Changing norms of older men’s sexuality in the sexological discourse during Czechoslovak socialism: Dementia as an interpretative lens to make sense of sexual expressions in later life

Abstract

This article examines the development of medical (primarily sexological) knowledge about older men’s sexuality during Czechoslovak socialism. Analysing medical and criminological journals, sexological textbooks and popular-science publications, and inspired by Ian Hacking’s theory of making up people (1995), we track how Czechoslovak experts created new kinds of older people. We show that the founder of Czechoslovak sexology, Josef Hynie, implemented the kind of older men with dementia with pathological sexuality into sexological discourse in 1940. In the following decades, medical experts omitted older men’s sexuality or debated it solely in the context of paedophilic delinquency, thus perpetuating Hynie’s ideas about the pathological sexuality of men with dementia until the second half of the 1970s. We explain how the classification was subsequently replaced by a new kind of healthy older men with active sexuality, which the sexologists made up hand in hand with incorporating new knowledge about sexual delinquents and changing ideas about active ageing. We argue that dementia served for the experts as a tool for defining what could be seen as normal or pathological ageing as well as normal or pathological ageing male sexuality. Finally, we highlight that the liberalisation of ageing male sexuality occurred in socialist Czechoslovakia at approximately the same time as in Western capitalist countries.