It would be hard to describe how much I enjoyed this story.

This from a statement by the Brazilian National Social Security Institute (INSS):

“The social security system was planned so that the wife receives her husband’s pension for only 15 years or so. With growing life expectancy and remarriages with much younger women, benefits today stretch out over 35 years,” the author of the study, Paulo Tafner, explained to AFP.

“This is a grave and serious challenge for the future of the country, and it’s going to require a reform of the pension system,” Tafner said.

He said the younger-wife phenomenon was commonly called the “Viagra effect.”

A Country Filled With Desperate Housewives?

The pension issue is just one of the unnatural consequences of those unions. Consider what might happen if the males start living significantly longer. Fast forward to the summer of the year 2015 in and about Rio and consider the following mix of facts and speculation:

• Millions of women in good health are married to much older men with seriously declining overall health, but whose deaths are not imminent thanks to the continuing advances in medicine’s ability to forestall death.
• Those same women see and read daily about the expected influx of wealthy tourists and athletes which are obviously expected to inundate the region during the summer Olympic games.

If I’m a Brazilian male of 60+ years married to someone who … how to say this tactfully … someone whom I would not even have been allowed [without being ridiculed or beaten] to look at, dating back to when early Biopeds first started doodling on walls in the Fertile Crescent — I would not be sleeping well, and not just because I’m peeing every two hours.

I tell you it’s like walking around with with the message “kill me” written on the tennis ball cushions of your walker. Combine that with the fact that the Brazilian airwaves were filled with American TV show episodes of The Closer, CSI and Law & Order, providing my once-adoring cookie weekly how-to-murder-without-getting-caught-seminars. Brazil might be on the verge of a Murderous Cookie/Trophy Wife Revolt.

Talk about a chemical imbalance. Appreciate the fact that the union which the chemical Sildenafil makes plausible from the male’s perspective, the chemicals Niacin and Atorvastatin threaten to make literally interminable from the female perspective.

Article referenced is copied in full at end of post.

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‘Viagra effect’ undermining Brazil’s pension system – AFP) – Aug 18, 2009

RIO DE JANEIRO — The widespread tendency in Brazil for men to remarry women several decades younger — called the “Viagra effect” — is undermining the country’s pension system, researchers warned Tuesday.

The report, by Brazil’s National Social Security Institute (INSS), showed that a trend of men in their 60s marrying women half their age was leaving a big pool of young widows collecting benefits for much longer than anticipated.

“The social security system was planned so that the wife receives her husband’s pension for only 15 years or so. With growing life expectancy and remarriages with much younger women, benefits today stretch out over 35 years,” the author of the study, Paulo Tafner, explained to AFP.

He said the younger-wife phenomenon was commonly called the “Viagra effect.”

But he noted that in fact the trend started in the 1970s — well before the advent of the little blue pill that has since the mid-1990s helped men carry their sex lives well into old age.

According to the INSS report, two out of three men who are separated remarry, while only one out of three separated women find a new husband.

Of the separated men, 64 percent of those aged over 50 remarry women younger than them. In the 60-64 age range, the proportion is 69 percent.

And the marked preference is for women aged 30 years younger.

Brazil has a mixed public-private pensions system.

Those in the public system receive the equivalent of their salary after retirement, while those with private funds receive a maximum of 1,800 dollars a month.

Under current laws, when a retired man dies, his wife continues to receive his full pension until her own death.

According to the INSS, 94 percent of pensions go to women.

“This is a grave and serious challenge for the future of the country, and it’s going to require a reform of the pension system,” Tafner said.

Copyright © 2009 AFP.
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