Older
Men During the past six years I've advocated strongly to get women on line so the Internet wouldn't just be a brave new world created by men, for men, of men. Nowadays women are here in equal numbers, so I no longer think about those issues too much. My interests shifted from women on line to older people on line when I began my column called Oldest Woman on the Web. Still I was surprised when I received an email the other day from a man who congratulated me on my site and said he is an 'older man' and he found it by searching on 'older women.' I too had searched on older women when I started that column. I had been shocked, pleased and amused to find a lot of pornographic sites about older women. Sometimes older women meant mature women about 40 or 50. But sometimes it meant babes who were clearly 60 or 70. Unseemly as it may sound, I still think these great pornographic older women are a blast of reality for people over 50, i.e. yes Matilda, there is sex over sixty. But I had never thought to search on 'older men,' even though I always think I'm looking for one of them. Finally I did search for older men and here is the report - from memory, because memory yields the strongest impressions. The predominant memory is sites about hair growing in older men's noses and ears. Some sites offered special tools. Some sites said the men's bodies were failing so the DNA forgot to tell the hair where to grow. Hair stopped growing on the head, and, knowing it should grow above the neck, had settled on the nose and ears. One man complained that he could barely keep up with the incessant hairs in his nose. In my experience, men without hearing aids often don't even know they have hair in their ears. There were some pornographic sites about older gay men, but these were a much smaller proportion of the search returns than the number of pornographic older women sites. After the hair-in-the-nose phenomena, the number two place goes to Men=Prostate. It seems like more than half the sites deal with this problem. From these search returns a clever entrepreneur might deduce that a viable new product would be a handheld prostate test kit for men, probably sold to and administered by women. A lot of health sites, medical research studies, etc., included the words 'older men' in their descriptions. I didn't dare look at all this stuff. It's hard enough to find an older man who doesn't suffer from some major infirmary without having all the real statistics and symptoms in mind. What is interesting is what is absent from the older men search: all the rest of life There were no sports sites for older men, no clothing or gift sites for older men, no 'educational or learning' sites for older men, no mental amusements like bridge sites for older men, no special equipment (like tractors, not sex aids) for older men. Now this last one, no big toys for older men, seems strange considering how much of life men do devote to cars, fancy mowers, power saws and the other hammer-in-the-nail-with-a-sledgehammer-type devices men play with most of their adult lives. There are no advice columns for older men and not even any funeral planning and coffins sites for older men. I guess we older women will have to keep going to the hairdresser, staying stylish, and praying that our men get those $80 nose clippers before the Saturday night oldies singles dance at the local community center. ©Sherry Miller 2001. All rights reserved.
|
||
