Posted on 02/23/2003 1:46:52 PM PST by Sir Gawain
February 22 2003
The modern marriage has it all - two jobs, two cars, two children. But there's one thing missing, writes Caitlin Flanagan ... sex.
During two strange days last year, three married people, one after another, confessed to me either that they had stopped having sex or that they knew a married person who had stopped having sex. Like a sensible person, I booked an early flight home from my holidays and chalked up the whole thing to the magic and mystery of living in New York.
But no sooner had I hung up my coat than it started up again. Several of the mothers in my set began making sardonic comments along similar lines. The daytime talk shows to which I am mildly and happily addicted worried the subject to death, revived it and worried it some more. Dr Phil, who, like his mentor Oprah Winfrey, has an uncannily precise sense of what the average woman is thinking, noted on his website that "sexless marriages are an undeniable epidemic".
Mass-circulation magazines aimed at married women rarely go to press these days without an earnest review of some new sexual technique or gadget, always presented in the context of how to reignite a long-doused fire. (And I must say a recent article warning desperate couples away from a product called Good Head Oral Delight Gel - "the consistency is like congealed turkey fat" - deserves an award for service journalism.)
In her memoir, Motherhood and Hollywood, Patricia Heaton, a star of the TV comedy Everybody Loves Raymond, writes: "Sex? Forget about it. I mean that literally." Books with titles such as Okay, So I Don't Have a Headache and I'm Not in the Mood have become immediate hits, and another popular book, For Women Only, lists techniques that married women use to avoid sex - from the age-old strategy of feigning sleep to the modern practice of taking on night-owl household projects.
And Allison Pearson's much-loved novel about a busy working mother, I Don't Know How She Does It (which opens with the main character engaged in just that sort of late-night project), features a woman who is so tired that she's frantic to escape sex with her husband, prompting one writer in Time magazine to observe: "Sleep is the new sex."
It has become impossible not to suspect that many relatively young and otherwise healthy married people are forgoing sex for long periods and that many have given it up altogether.
And so we turn our curious attention to the marital therapist Michele Weiner-Davis, whose new book, The Sex-Starved Marriage, is so well timed and so aptly titled that it is primed to become a cultural sensation. Weiner-Davis is not particularly interested in the cause of this strange turn of events, though she tosses around the expected observations about the exhaustion of contemporary working parents and the reduction in lust that has always gone with marriage. Hers is not a reflective kind of book. Rather, it's a get-cracking-and-solve-the-problem kind of book.
Solutions? She's loaded with them. She has created a "passion-building toolkit" filled with "field-tested" techniques - none of them bad. Although I found Part IV ("Doing It Together") far more appealing than a scary mini-chapter called "The Do-It-Yourself Solution", her notions on how to jump-start the old hanky-panky seem eminently reasonable. Make "romantic overtures", she counsels. A wife might buy some new lingerie; a husband might wear flattering clothes.
Most important, though, is a recommendation based on exciting new "research" revealing that waiting for the urge to strike is pointless for many people - better to bash ahead and hope for the best. Weiner-Davis asks: "Have you ever noticed that although you might not have been thinking sexual thoughts or feeling particularly sexy, if you push yourself to 'get started' when your spouse approaches you, it feels good and you find yourself getting into it?"
Many of her clients have received this counsel with enthusiasm. "I really wasn't in the mood for sex at all," one reports after such a night. "But, once we got started, it was fun. I really enjoyed it."
What's odd here is not the suggestions themselves - they all seem sensible, and I can vouch for more than one of them - but the generation that apparently needs them. Today's adults under the age of 50 tend to know more about sex and its many delightful permutations than did streetwalkers of an earlier century.
Yuppies, with that winsome arrogance of theirs, proudly describe the nature and frequency of their premarital couplings with a specificity matched only by advanced seminars on animal husbandry. The reason abortion rights hold such a sanctified position in contemporary political life is that they are a critical component of the yuppie program for maximum sexual pleasure. But let these inebriates of nooky enter marriage, a state in which sexuality often has as much to do with old-fashioned notions of obligation and commitment as it does with the immediate satisfaction of physical desire, and they grow as cool and limp as yesterday's salad.
All of this makes me think those repressed and much-pitied 1950s wives - their sexless college years and their boorish husbands, who couldn't locate the clitoris with a flashlight and a copy of Gray's Anatomy - were apparently getting a lot more action than many of today's most liberated and sexually experienced married women.
In the old days, of course, there was the wifely duty. A housewife understood that, along with ironing her husband's shirts and cooking the Sunday roast, she was going to, with some regularity, have relations with the man of the house. Perhaps, as some feminists would have us believe, these were grimly efficient interludes during which the poor humped-upon wife stared at the ceiling and silently composed the grocery list.
Or perhaps not. Maybe, as Weiner-Davis and her "new" findings suggest, once you get the canoe out in the water, everybody starts happily paddling. The notion that female sexuality was unleashed 40 years ago, after lying dormant these uncountable millenniums, is silly. More recent is the sexual shutdown that apparently takes place in many marriages soon after they have been legalised.
Online sex therapist Jane Greer, who has a thriving Manhattan practice, said she had seen many married couples who had gone without sex for periods ranging from six months to six years. Why? "Marriage has changed," she said. "In the old days, the husband was the breadwinner. The wife had the expectation of raising the children and pleasing him. Now, they're both working and both taking care of the children, and they're too exhausted and resentful to have sex."
The obvious question to Greer was: If a couple is not having sex because of job pressures and one partner quits working, does the couple have more sex? The answer was immediate and unequivocal: "Absolutely."
And this, of course, is the general plot of I Don't Know How She Does It, which has the heroine, Kate Reddy, playing dead in the sack for a world of nights until, at book's end, she resigns from her job and runs into her husband's arms. When Kate and her husband reconnect in a London coffee shop after a brief, miserable separation, "we both laugh and, for a moment, Starbucks is filled with the sound of Us". (Funny, I thought that grating, deafening sound was the coffee grinder.)
Still, the book has struck a chord. On an episode of Oprah devoted to the book, Winfrey introduced it as "the new bible for working mothers". In particular, droves of readers reported that the nature of Kate's marriage mirrored theirs.
The dominant feature of Kate's attitude toward her husband - that is, before they resume making the sound of Us - is blistering contempt. Contempt for his work: he is a quietly successful architect, given to building whimsical little structures like peace pagodas. (That leaves him time to make pesto and watch Disney videos with the kids while she strides off to her high-paying, high-pressure job.)
Contempt for his inability to notice if the family has run out of toilet paper or if children are properly dressed for a birthday party. Contempt for his very existence in the household: when he wonders whether it would be such a bad thing if their unco-operative nanny quit, Kate tells him: "Frankly, it would be easier if you left."
That the man entertains even a single amorous notion about this ball-breaker - much given to kittenish, come-hither comments along the lines of "Richard, I thought I asked you to tidy up" and "Why the hell can't you do something that needs doing?" - is testament either to a libido of iron or to an erotic sensibility leaning towards the masochistic. If best-selling novels succeed because they "tap into" something in the culture, surely this woman's helpless anger at the man she thought was going to share her domestic burden accounts, in part, for the book's popularity.
Pearson told an interviewer: "Until they program men to notice you're out of toilet paper, a happy domestic life will always be up to women" - a sentiment held almost unanimously by the working mothers I know. We've learnt during this 30-year grand experiment that men can be cajoled into doing all sorts of household tasks, but they will not do them the way a woman would.
They will bathe the children, but they will not straighten the bath mat and wring out the washers; they will drop off a toddler at nursery school, but they won't spend 10 minutes chatting with the teacher and collecting the art projects. They will, in other words, do what men have always done: reduce a job to its simplest essentials and ignore the fillips and niceties that women tend to regard as equally essential.
And many women feel cheated and angry and even, bless their hearts, surprised about this. In the old days, of course, men's inability to perform women's work competently was a source of satisfaction and pride to countless housewives. A reliable sitcom premise had Father staying home for a day while Mother handled things at his office. Chastened and newly admiring of each other's abilities, they ran gratefully back to familiar terrain.
Now, when a working mother arrives home after a late deposition, only to find the living room scattered with Lego and a pizza box crammed into the kitchen bin, she tends to get madder than a wet hen. Women are left with two options: haranguing their husbands to be more womanly, or silently fuming and launching a sex strike of an intensity and duration that would have impressed Aristophanes.
The men who cave in to pressure to become more feminine - putting little notes in the lunch boxes, sweeping up after snack time, the whole bit - may delight their wives but they probably don't improve their sex lives much, owing to the thorny old problem of la difference.
I might be quietly thrilled if my husband decided to forgo his weekly tennis game so he could alphabetise the spices and scrub the lazy Susan, but I would hardly consider it an erotic gesture.
It turns out that the "traditional" marriage, which we've all been so happy to annihilate, had some pretty good provisions for many of today's most stubborn marital problems - such as how to combine work and parenthood, and how to keep the springs of the marriage bed in good working order.
The sex advice given to married women of earlier generations is interesting in that it proceeds from the assumption that a happy sex life in a marriage depends on orderly and successful housekeeping.
Marabel Morgan's notorious 1973 book, The Total Woman, has lingered in people's minds because of the seduction techniques it recommends to unhappy housewives. They should consider meeting their husbands at the front door in sexy costumes (heels and lingerie, that kind of thing), calling them at work and talking dirty to them, and seducing them beneath the dining-room table.
But, long before she describes any of these memorable techniques, Morgan gives a thorough account of how a housewife should go about "redeeming the time" and energy to be physically and emotionally able to make love on a regular basis.
A housewife should run her household the way an executive runs his business: with goals, schedules and plans. She should make dinner, or at least do the shopping and planning for it, after breakfast so she isn't running around like a madwoman in the late afternoon with no idea of what to cook. She should take time to rest and relax during the day so she is not exhausted and depleted come whoopee hour. With good planning, "you can have all your home duties finished before noon".
In a household run by an incompetent wife, however, "by the time her husband enters the scene, she's had it", Morgan writes. "She's too tired to be available to him."
This seems a fairly accurate depiction of many contemporary two-career marriages, in which dinner is a nightly crisis (what to eat?) and an endless negotiation (who to cook it?), entered into by two people who have been managing crises and negotiating agreements all day, and who still have the children's homework and baths and bedtimes to contend with.
A document circulating on the internet purports to be a list from a 1950s home-economics book and announces that it is designed to offer future wives "preparation for married life". I recently attended a dinner party at which this list was read out by the hostess, to general hilarity, and I know of at least two classrooms where it was received in similar side-splitting fashion. The book advises the housewife to prepare for her husband's arrival at the end of the day: to have dinner ready, to minimise household noise and clutter, to avoid assaulting her man with a list of domestic problems and disappointments, and to inquire about his day.
There was a sense back in those innocent years that a day at the office was a tiring event that required a bit of recuperation: a cold drink, a sympathetic companion, a decent meal - all of which, I suspect, functioned as a sexual tonic.
The modern professional workday, as we all know, is far more demanding than its predecessors. It lasts longer, and the technologies that were supposed to liberate workers from the office have, in fact, made the whole world an office. (I recently sat on an otherwise deserted tropical beach, a few minutes after a spectacular sunrise, and watched a middle-aged man march grimly through pellucid knee-high surf, barking commands on a mobile phone.)
When a professional person crosses the threshold at the end of the day, the trip home hasn't provided a transition from work. It has been a continuation of it, thanks to the array of pagers, phones and internet connections available to the modern driver. And here's the kicker- it's not just one spouse who has had a punishing day, but two. No one has spent even a moment planning a gentle re-entry into home life, let alone plotting a thrilling seduction.
Although I have an amused tolerance for books such as The Total Woman, I am not incapable of good, old-fashioned feminist rage. The notion that even educated middle-class women had to put out in order to get an item of whitegoods, or even that they might "yearn" for one, just steams me. However, I would not advise against using sex for more subtle marital adjustments, of a type described in The Sex-Starved Marriage. Weiner-Davis reminds women that one of the more effective ways to get a husband to be more considerate and helpful is to seduce him. She counsels a group of women clients who complain of angry, critical husbands to "pay more attention to their physical relationships with their husbands", to "be sexier, more affectionate, attentive, responsive and passionate".
Darned if the old bag of tricks doesn't work like a charm. The ladies arrive at the next therapy session, giggling and thrilled with their new powers. To many contemporary women, however, the notion that sex might have any function other than personal fulfilment (and the occasional bit of carefully scheduled baby making) is a violation of the very tenets of the sexual revolution that shaped their attitudes on such matters.
Under these conditions, pity the poor married man hoping to get a bit of comfort from the wife at day's end. He must somehow seduce a woman who is economically independent of him, bone-tired, philosophically disinclined to have sex unless she is jolly well in the mood, numbingly familiar with his every sexual manoeuvre, and still doing a slow burn over his failure to wipe down the benchtops and fold the tea-towel after cooking the kids' dinner. He can hardly be blamed for opting instead to check his email, catch a few minutes of sport on TV and call it a night.
One final, less quantifiable development has snuffed out marital sexuality, and it has to do with the way middle- and upper-middle-class adults think about family life and their role in it. For many couples, child-rearing has become not merely one aspect of marriage but its entire purpose. Spouses regard each other not as lovers and companions but as sharers of the great, unending burden of taking care of the children.
And middle-class families have made child-rearing a dauntingly complex enterprise. My children are still small, but friends and acquaintances have made it clear I'd better get in the market for a four-wheel-drive or a mini-van, because I'll soon be shuttling the children and their friends to a bewildering series of soccer games, soccer parties and soccer tournaments. Already, I throw birthday parties with guest lists and budgets that approximate those of a wedding breakfast.
The curious thing about this labour-intensive variety of parenting is that it has arisen now, when parents, specifically mothers, have less time to devote to their children. One can't help finding in these developments a frantic attempt to compensate for the hours some professional-class mothers spend away from their children. Mothering, which used to be a private affair (requiring, mainly, a playpen, a backyard, a television set and a coffeepot), has adopted a public dimension. Why, of course Sarah So-and-So is a good mother: little Andrew is at gym sessions, music lessons and classes for gifted children every week.
Domestic life turns on the entertainment and happiness not of the adults but of the children. At holiday time, my husband and I don't drag our little boys through the Louvre, as happened to me at a tender age (because my parents wanted to see it, and it would never have occurred to them to consult their children). Rather, we check into hotels with children's pools and nightly fireworks and huge duck ponds. It's all very jolly but it is possible, I suppose, that some parents will over-identify with the whole thing and forget that they are, in fact, the adults and not the children. And, if your conception of yourself is as a big eight-year-old, you're not very likely to have sex on your mind at the end of the day.
When I was a teenager, in the 1970s, I was quite happy to accept babysitting jobs, because I knew that once I got the kids to sleep, I could read The Joy of Sex for an hour or two. I don't think I babysat for a family that didn't have a copy. There was a sense that young parents then were still getting it on.
Similarly, the characters one encounters in John Cheever and John Updike stories, with their cocktails and cigarettes and affairs, seem at once more dissolute and more adult than most of the young parents I know. Now, parents of a certain social class seem squeaky clean, high-achieving, flush with cash, relatively exhausted, obsessed with their children, and somehow - how to pinpoint this? - undersexed.
If I Don't Know How She Does It, a book about a working woman who discovers deep joy and great sex by quitting her job and devoting herself to family life, had been written by a man, he would be the target of a lynch mob, the proportions and fury of which would make Salman Rushdie feel like a lucky, lucky man.
But, of course, it was written by a with-it woman journalist, so it's safe, even admired. Pearson, we have been given to understand, is telling it like it is. And what she's telling us, essentially, is that in several crucial aspects, the women's movement has been a bust, even for the social class that most ardently championed it.
Given the curious alchemy of feminism, which transforms anything women choose to do into a crucial element of liberation doctrine, confessing that one has given up sex has become a right-on, empowering act. A hot new collection of essays, called The Bitch in the House, is filled with such gleefully tendered admissions, including from writer Jill Bialosky, whose account of a long lunch with an old friend is featured on the book's jacket: "My friend asked me about my marriage. 'Are you guys having sex?' she asked bluntly ... I wanted to laugh."
These public confessions are interesting - and, I suspect, satisfying to women - because they are utterly humiliating to husbands. Granted, Bialosky has protected her husband's privacy by referring to him as "D" in the essay, but if her heart had really been in it, she might have written under a pseudonym.
Clearly, sticking it to "D" was part of her intention when she published the piece. Every account I've read in which a married woman admits she's not having sex begins with a red-hot account of the sex she had with her husband before they had children. Before Bialosky decided to cut off poor "D", he was having the time of his life. "He pressed up against me in dark alleys. I gave him blow jobs as he drove on one of our weekend treks. We made out in taxicabs. There was
a kind of volatile tension wired through our relationship that set my body on fire, feeling his arm resting against mine in the dark cavern of a movie theatre."
But now? "A little faucet had turned off inside my body. My veins were cold. I didn't want to be touched." And herewith - that little tap - is the heart of the matter. Sex therapists agree that sexless marriages are not inherently problematic. If both partners are satisfied with a passionless union, the marriage is said to be in fine shape. But I'm not so sure.
Marriage remains the most efficient engine of disenchantment ever invented. There is nothing like uninterrupted cohabitation and grinding responsibility to cast a clear, unforgiving light on the object of desire. Once children come along, it's easy for parents to regard each other as co-presidents of an industrious little corporation.
Certainly, all sound marriages benefit from sudden and unexpected infusions of goodwill. What luck. Here we are, so many years later and still as happy as ever. But the element that regularly restores a marriage to something with an aspect of romance rather than of collegiality is sex.
The Atlantic Monthly
More like a unilateral silent vow by the wife in most cases.
If a husband is deserving, a wife won't hold back sex.
So9
Around 1900, there was a small Russian village with only one cow. When the cow died, the village elders got together, did some checking and discovered they could buy a cow from Moscow for 1000 rubles, or a cow from Minsk for 500 rubles.
Of course, they buy the cow from Minsk. And she was terrific! She produced milk day and night, rain or shine.
Everyone is so pleased with the cow that the elders decide to breed her.
A visit from a bull is arranged, but no luck. The bull charged from the right and the cow moved to the left. The bull charged from the left and the cow moved to the right. The cow just refused to mate.
Perplexed, the elders went to see the village Rabbi. "Rabbi," they begged, "please help us. We want to breed the cow, but she refuses to couple. The bull charges from the left and the cow just moves to the right. The bull charges from the right and the cow moves to the left. What do we do???"
The Rabbi stroked his beard, thought for a second and finally said, "You got this cow from Minsk, didn't you?"
There was a gasp as the villagers said, "Yes, Rabbi! But how did you know that? We never told you that."
The Rabbi sighed and said, "My wife is from Minsk."
Repressed? I think women had more sex back then. Now, they weren't hanging off the chandeliers, but they sure could show more proof of a healthy sex life, that is, lots of kids. Remember, the pill had not been invented yet.
Hmmm, I wonder if the pill has added to the demise of good marital relationships?
A man who can't consistently deliver total satisfaction has no right to ask for any in return. How often would we be willing to have sex with a woman who suddenly stopped, rolled over and went to sleep just as we were about to get off? The miracle is that women don't kill men who do that. We would certainly get homicidal towards any woman who did it to us.
If it is the wifely duty to put out, then it is the husband's duty to get it up and perform to her satisfaction on every occasion when she might get an urge as well.
So9
Yep, I'll bet they had a few partners and learned what a man was capable of. It must have been a lot easier for losers in the day of marying virgins. With luck they would never find out he was an incompetent bumbling clod.
So9
LOL! You make it sound like some sort of contractual obligation.
A loving wife is open to sex even when she is not initially in the mood. A loving husband puts his wife's satifaction ahead of his own. A good marriage is about teamwork, not personal demands.
In the day of marrying virgins couples had the freedom which comes with sex without venereal diseases, and the joy of sharing the discovery of the wonder of sex with each other. Couples who are exclusive to each other may not become technical experts at pleasing the masses, but, if they care about each other, become specialized experts at pleasing EACH OTHER.
Sometimes. A lot suffered in silence, not even knowing that satisfaction was possible.
So9
Exactly right, but I would guess that most men whose wives cut them off never even considered trying that. Don't even understand the concept.
So9
WADR, that was Norm Peterson.:)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.