I love it when complete strangers can dictate intimacy to others.
They must be such caring (see: intrusive) people (see: assholes).
I understand what you mean. However, that’s not really what’s accused of happening here, nor is it the primary problem of nursing home sex. The much more common occurrence is that the person with dementia becomes sexually aggressive and really really wants sex…but the law says they can’t consent. Their spouse/partner is then in the position of wanting sex with a person they love who wants sex, and knowing that some paternalistic doctor somewhere - who isn’t in the room watching this woman strip off her robe and paw at his trousers - says she can’t consent. To something she *clearly *wants with someone she’s got a prior relationship with.
Remember, some of the more common symptoms of dementia are an increase in sex drive and a decrease in inhibitions.
It’s really fucked up. It’s a mess. It comes from a good place of wanting to protect patients from actual abuse, but the same laws that protect can also destroy a loving couple’s lives.
Reading this article, it seems clear that this is all a much deeper issue, stemming from a power struggle between this woman’s daughters and her husband.
Oh, and the person who determined she was not competent to consent to sex was a doctor, but the tool he used to determine that is a crappy one for the job.
It seems to me the defendant should have the right to have the “witness” examined, by his experts, to determine whether she could give convent. And of course, that’s impossible. The defendant claims she was a willing participant, that sort of kills the whole thing.
Exactly the problem. What they should try to determine was whether or not she wanted to have sex with her husband, not whether or not she was legally competent to have sex with her husband.
As someone pointed out, was she allowed to decide whether she wanted dessert or not or what TV channel to watch? If yes, she should be allowed to decide whether or not she wanted to have sex, even if she didn’t have all her wits anymore. I find incredibly offensive and paternalistic to deprive elderly adults of the last pleasures they can have. Bacause that’s sex, of course, how awful! Nobody would feel the slighest bit concerned if he had been feeding her her prefered cookies or if they had watched together their prefered TV show.
Sex toy? Lacking any specific information, what exactly can lead someone to make the assumption that he was using her as a sex toy, as opposed to keep on having joyful moments with her despite her disease, which is exactly what I would expect in a loving couple? Frankly what kind of mindset do you have that the first thing you think in such a situation is that he was abusing her?
People love sex. Sex is probably the main reason why people decide to become a couple. But you’d assume that as soon as someone begins to be impaired, they would hate having it with their spouse/lover? And that it would be harmful to them as opposed to greatly enjoyable? WTF? There’s no indication whatsoever that she disliked having sex with him, or that she didn’t recognize him anymore, or was distressed, or anything like that. And lacking such indications, why would you want to deprive them of one of the main life’s pleasure?
So many people bent on protecting everybody else from the evil, traumatizing, horrible, unatural, sinful, sex. Because having sex is the worst calamity that could befall a human being and presumably the most horrible part of the life of someone having dementia.
The more time passes, the more I’m bewildered by how people make such a fuss about sex. It feels like we never left the Victorian era (or maybe high school). Sex is just sex. It’s not nitroglycerin. Why don’t people agonize over what other people have for dinner or with whom they play tennis, for a change?
Bingo.
I have a serious issue with someone else telling a married couple what constitutes an OK relationship. If she were screaming for him to get the hell out, they have a point. If she were happy with the encounter, it almost doesn’t matter whether she was “with it.”
Not enough information to be sure, but the whole thing sounds like bullshit to me.
IMHO you miss the entire point. The law is irrelevant regardless of the suffering it imposes, to the human condition.
Oh come on, everyone knows that women don’t like sex.
Seriously though, what else do we lose when we get old?
- having sex
- controlling our money
- traveling and deciding where we will live
- driving
what else?
free speech?
freedom of association (do nursing homes allow unrelated visitors?)
religious observances?
internet access?
Ah, then that’s a bit different and I appreciate the correction, WhyNot. However, if that is a symptom of dementia, would that really be considered something she wanted or simply the disease talking? And as Czar pointed out, those alleged conversations with her daughters certainly doesn’t necessarily sound actively healthy. Unless that’s one very, very open parent / children relationship.
That’s a really good question, and one that doctors, nurses and medical ethicists continue to wrestle with.
I have to be honest, at this point, I’m kind of at the “eh, who’s it hurting?” stage. There’s no risk of pregnancy, little risk of STDs (in this case), a rape exam showed no trauma to her tissues, and there’s no reports that she became agitated during his visits. Her conversation with her daughter about how he liked her crotchital region is entirely in line with the kind of filterless inappropriate remarks that people with dementia make.
On the other hand, we have a couple of daughters who literally moved their mother out of her marital home against her husband’s wishes while he was out for the day, who actively worked to restrict her activities, and even got her moved from a private room to a shared room (which is the biggest wtf for me…people with dementia don’t tend to do well with strange roommates) in an effort to thwart their relationship and then prevented him from seeing her in her last months on earth and now want him to pay for the nursing home care that he didn’t want for her.
I realize that the article didn’t contain their side of the story, because they refused to talk to the journalist, and perhaps they’ll have all sorts of testimony about what an abusive asshole he really was…but at this point, I’m kind of going with the “raging bitches” theory.
I understood this
to mean that because you wouldn’t want to boink your spouse if they were seriously confused at the time, as icky and rape.
And therefore your feelings would help define rape. Maybe I’m wrong.
Oh, my God. Isn’t that the same woman who wrote the ‘rape culture’ article about UVA in Rolling Stone?
This changes everything. Neither the husband nor wife in this story probably exist, much less have sex consensually or otherwise.
OMG! :smack:
This has NOTHING to do with what is an “OK relationship”. If you and your SO are knocking boots at 85 more power to ya. I’ll envy you and hi-five you.
Reading this thread I really wonder if many here have ever actually dealt with a person with serious dementia and/or Alzheimer’s. I have and I can tell you I doubt you’d want to have sex with them. If you did it is borderline perverted. Not because sex is bad or “teh evil” or somesuch but because you are not really having sex with the person you knew. It is more akin to having your own sex doll that is not made of plastic.
To be clear there is certainly a gray area (a big one) here. Alzheimer’s is not a switch. It is a slow (usually) progression. Certainly there is a lot of time where the person is lucid and has only minor bouts of forgetfulness.
I honestly do not know if you can legally consent to sex before having sex. That is to say, “I consent to Person_X having sex with me whenever they want regardless of my mindstate.” My guess is you can’t. It is more a “point-of-sale” thing. You have to consent at the moment the transaction (so to speak) occurs and cannot do so ahead of time. A legal eagle will have to weigh in on this one though. I really do not know.
But horribly and inexorably the lucid moments shrink and the forgetful times grow. My grandma (one person among others I have known with this) would ask me how long I have been dating my mom (she would say her name…not “your mom”). I would tell her I am not dating her, I am her son, you are my grandma. Her eyes would widen and she’d nod in a moment of recognition. Then she’d say, “Oh yeah…so nice to see you!” A minute or two later she’d ask how long I have been dating my mother.
My guess is this woman stayed at home and she and her husband had sexy time (happily I’ll assume) till her malady became too much to cope with and the family put her in a nursing home (again this is a guess but is a normal course of events for most people). That would suggest the wife was pretty far along in suffering from dementia/Alzheimer’s.
Having sex with your seriously demented wife is disturbing. In many ways, maybe in all ways, you are not her husband anymore. She doesn’t see you “that way” regardless of how cool and awesome and intimate your relationship once was. To suppose you can demand sex from her is appalling. SHE CANNOT CONSENT!! You would be raping her in every sense of the term. Perhaps she has moments of lucidity but what happens if she slips back mid-coitus? And how would that work anyway? “Hey! You recognize me? Awesome! Get naked NOW! We’re gonna fuck!” :dubious:
This is NOT people being disapproving. This is reality. Alzheimer’s is a horrible thing. The person you love is still standing there but you lose them in all the important ways. Loss of intimacy is going to be part of that.
It sucks. I get it.
But no matter how close you were, no matter how intimate you were, no matter how open minded you were having sex with her in that state is really weird and quite possibly, probably rape.
(And yeah, I say having sex with “her” because I would be amazed if a woman tried to have sex with her husband in the same situation…never say never I know and there would doubtless be a few but this will mostly be guys trying to bone their wives I think.)
Dementia can present in a lot of ways. Sometimes they’re out of it and combative, sometimes they’re sweet and horny and retain their long term memory while their ability to form new memories is shot. My own grandmother was the later type, and tried more than once to seduce my husband, the male nurses and (bless her heart) her own son, who, admittedly, looks a whole lot like her deceased husband. Still…awkward!
Of course, none of them took her up on it. But none of them were her husband, either. None of them wanted a sexual relationship with her, even though she wanted it with them.
No, this is not exclusive to men. There are lots of sexually active - even sexually aggressive - old women in nursing homes (and in the community at large). It’s amazing how randy people get when pregnancy is no longer a concern. There is a huge and growing problem with STIs in nursing homes. Seniors are now giving young adults a run for their money in the STI department.
Old people still like sex, whether they have dementia or not. It makes their families and caregivers profoundly uncomfortable to deal with it, but we’re going to have to get over it somehow. The people going into nursing homes are the Baby Boomers now. They think they invented sex, and they’re not going to give it up easily.
Nope, that was Sabrina Rubin Erdely
I am 100% for old people having sex. I am not “old” yet (guess it depends who you ask) but I hate to think there will be a time I won’t be getting any.
What you are missing is the mind of the person. I have personally experienced a WHOLLY inappropriate come-on from a much older relative (not my grandma). I guarantee you she would not have done that in her right mind. In this case she had pretty well departed reality and was in la-la land.
And therein lies the rub. Who discerns if the person is capable of consenting to sex when the person in question is distinctly of diminished capacity?
As for demented old women being randy it is not about demented old women. I suggested fully sane women would NOT be fighting to have sex with their demented husband.
Dementia does not equal insanity. Not legally or medically. And I still disagree with you. I’ve observed couples where he was the one with dementia and they still shared a loving sex life. Your assumptions are untrue.
WhyNot, I’m not asking about this woman specifically,( because there’s no way for any of us to know what her condition was) but as you said , dementia presents in a lot of different ways. Would you agree that it’s possible that someone with dementia could be incapable of giving consent? Because I think that’s perhaps the divide - I think that the people who are outraged at the idea of this man being arrested are envisioning someone who has memory lapses , loses things and can’t come up with the right word sometimes while those who are horrified at the idea of someone having sex with a dementia patient are imaging someone who doesn’t know where she is, or has delusions/hallucinations or isn’t even capable of having a conversation. It would be a lot easier if we could say Diagnosis A can’t consent while Diagnosis B can, but things don’t work that way.
On another note- is it just me , or is anyone else wondering how the daughters got the woman into the nursing home and kept her there without the husband at least acquiescing ? They put her in the nursing home in March, the incident happened in May and the daughter didn’t get guardianship until afterward. I don’t understand what prevented him from bringing his wife home the day the daughter moved her, or why the staff were dealing with her daughters rather than her husband. There’s something missing from the news reports.
Yes, absolutely. I’m glad I’m not the one that has to make those determinations, but I would probably base it on their state of distress if I had to. If a person gets agitated when a particular visitor comes, if they have bruises, if they cry or shut down when we talk about that person…these are alarm bells that would make me suspect abuse and act to stop it.
Can a person with Alzheimer’s switch in and out of lucidity in a short period of time (e.g. less than a minute or two)?
Even if at the moment she was not lucid (which has not been demonstrated) what if afterwards she was aware of what happened and was pleased by it (which seems to be the case.) Legally it might be rape, but should it be something a prosecutor brings to trial?
An example without dementia. A married couple get smashed and have sex. They wake up the next morning and tell each other it was great. However, a bug placed in their bedroom informs the police what happened. (The bug is legal) and they bring rape charges against the husband. Good idea? Neither could really consent, after all.
And before anyone gets mad, sex while drunk with someone you don’t have this kind of relationship with is a totally different matter.
I would generally ask the janitor. They are good people.