Gerontophilia is the primary sexual attraction to the

elderly Old age refers to ages nearing or surpassing the life expectancy of human beings, and is thus the end of the human life cycle. Terms and euphemisms for people at this age include old people, the elderly (worldwide usage), OAPs (British usage ...

. A person with such a sexual preference is a gerontophile or gerontosexual. The word ''gerontophilia'' was coined in 1901 by psychiatrist

Richard von Krafft-Ebing Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing (full name Richard Fridolin Joseph Freiherr Krafft von Festenberg auf Frohnberg, genannt von Ebing; 14 August 1840 – 22 December 1902) was a German psychiatrist and author of the foundational work '' Psychopath ...

. It derives from

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

: geron, meaning "old person" and philia, meaning "friendship". Gerontophilia is classified as a

paraphilia Paraphilia (previously known as sexual perversion and sexual deviation) is the experience of intense sexual arousal to atypical objects, situations, fantasies, behaviors, or individuals. It has also been defined as sexual interest in anything ot ...

, but is not mentioned in the ''

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders The ''Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders'' (DSM; latest edition: DSM-5-TR, published in March 2022) is a publication by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) for the classification of mental disorders using a common langu ...

'' or

International Classification of Diseases The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) is a globally used diagnostic tool for epidemiology, health management and clinical purposes. The ICD is maintained by the World Health Organization (WHO), which is the directing and coordinating ...

. The prevalence of gerontophilia is unknown. A study of pornographic search terms on a

peer-to-peer Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network. They are said to form a peer-to-peer ...

network reported that 0.15% had gerontophilic themes.

Sex offender A sex offender (sexual offender, sex abuser, or sexual abuser) is a person who has committed a sex crime. What constitutes a sex crime differs by culture and legal jurisdiction. The majority of convicted sex offenders have convictions for crim ...

s with elderly victims do not necessarily have gerontophilia. There are other possible motivations for these offenses, such as rage or sadism, or the increased vulnerability of elderly as a social group, which are factors that may not involve a sexual preference for the elderly. There are no studies showing that most such offenders are gerontophiles. In one small study, two of six sex offenders against the elderly showed gerontophilic tendencies. Gerontophilia can also be expressed with consenting elderly partners in a legal context. Research on gerontophilia is limited to a small number of

case studies A case study is an in-depth, detailed examination of a particular case (or cases) within a real-world context. For example, case studies in medicine may focus on an individual patient or ailment; case studies in business might cover a particular f ...

, beginning with a paper by French physician Charles Féré in 1905. Féré described a 27-year-old man who rejected an arranged marriage with a 20-year-old "beauty" in favor of a 62-year-old woman. Such studies commonly report that the subject had an early sexual experience with a much older woman.

See also