The politics of gender representation and successful ageing in internet pornography

ABSTRACT The current cultural discourse of successful ageing tends to reinvigorate the graying population into young, energetic and healthy social beings through prescriptions of active sexuality. On TV, in movies and advertising, the term ‘sexy oldies’ has emerged to uphold this script about old people and their sexuality. However, what seems to be troubling about the (online) depiction of the ageing demographic is its rigid and homogenous portrayal of old people and their sexuality that misrepresents aspects of gender and age, especially when it refers in an unfavorable manner to the bodies of older women in the mass media. Delving into the sexual portrayal of old persons in internet pornography, this paper scrutinizes the politics and problematic of gender representation and successful ageing via a content analysis of a popular porn website, XVideos. I argue here that although the online appearance of sexy oldies transmits a positive cultural signal that affirms the existential significance of older women, it provides a sexist and ageist handling of their bodies, especially how their online identities are presented. The question then is about the need to redress this and seek more gender equal representations.