild dementia? That seems fairly severe to me.

It’s a fair point. I don’t want to personalize this situation and appear to be criticizing HoneyBadgerDC, but in a similar situation, I would wonder if a woman who believes she’s married to me, but is in fact not, has fully and freely consented to that sexual contact.

Well, sure, it is good that only the good times are remembered. But it certainly leads to some complications.

54

I think the thing my mother HATED the most about aging as being reduced to the stereotype of a sweet ( or worse, cute) old lady.

Old people are, first and foremost, people - with the same range of personality types as younger people. There might be an old guy in the home that’s an asshole, the guy that spent his life harassing and coercing woman. Another one might be a charming flirt and yet another might be commitment-shy who backs away when the woman gets serious. There are old women and men who are prudes, and others who are promiscuous….and everything in between. It might be harder for young people to see this, because all they see is age…but I bet the elderly are pretty adept at figuring out what type of people their assisted living neighbors are.

I suspect some older people are enjoying the the lessening of consequences that comes with aging. If the little old lady wants to have a fling with the guy down the hall, she doesn’t have to worry about getting pregnant, getting caught by her husband or getting caught up in some drama that causes her to lose her job or move……plus she doesn’t need a car to sneak around, the logistics are easier. It’s also, in some way, rebelliousness………being treated as a child after living a long and full adult life is grating.

I do know that if I end up in assisted living at some point in the future, I’m going to make the most of it and have as much fun as I possibly can.

I think the staff of the old age home should know which residents, if any, are predisposed to predatory behavior, but assuming that an adult that is considered legally competent in other matters is incapable of consenting to sex is infantilizing, and I suspect it largely stems from children getting squeamish about their parent’s sexuality.

If Mom was in a home and started getting close to some guy that I thought might have ulterior motives, I’d be way more concerned about financial abuse than sexual abuse. Some of my older female friends joke about having to watch out for the old guys that are shopping for “a nurse with a purse”, and I think that’s a far greater problem.

55

Not directing this at you, but your comment led me to wonder what we all mean by “sexual predator” or “predatory behavior” in the context of sexual relationships.

Anyone care to offer their thoughts on this?

56

In my case, I’m defining it as someone who attempts to use harassment or coercion to obtain sex. Which is pretty much the same definition I’d use outside of assisted living, but I think that in assisted living the victim may not have the same option of “just avoiding the asshole” that she had in the outside world.

57

:+1:t4: The Voice of Reason (as usual).

I believe that has been the crux of the foregoing discussion.

58

Amen. My father (87, in a memory care facility, suffering from pretty severe dementia, but not Alzheimer’s) hates this. And I hate it even more.

Just an off-topic observation -

The lowest level of staffing at his residence, the aides, do not do this. They’re amazing. The care they provide is wonderful, and their treatment of the residents, by and large, is really, really good. They don’t infantilize my father (or anyone else), they always call him “Judge (X),” not, say, “Bobby” (even after he’s repeatedly said “call me Bobby”), and they don’t treat him like a child.

And they’re the lowest-paid employees in the place. They’re almost entirely women immigrants from the Caribbean. We (the family, and my father) recognize that they’re doing all the work, and make a significant contribution to their holiday fund every year, and will make sure that, upon my father’s death, the aides who spent the most time with him will be remembered.

The administrators, on the other hand… well, I get angry. And I have to keep my mouth shut, because really, there’s nothing I can do, and if I antagonize them, maybe they’ll take it out on my father.

59

Then that might have been the better question to ask upfront. Being old, male, resident in a nursing home, straight, or a member of a social milieu with a lopsided gender ratio are all traits that are irrelevant to the question of whether a person is a sexual predator.

That seems like a pretty sensible definition, although the main issue that people have been discussing so is the question of consent and whether participants are mentally fit to give it, so it seems like that should be part of the definition.

Upthread, AL facilities were compared to grade schools in some aspects. One aspect not mentioned is that the staff do enforce rules of conduct, and repeat offenders can be sent packing. Some time ago one of my dad’s friends was asked by staff to stop pestering a particular female resident. That guy is still there, so I assume he abided by her wishes.

60

Absolutely.

The flip side of that coin are the (female) care aides at some facilities that end up marrying male residents with inheritable pensions.