A London podcast that opens with bouncy jazz and two hosts cheerfully announcing their ages has become one of the more unlikely success stories on social media. Sex Advice for Seniors, started by Suzanne Noble and Peter Marriott — both 61 when it launched — went viral in 2022, helped along by the release of Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, the Emma Thompson film about a 55-year-old woman hiring a sex worker. Media outlets came looking for senior sex experts, hundreds subscribed, and Noble's TikTok following has since climbed from 55,000 to around 160,000.
She is part of a wider wave of older creators talking frankly about sex after 60. Joan Price, now 82, wrote Better Than I Ever Expected: Straight Talk About Sex After Sixty at 61, after finding that the only books on the subject were academic and grim — the gist, she says, being that you dry up and may as well take up knitting. Price calls the current moment a late-in-life sexual revolution, and her mission is reaching people who simply assumed sex was over.
The audiences have shifted in a surprising direction: largely viewers in their 20s, who found these creators on TikTok and Instagram. But visibility has a cost. Comment sections on senior sexfluencer accounts have turned hostile, particularly those of older single women. Noble says everyone in the scene gets trolled and receives death threats. Julie Sale, principal of the Contemporary Institute of Clinical Sexology in Britain, notes that even tame, educational accounts about contraception draw abuse — and that it is exclusively women who get attacked on their appearance. Her verdict: it is ageism, layered with a double standard, since old women's bodies are judged far more harshly than old men's.
There is a serious health side to all this. Roughly half of women over 50 report vaginal dryness and painful intercourse, and more than half of men over 50 deal with erectile dysfunction. Sale points out these are often signals of wider issues — estrogen deficiency in women, heart disease or diabetes in men — yet GPs who don't specialise in menopause or psychosexual therapy frequently wave older patients away, telling them sex isn't important at their age.
In the US, The Old Gays — Mick Peterson, Robert Reeves, Bill Lyons and Jessay Martin — started with videos for Grindr's YouTube channel and have since worked with brands like Shake Shack across TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. Peterson, 70, and Reeves, 83, are both HIV-positive, and they frame their openness as a continuation of the work of Act Up: silence equals death, so keep talking.
Noble now hosts her podcast solo — Marriott, she jokes, ran out of things to say — interviewing everyone from tantric teachers to the inventor of Viagra, and taking heart from growing numbers of seniors on the dating app Feeld. Her line sums up the whole movement: sex doesn't have to retire because you have.
For travellers and readers of any age, it's a reminder that intimacy, curiosity and reinvention don't come with an expiry date — and that the fastest-growing voices challenging taboos online might be decades older than you.