4 - Sexual health challenges, masculinity and responsive help-seeking among older Yoruba men in Ibadan, Nigeria

Summary

Introduction

This chapter focuses on contextualised evidence on older men’s sexual health, social expectations and help-seeking around sexual dysfunctions among the Yoruba people in southwestern Nigeria. The focus is partly motivated by the need for expansion of knowledge and possible ways to promote sexual health beyond the reproductive stage of life to cover the post-reproductive, where older adults are the most affected (Chao et al, 2015). In addition, Africa has few or no studies on male older adults’ positions on sexual health challenges and the possible implications on help-seeking (Sinković and Towler, 2019). Thus, understanding how older male adults position themselves in the sexual field along other social actors and their help-seeking behaviour within and outside medical systems would produce insights that have theoretical, policy, and practice relevance.

Older adults as individuals exercise their agency differently across their life spans. These processes, among other factors, shape how social agents learn, adopt, deploy and adjust their dispositions and experiences in manners that affect how they interact with others and possible outcomes within structures and network of relations. Such differentiation also exists as they engage in practices and relationships that could compromise their sexual health, dispositions and pathways to seeking help (Sinković and Towler, 2019). Thus, questions around what, how, when and where older adults considered helpful when faced with health challenges, including those linked to their sexuality, could reveal their individual positioning and cultural expectations that impact on their ageing experiences within a given social setting (Hinchliff and Gott, 2011; Schatz and Gilbert, 2012; Meyer et al, 2014). With age, sexual health concerns are likely to differ for older male adults with possible implications on how they see themselves and how others also perceive and relate to them. The possible implications of experiencing a sexual health challenge on the social relations of older men have remained underexplored in the gerontological literature. The chapter proceeds with a background that situates the study within contexts and the literature, followed by the method section and then the results and discussion of findings.