Sexuality Across the Lifespan

Sexuality doesn't switch on at puberty and switch off at retirement. Research tracking children, teenagers, midlife adults, and people well into their nineties all points the same direction — sexuality is a thread that runs the entire length of a human life, changing shape at every stage rather than simply appearing and disappearing. Table of Contents M ost of us carry around an unspoken timeline in our heads: sexuality begins somewhere around puberty, peaks in youth, and quietly fades out by the time someone qualifies for a senior discount. It's a tidy story. It's also wrong at nearly every point along the line — sexuality-related development starts in infancy, long before anything most people would call "sexual" in the adult sense, moves through a series of fairly predictable stages with real research behind each one, and persists, in some recognizable form, well into the ninth and tenth decades of life. This lesson walks the entire line, stage by stage, using the…