Joan Bakewell: Now it's official: sex improves with age

The best of Voices delivered to your inbox every week - from controversial columns to expert analysis Sign up for our free weekly Voices newsletter for expert opinion and columns Sign up to our free weekly Voices newsletter SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Then there's the informal education of sex mags and girlie magazines: boys tend to browse over the glossy pictures, the greater the anatomical detail the better; girls veer towards advice columns and articles: "How will I know when I have an orgasm? Next up in the mid Sixties came Masters and Johnson, practising sex therapists, whose Human Sexual Response was a bestseller and did much to debunk the prevailing myth that homosexuality was an illness. Then, coinciding with the high tide of feminism in the mid Seventies, came The Hite Report, whose author Shere Hite discovered that women were not getting the sexual satisfaction they believed could be theirs and that, in fact, traditional sex - defined as foreplay, penetration and male orgasm - was itself sexist. The Global Study of Sexual Attitudes and Behaviours finds that those in gender-equal relationships enjoy the best sex and are more likely to have fulfilling sex lives in their later years.