David Shields - The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead

As women lose estrogen, their pubic hair becomes more sparse, the labia become more wrinkled, and the skin surrounding the vulva atrophies. The cell walls of a woman’s vagina become weaker and more prone to tearing; the vagina gets drier, more susceptible to infection, and—with loss of elasticity—less able to shrink and expand, less accommodating to the insertion of a penis. (Mickey Rooney on Ava Gardner: “She was unique down there, like a little warm mouth.”) In postmenopausal women who aren’t receiving estrogen, the vagina becomes smaller in length and diameter. Women’s breasts sag and mammary gland tissue is replaced by fat, which aggravates the sagging and is accompanied by wrinkling. The nipples become smaller and get erect less easily. Stretch marks in the breast grow darker. Fat accumulates in the torso, especially near the waist, neck, arms, and thighs—which creates uneven bulges, except in the face, which loses fat and creates a hollower visage. (A friend of Laurie’s told her, “At forty, a woman must choose between her face and her ass: nice ass, gaunt face; good face, fat ass.”) Women’s skin wrinkles, dries, and thins. Men have a thicker dermis than women do, which may be why women’s facial skin seems to deteriorate more quickly. Premenopausal women typically show no loss of bone density; postmenopausal women show a faster rate of bone loss than men of comparable age.

For women ages 20 to 40, vaginal lubrication after sexual arousal takes 15 to 30 seconds; for women 50 to 78, it takes 1 to 5 minutes. For younger women, the vagina expands without pain during arousal; for older women, there’s a limit to the expansion. Increased blood flow causes the labia minora in younger women to become red; in older women, there’s no reddening. For younger women, the clitoris elevates and flattens against the body; in older women, this doesn’t happen. For younger women, during orgasm, the vagina contracts and expands in smooth, rhythmic waves, usually 8 to 12 contractions in approximately 1-second intervals, and the uterus contracts. For older women, there are only 4 to 5 contractions, and when the uterus contracts, it’s sometimes painful. Older women return to a pre-arousal state much more rapidly.

When men turn 40, the tissues in the back of the prostate gland atrophy and the muscle degenerates, replaced by inelastic connective tissue. A hard mass sometimes appears on the prostate, causing men to produce less semen and at a lower pressure. For many men, the gland cells and the connective tissue in the middle of the prostate overgrow, causing pain during urination. Enlargement of the prostate gland occurs in almost all men, including my father (who had prostate surgery at 85), and the hormone changes that accompany this enlargement can result in various diseases, including cancer. Rates of testicular cancer peak in the 30s, then decline sharply. More inflexible connective tissue grows on the surface of the penis, whose veins and arteries become more rigid. With the reduced blood flow, men find it increasingly difficult to produce and maintain erections. One physician calls the brief, violent upsurge of sexual desire in old men the “final kick of the prostate.”

Men ages 20 to 40 need 3 to 5 seconds to achieve an erection when stimulated; for men ages 50 to 89, it takes 10 seconds to several minutes. Younger men quickly feel the need to ejaculate; older men feel less of a need to ejaculate, even over several episodes. For younger men during orgasm, the urethra contracts 3 to 4 times in one-second intervals; semen travels 1 to 2 feet. For older men during orgasm, the urethra contracts 1 to 2 times; ejaculation is 3 to 5 inches, with less semen and a smaller amount of viable sperm. The proportion of immature sperm increases over time. Young men return to a pre-arousal state in anywhere from a few minutes to a couple of hours, in two stages; older men return in a couple of seconds, in a single stage.

On the upside: the oldest verifiable father was 94 at the birth of his last child; the oldest mother was 66.

On the upside, somewhat more viscerally: my father, at 70, telling me a couple of years after my mother’s death, “I’ve been more active this year with Sarah [his new paramour] than I’d been the previous twenty-five with your mother, and I don’t mean once a night. I mean two or three times a night most every night of the week and then again in the morning.”

Hair is produced in the skin’s hair follicles. A follicle contains more than just hair-producing cells. The melanocytes deposit their pigment in the root of the hair, coloring the hair shaft proteins as they’re made. If pure melanin is made, you’ll have brown to black hair. If an analogue of melanin called phaeomelanin is made, your hair will be red or blond. If the cells quit functioning altogether, your hair will be white.

There’s really no such thing as gray hair. Your hair turns white, not gray. The gray hues you think you see are actually only the intermediate steps as this process advances unevenly across your scalp. The amount of gray you perceive depends on how much of your original hair color mixes with the white.

Everybody has a million hair follicles; only about 100,000 follicles have hair growing from them (blonds slightly more, redheads slightly fewer). The other 900,000 follicles are resting. Each strand of hair grows six inches a year, eventually reaches two to three feet in length, and has its own blood supply. As you age, the density, diameter, and strength of your hair decrease; fewer hairs grow, more rest; you lose hair on your scalp and gain it on your face; and your hair can change not only in color but in texture: your hair can go from straight to curly. Men’s eyebrows get thicker, and hair sprouts on the inner canal of the outer ear.

Because they have less estrogen to counteract their bodies’ testosterone, postmenopausal women grow facial hair; by age 55, about 40 percent of women grow hair above their upper lip. As women age, they have less armpit hair, which, in older women, often disappears. Armpit hair disappears in most postmenopausal Japanese women. Pubic hair vanishes in a small percentage of women over age 60.

Approximately 100 hairs fall out of your head each day, more during the fall and fewer during the spring. Hair loss is the result of changes in the levels of hormones. If you lose hair, you’re more sensitive to these changes in hormone levels. People whose parents experienced hair loss are more likely to lose their hair. One in four women loses some of her hair.

Because of a gradual decrease in adrenal secretion—which begins, for both men and women, in the late 20s—the cells that manufacture hair protein, the germ centers, are selectively destroyed or deactivated. When the affected hair is shed, no replacement occurs.

Forty million American men are bald. Thirty percent of 55-year-old men are bald; 60 percent of 65-year-old men have experienced significant hair loss. Both men and women view bald men as weaker and less attractive than men with a full head of hair. Seventy-five percent of men feel self-conscious about their baldness, and 40 percent wear a hat to hide their baldness. Hair transplants are the most common plastic surgery for men.

There’s no cure for baldness. The Ebers Papyrus —dating to 4,000 B.C., one of the oldest written documents—advised Egyptian men to treat baldness with a magical potion composed of sea crab bile, blood from the horn of a black cow, burned ass hoof, and the vulva and claws of a female dog.

Woody Allen says, “The best thing to do is behave in a manner befitting one’s age. If you are sixteen or under, try not to go bald.”

Harlan Boll, a publicist for celebrities, says, “There wasn’t as much pressure on men like Bob Hope or Frank Sinatra to look young. Even today this is true. If they keep their hair, they pretty much have it made.”