Gerontophilia

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

As Gerontophilia ( gr. Γέρων Géron "old man" and philia ) is defined as the permanent or predominant sexual interest in older people. It is subordinate to the umbrella term of chronophiles . Often just a younger person's sexual fixation on older people is referred to as gerontophilia. It is characterized by a large age difference between the partners, since otherwise any sexuality between older people would be gerontophilic. The coveted age range cannot be clearly determined. Magnus Hirschfeld defined the difference at around fifty years of age.

The terms gerontalism or gerophilia are sometimes used as synonyms in English . The word gerontosexuality ("gerontosexuality") is also used in English for purely sexual relationships .

The opposite is the preference for much younger people, for whom the terms neoterophilia , ephebophilia and pedophilia are used depending on the further characteristics .

Interpretations of gerontophilia

Contrary to its neutral meaning, the term is also used synonymously for rape or sexual abuse of elderly people. Then an older person is also called a sexual object. The latter describes overarching concepts in contrast to the meaning of “object” in psychoanalytic technical jargon. In Texas, cases of sexual assault against people 65 and older automatically fall into the gerontophilia category.

If - which seldom happens - one conceptually separates the sexes of the desired person, gerontophilia is used for men and graophilia (Greek gray , Gen. graos = "old woman") for women. What gender the partners belong to is not relevant for the use of the word today. Magnus Hirschfeld described in his book The Homosexuality of Men and Women , published in 1914, a system of age-dependent terms under the taste types of homosexuals . In it, gerontophilia names the interest in old people, and he coined the term graophilia for the interest in old women . The latter is rarely used in German; the English counterpart "graophilia" a little more often.

Sometimes the term is also used in the general meaning “love for the elderly”. The antonym for this is gerontophobia , the social aversion to old people, which can cause exclusion. Some describe it as affection for someone the same age as the parent or grandparent. (The term teleiophilia can also be appropriate for children and adolescents .)

features

In addition to personal affection, age-related characteristics such as human maturity, white hair, wrinkled, sagging and sagging skin, senile thinness, poor brain performance, but also climacteric changes triggering sexual desire are essential. There is no upper age limit; even infirmity up to death can u. U. be experienced sexually arousing. Since those affected are socially positively confirmed because of their social contacts with old people, the preference often goes unnoticed by society.

Socially accepted gerontophilia is mainly found in traditional cultures, especially those with a gerontocracy . According to Erdman B. Palmore, it can represent an extreme form of "positive agism". The term "agism" must, unlike the German word age discrimination does not merely mean "disadvantage affecting the basis of age" but also the stereotyping of older people can feel (which may be filled with positive associations).

Demarcation

For a long time, older men have been more socially acceptable with younger women than vice versa, and in some parts of the world and at some times this has been quite common. Well-known examples today are Anna Nicole Smith (26 on marriage) and J. Howard Marshall (89) or Simone Rethel (62 on the death of her husband) and Johannes Heesters (108). Relationships between older women and younger men, on the other hand, are often noticeable when the age difference is smaller. A famous example was Betty Dodson (72) and Eric Wilkinson (25). But it applies to everyone that old- age sexuality is often rejected or ridiculed in Western society, older men are called lascivious, older women are treated with undisguised contempt and younger partners are rashly reproached for, they suffered from “ neuroses ” or “gerontophilia” ". Financial interests are also often assumed.

Legal Aspects

In principle, sexual contact is not a criminal offense in a gerontophile context. Restrictions for the young partner are the respective age of consent and any additional provisions to protect against the sexual abuse of young people and the sexual abuse of wards or dependents. With regard to the older partner, sexual abuse of people who are incapable of resisting who are mentally or physically incapable of resistance, according to Section 179 of the Criminal Code , the abuse of prisoners, those in custody or the sick and needy in facilities according to Section 174a of the Criminal Code, and abuse are particularly common in Germany relevant when taking advantage of a counseling, treatment or care relationship according to § 174c StGB.

Points of view

Occasionally, gerontophilia is used neutrally in the psychiatric literature and only problematized with regard to the partners who, due to their mental or physical condition, cannot responsibly consent to sexual contacts or are unable to contradict the request made to them.

Gerontophilia does not play a role in the ICD and DSM diagnostic keys .

Pathological consideration

Other authors emphasize the deviant character. Most of them deal primarily with sexuality in the narrower sense, abuse and criminology . Often it is just described as paraphilia . According to today's view, the extent of the behavior, any suffering of the person concerned or dependent behavior, without which sufficient arousal and / or orgasm cannot be achieved, is decisive for paraphilia. Further criteria are if it could lead to criminal offenses or repeatedly leads to other problems in the social environment. It can then be diagnosed according to ICD-10 as F65.8 - other disorders of sexual preference or according to DSM-IV as 302.9 - unspecified paraphilia . According to Bernhard Strauss (2004), gerontophilia is not classified separately due to its rarity.

According to Beier (2002), as in pedophilia, there is usually a disorder in social behavior, since the perpetrators see the children or senior citizens as substitutes for an age-appropriate partner.

According to Vetter (2007), it seems reasonable to assume that the fixation on age characteristics results in a comorbidity with fetishism and with the triggering of sexual arousal through old age there is a comorbidity with sadomasochistic tendencies.

Peak (1996) counts gerontophilia (along with pedophilia and necrophilia, among others ) among the “dangerous perversions”, as they - in contrast to exhibitionism and voyeurism - have the potential for injury.

Enos and Beyer (1980) limit the term to the sexual attraction of younger men to older women. They also highlight the potential for injury, as it often results in hematomas, lacerations and broken bones.

In psychoanalysis, it is viewed as a symptom of a grandfather complex.

Criminological consideration

At the One Stop Crisis Center (OSCC) of the Hospital Universiti Sains Malaysia (HUSM) in Kelantan, 1.6% of all cases of sexual abuse treated between 2000 and 2003 affected women over the age of 43. The women between 37 and 43 years of age did not report sexual harassment, but rather sexual assault (27.3%) and anal or vaginal rape (36.4%). It is not known where the remaining 36.3% are classified at 100%.

According to Bopp (1987), 3% of all rape affects women over 50. When it happens, their lives are more at risk; the act often ends with the murder of the victim. And, according to Pollak (1988), the perpetrators' psychopathology is more pronounced than those who rape younger women. When young men sexually coerce older women, according to Ellis and Arbabanel (1961), this falls into the category of sadistic gerontosexuality. In 1977 Oules and Boscredon typically described the perpetrators as follows: obsessive personality, history of bed-wetting up to the age of about 25, lack of interest in younger women, inability to control impulses, tendency towards hurtful and aggressive sexuality.

reception

Gerontophilia is a theme of the cult film Harold and Maude , in which an eighteen-year-old young man falls in love with an eighty-year-old woman. The song Omaboy der Ärzte and partly the song The Beauty and the Beast by KIZ also has gerontophilia as its motif. The aforementioned sexual inclination is the subject of the book Pyromalion by Hugo Hammerfest, in which a twenty-five year old man can only have relationships with much older male partners. In the animated film Little asshole by Walter Moers twelve years old protagonist is in the octogenarian Inge Koschmidder in love and tries to win her heart. In the first season (2003) of the comedy series Little Britain , Jason loves his friend Gary's grandmother . With the feature film Gerontophilia , produced in Canada , the director Bruce LaBruce presented an adaptation of the subject in 2013, a love story between a young nurse and an old people's home.

See also

literature

  • Brigitte Vetter: Sexuality: disorders, deviations, transsexuality. Schattauer, Stuttgart 2007, ISBN 978-3-7945-2463-1 .

Web links

Wiktionary: Gerontophilia  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Uwe Henrik Peters: Lexicon of psychiatry, psychotherapy, medical psychology. Elsevier, 2007, ISBN 978-3-437-15061-6 , p. 213.
  2. ↑ Duden - The great foreign dictionary. Dudenverlag, Mannheim / Leipzig / Vienna / Zurich 2003.
  3. ↑ Anike Bäslack: Sexual violence in care. A literature review on the experiences of sexual and sexualised violence by patients and carers in hospitals and senior citizens' homes. GRIN Verlag, 2007, ISBN 978-3-638-74216-0 , p. 34 f.
  4. ↑ a b c d Brigitte Vetter: Sexuality: disorders, deviations, transsexuality. Schattauer, Stuttgart 2007, ISBN 978-3-7945-2463-1 , p. 245.
  5. ↑ Stephen T. Holmes, Ronald M. Holmes: Sex Crimes: Patterns and Behavior. SAGE, 2007, ISBN 978-1-4129-5298-9 , pp. 87 f.
  6. ^ Thomas Hofheinz, Liz Gold: Sex Offender Characteristics. ( Memento of the original from August 22, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, March 2000, p. 15. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.tcleose.state.tx.us
  7. ^ Raymond J. Corsini: The Dictionary of Psychology. Psychology Press, 1999, ISBN 1-58391-028-X , p. 413.
  8. ↑ Rudy Flora: How to Work with Sex Offenders: A Handbook for Criminal Justice, Human Service, and Mental Health Professionals. Haworth Press, 2001, ISBN 0-7890-1499-8 , p. 91.
  9. ↑ Erdman Ballagh Palmore: Ageism: Negative and Positive. Springer Publishing Company, 1999, ISBN 0-8261-7002-1 , p. 45.
  10. ^ EJ Haeberle: Die Sexualität des Menschen - 12.2 Older people , manual and atlas 2nd, expanded edition, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1985.
  11. ↑ repealed with effect from November 10, 2016, Art. 1 No. 8 of the law of November 4, 2016 ( BGBl. I p. 2460 )
  12. ↑ a b Thomas Görgen , Barbara Nägele: Older people as victims of sexualised violence ( Memento of the original from August 16, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 645 kB) , in the series KFN Research Reports No. 89 , Criminological Research Institute Lower Saxony, Hannover 2003, p. 9.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.kfn.de
  13. ↑ Bernhard Strauss: 4.9 Sexual Deviations - 4.9.1 Definitions and Diagnostics. In: Wolf-Bernhard Schill, Reinhard G. Bretzel, Wolfgang Weidner (Hrsg.): Male medicine: In the general medical and internal practice. Elsevier, 2004, ISBN 3-437-23260-6 , p. 140.
  14. ↑ KM Beier: Sexual assaults: the perpetrators. In: H. Ostendorf, G. Köhnken, G. Schütze (Eds.): Aggression and violence. Peter Lang, Frankfurt / Berlin / Bern / Bruxelles / New York / Oxford / Vienna 2002, pp. 121–158.
  15. ↑ KJ Peak: Things fearful to name: An overview of sex crimes and perversions. In: Journal of Contemporary of Criminal Justice. 12 (2), 1996, pp. 204-214.
  16. ↑ WF Enos, JC Beyer: Sex crimes in: WU Spitz, RS Fisher (eds.): Medicolegal investigation of death: Guidelines for the application of pathology to crime investigation. Charles C. Thomas, Springfield, IL 1980, pp. 511-526.
  17. ↑ Mohammed Nasimul Islam, Khoo Lay See, Lai Chin Ting, Jesmine Khan: PATTERN OF SEXUAL OFFENCES ATTENDED AT ACCIDENT AND EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT OF HUSM FROM YEAR 2000 TO 2003: A RETROSPECTIVE STUDY. In: Malaysian Journal of Medical Sciences. Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2006, pp. 30-36.
  18. ^ William J. Bopp, James J. Vardalis: Crimes Against Women. Charles C. Thomas Publishing, 1987, ISBN 0-398-05333-2 .
  19. ^ N. Pollack: Sexual assault of older women. Annals of Sex Research, 1, 1988, pp. 523-532.
  20. ^ A. Ellis, A. Abarbanel: The encyclopedia of sexual behavior. Hawthorne, New York 1961.
  21. ↑ J. Oules, J. Boscredon, J. Bataille: A case of gerontophilia. In: Evolution Psychiatrique. 42, 1977, pp. 243-257.
  22. ↑ Asaro Verlag: Pyromalion  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.firstedition-verlag.info  
  23. ↑ viennale.at