What if you found out that too much respect was hurting your orgasms? Being regarded
as an equal in a marriage is great and everything, but would you give it all up if only it meant your partner still wanted to bang you? Or
that you still wanted to bang him/her? Because marriages may be more equal than
ever, but the sex is about as frequent as a gum scraping. But oh well, at least he vacuumed (or did he?).
The Piece: “Does a More Equal Marriage Mean Less Sex?,” in the New York Times Magazine
The Scribe: Lori
Gottlieb, author of Marry Him: The Case For Settling
For Mr. Good Enough, the
book that boldly encouraged women to take whatever was around, because,
hey, better than being ALONE, right? Jezebel was all over it here, here,
and here,
and described the approach as “calorie counting for the soul.”
The Premise: Gottlieb investigates the uncomfortable notion that
marriages are more equal than ever, and yet no one is getting any, probably because equality has gender neutered us all in the process. The idea piqued
her interest when, at a dinner for mostly married couples in their 40s, things got
weird when a husband made a porn joke and the wife tensed up. She joked that
the porn joke couple prolly wouldn’t be getting any that night, but her boyfriend
said, nope, it’s the other happily married couple here that you think is so awesome who
won’t be doing it:
I thought he was kidding. This
couple were my “model marrieds,” true equals who share the housework and child
care, communicate openly and prioritize each other’s careers. The best friends
of happy-couple cliché. Earlier in the evening, I watched them work together in
the kitchen, cheerfully cooking and cleaning: She bringing out the hors d’oeuvres,
and he chopping and dicing. When their 6-year-old woke up with a nightmare,
they wordlessly agreed that he would be the one to soothe her. It was the kind
of marriage many people wish for.
“Exactly,” my boyfriend said.
“Least likely.”
Aside from the fact that her beefcake is mad insightful, I
will spoil this for you now: You never
find out if the “model marrieds” got it on that night, although if they did not, I would point to the having of a 6-year-old over equality any day. But that’s
only one of the many frustrations of this piece! Buckle up, this one is bumpy, but not in the way that can titillate.
The Evidence: Some
64 percent of marriages with kids now have both partners working. Those
partners are sharing ALL the responsibilities now, from the laundry to the
dishes to the car-pooling to the braiding of the teen daughter’s hair. People
under 30 think this is “a good thing” — which is a nice bit of
foreshadowing to imply they will be getting their perfect little egalitarian
unions with no handjobs soon enough, just you wait:
A study called “Egalitarianism,
Housework and Sexual Frequency in Marriage,” which appeared in The American
Sociological Review last year, surprised many, precisely because it went
against the logical assumption that as marriages improve by becoming more
equal, the sex in these marriages will improve, too. Instead, it found that
when men did certain kinds of chores around the house, couples had less sex.
D’oh. But riddle me this: If equality makes sex bad, wouldn’t it follow that sex was better when things were less equal? Or has married sex always been bad, but we hoped equality would fix it, only to find out it didn’t? Furthermore, does this mean the
women who grimaced through sex every night
in the 1950s as their wifely duty were actually having better sex and just didn’t know it? And! Did the people in this piece having
all this great equality but fewer orgasms used
to have hot sex when the husband was only mowing the lawn?
Can’t tell you, because none of
this is addressed. All we know from the piece is that equality might be making your sex bad,
if we have zero idea how your sex was before, and never mention the simple fact
that marriage has always been a challenge in the passion department. Also, I really had no idea that people thought equality would singlehandedly make familiarity breed
lust instead of boredom in the bedroom. We’re feminists here, people, not magicians.
Back in that chores study cited above, Gottlieb notes that when men did the chores women claim to want men to do, folding clothes,
laundry, vacuuming, aka “feminine chores,” the couples had sex 1.5
fewer times a month. Gottlieb concedes the data is from the 1990s. But one of
the authors of the study contends that not much has changed on the data about the
division of labor in the intervening years. However, no one seems able to admit that 1.5 sex times a month doesn’t seem like a lot. And that most people would
gladly trade 1.5 sex times for, like, a clean kitchen floor. (And, no, I do not say “sex times” in my actual life, promise.)
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