Sex educator, 82, counsels seniors at retirement community

Sex is her subject. The fact that Peggy Brick, 82, looks like your kindly great-aunt is irrelevant.

A nationally known sex educator and author, Brick moves lightly, smiles easily, and listens intently. She's equally at ease in a classroom or presiding over a discussion of sex - candid, freewheeling, and direct - at Kendal at Longwood, a continuing-care retirement community in Kennett Square.

Brick lives there with Allan, her 82-year-old husband of 60 years and a retired English professor. And she met there on a recent afternoon with about 16 other residents, all alumni of her three-session workshop called "Sexuality in the 21st Century: Issues in Later Life."

They had gathered a year later for a refresher, a chance to reflect and ask questions.

"I always try to make an environment comfortable enough to make the asking easy," said Brick. "Sometimes, the older participants in my workshops submit questions anonymously. I don't care how they ask - I just want to answer."

"Is masturbation harmful?" (No.)

"What happens when I have zero libido?" (There are other ways to share love. See below.)

And "how important is fidelity when one partner no longer recognizes the other?" (Up to the individual.)

Brick grew up in Glen Rock, N.J., with a mother who warned that girls got "reputations" by necking in the back row at the movies and a father who had reservations about sending a daughter to college. She earned a master's degree in education.

While teaching high school in North Jersey in the 1960s, Brick helped to develop a yearlong psychology/sociology curriculum. She introduced a one-week unit on human sexual behavior to her teenage students with a nod to modern realities: No birds and bees but lots of straight talk and humor. It quickly expanded to 10 weeks.

"From that time on, I always felt that sex education needed to be interactive - and that it could be fun," said Brick, who left the public schools in the mid-1980s to work for Planned Parenthood.

"When you think of sex education in the United States and beyond, you think of Peggy Brick," said Bill Taverner, who succeeded her as director of education for Planned Parenthood for Greater Northern New Jersey when she officially retired in 1998.

Taverner, who also is editor of the American Journal of Sexuality Education, points out that Brick's interests have encompassed the entire life cycle of sex education.

"Her 1989 Bodies, Birth and Babies," said Taverner, "remains the only resource I know of that trains early childhood professionals in the sexuality of young children. And now she's come full cycle."

Brick's interest in aging and sexuality grew after her retirement. By the time she moved to Kennett Square in 2003 to be closer to her two adult children and grandchildren, it was her consuming passion.

"Nobody was really paying attention to the issue of how aging affects sexuality," said Brick, who has written and lectured about it for almost a decade.

In 2007, she created the Sexuality and Aging Consortium, bringing together 20 sexuality professionals from around the country with interests in issues that face the elderly. It affiliated with Widener University last year and offers workshops with titles such as "Sex After Cancer and Other Chronic Health Issues"; "Aging, Sex, and Spirit: Taking the Next Step on the Journey"; and "Good, Good, Good Vibrations: Spicing Up Your Sex Life With Sex Toys."

Brick also is the lead author, along with Taverner and two other colleagues, of the 2009 book Older, Wiser, Sexually Smarter, a compendium of 30 sex-education lessons for mid- and later-life adults that is used by sex educators around the country.

The mission was to reexamine sexual "scripts" learned as children that are inadequate in aging adult lives. "These scripts commonly focus on sex as penetrative intercourse only, and portray sex as for the young," she writes in the introduction. "Such scripts need to be challenged."

One of Brick's missions for her workshops at the Kendal retirement community has been to expand the definition of sexual intimacy beyond what the participants, none under 70, may have bought into earlier in their lives. She also aims to help them eliminate the rush to "perform," and to concentrate instead on reasonable expectations.

Does that mean surrender? No intimacy?

Brick bristles at such a notion. So does Peter Schindler, 80, a psychiatrist and new widower who lives at Kendal and participated in the recent reunion of last year's workshop participants.

"Senior sexuality isn't focused on the penis, vagina and mouth," Schindler said. "It has to do with the brain, and with the longing for pleasure and intimacy. At our stage," he observed, "we men have stopped worrying about erections that last three days. . . Now, sexuality can be a look, a touch, or more."

There were nods around the room.

It was, in fact, a look that brought together Laurie Pizzuto, 84, and Henry Gass, 81, who were both widowed after long, happy marriages, and now are romantically involved.

"I met Henry on the stairway here after he'd given a lecture on blues music. We took a risk and began a relationship. But we don't live together," said Pizzuto. "We give each other tenderness."

Not too long ago, Ros Campbell's husband moved to the skilled-nursing area from independent living, where they had been together. His new hospital bed was too narrow for cuddling.

"Thanks to Peggy, I got my courage up and realized that people our age still have the need for privacy and physical contact, even if it's snuggling and a nap together," said Campbell, 83.

She appealed to the staff. Within two weeks, a larger bed was installed in her husband's room, along with a "Do Not Disturb" sign. "Dudley was so thrilled, and so was I. Just being physically close was a tremendous gift to both of us," she said.

Another participant voiced a common feeling in the group: that the social mores they knew were light-years away from what exists now.

"My granddaughter loved a boy, and now she loves a girl," said Caroline, 94, who asked that her last name not be used. "I'm trying not to be shocked. I assume she just needs to try everything."

Little research has examined how to help elderly people maintain a sense of themselves as sexual beings. Patricia Barthalow Koch, a professor of biobehavioral health at Pennsylvania State University, is completing a study on the effect of sexual education on older adults. It is based on a workshop that Brick led earlier this year at the University of Delaware's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.

Brick's goal over the 12 sessions was to arm the 35 participants with information that would help them keep exploring their sexuality with new insight, and make them feel more connected in their lives. "As people age," she said, "they need more intimacy and physical contact because their worlds get smaller."

To test the effect of the sessions, the researchers "continually communicated with participants in the workshops who were willing to share their reactions anonymously," said Koch, also an adjunct professor at Widener.

The results have not yet been published, but Koch said they validated Brick's hypotheses. Change seems possible at any age, Koch said, and even some respondents who were no longer sexually active "were motivated to return to sexual experiences and find deeper intimacy physically and emotionally."

They also seemed to experience "increasing comfort with sex in general," she said.

Much of what Brick does is to get people comfortable with sex in all its guises - including alone. "Masturbation can provide a sexual outlet when other forms of sexual behavior are not possible or desired," she and her coauthors wrote in Older, Wiser, Sexually Smarter.

And, they wryly point out, masturbation is a classic example of safe sex: "Having sex with the only person whose sexual history you can trust completely."

"Older, Wiser, Sexually Smarter"

To order the book: Send a check for $35 plus $6 shipping payable to The Center for Family Life Education, 196 Speedwell Ave., Morristown, N.J. 07960; phone: 973-539-9580. (Amazon.com ships for free.)

Sexuality and Aging Consortium at Widener University

Members offer workshops for individuals and couples. Resources on a range of topics are posted online.

Web: www.widener.edu/sexualityandaging

Phone: 610-388-5062.

E-mail: peggybrick@verizon.net EndText