01.21.06
the sexless marriage: part 1
so i’ve been thinking about this phenomena of the sexless marriage… how a couple marries and 5, 10, 15 years later the man can recount on one hand the last sexual encounters he’s had within the past two years.
and i’ve been thinking about what it means and why the problem exists. it makes sense statistically if 55% of american women are suffering from sort of sexual dysfunction (and a dysfunction in this case is only tallied when there is a sexual problem which actually causes distress to the woman). what of the untold numbers of women that are apparently perfectly unwilling to broach the subject with their own husbands– much less visit a sex therapist or even identify their lack of sexual interest as a problem. theoretically, the numbers could be much higher.
two hundred years ago, lack of sexual desire in a wife was accepted because women were generally considered to be non-sexual beings, the less sexual the better, the more virtuous, motherly, womanly even. in other words, the husband would have access to a warm accomodating log which he would impregnate multiple times (if she didn’t die during child birth as apparantly more than 10% of women did back then).
somewhere between now and then and mostly in the 60’s and 70’s women started to speak up about the fact they actually liked sex, could orgasm, masturbate, and fantasize…. just like men!
and yet… i’m not convinced that the revolution happened– you know, birth control, pornography, hollywood, all that stuff, it still seems to be hiding from something bigger about this topic. and i think what we’re missing is hiding in these sexless marriages, in the 55% of women suffering from some sort of sexual dysfunction.
it’s the final traces of acknowledging that women are full humans that are missing. women themselves still don’t understand what this means.
whether or not women have less sexual desire than men (as there are studies which exist to document this fact– and the fact that gay men in relationships report more sex with their partners as well as an increased tendency to sexually explore than either hetrosexual or lesbian couples report, does not mean that this fact is biologically inevitable or even properly framed to explain its reason for existing.
since recorded history the sexuality of the women has been actively supressed by women and men… it is almost our heritage as a group, to devalue our own sexuality as some sort of paranormal incident of our wedding night (or whatever) which once achieved (as marriage is for many women still an achievment, another tick on the almighty list of things they must accomplish to be decent members of society), will gently taper off into the child-rearing years and long nightgowns.
in the blink that has been the past 40 years of human history, women have awoken more than ever before in recorded history and arisen from a terminal fog of servitude that blinds us to our own ability to achieve personal happiness without first attending to the needs of our children, husbands, families, friends, and even bloody strangers.
feminism has voraciously struggled and sought, loudly argued and fought for many causes on behalf of women– some more damaging than healing to the general cause that is being half of the human race which still vies for validity even in the presence of its own power and impact.
i think one of the most hampered of agendas has been the one of sexual freedom. even today, i watched a ridiculously romantic movie “before sunrise” where julie delpy’s character tells ethan hawke that she believes men invented feminism to get women into bed with them. and on some scale, on some slightly scewed scale, it might just be such a conundrum– but without all the finger pointing.
if we women want the right to fuck without judgement, if we want the right to our own version of sexuality, we must also take responsibility. we must understand the consequences of casual sex– which is all too frequently not understood.
the first thing that should undoubtedly be done is firmer advocacy for easily accessible reliable birth control. nothing like unwanted children to screw up society. read freakonomics, if only for that nice little analysis which is just brilliant.
there is some sort of bizarro thing going on now: suddenly all of these women are finding reasons to NOT be on birth control: depression and lowered sex drive being two of the main ones. we now have more refined precisely minumized optimal dosages of artificial progesterone, estrogen, etc. in the pill than the clunky ones of the flower children. why didn’t we hear more protest thirty years ago?
lowered sex drive as a result of the pill? is this really a hormonally inavoidable fact? how’s this for a theory: back in the seventies when the pill really started to gain momentum, women’s expectations about their own sex drives were still so undefined and unknown, that they were simply happy to have a pill which would keep them from getting knocked up. .. it was more control, more certainty than they had ever had about sex. pregnancy was finally avoidable, now all they had to do was lay back and enjoy the fucking with less guilt or fear than their mothers had taught them to feel.
but sooner or later this new found freedom and control became common place and the control didn’t seem to be enough… they wanted orgasms when they had their one-night stands, planned their lives, and engaged in sordid encounters with the pool repair man. now that sex was no longer russian roulette, they could start to actually analyze their position (literally and figuratively) more objectively. not only did they want orgasms, they wanted passion, and they wanted men to give it to them, because if there’s one thing we still haven’t learned yet it’s that sexuality is not merely defined by those we are erotically attracted to, but rather a much longer more round and complex version of this– which includes our sexual history as children and adolescence, what we actively eroticise, repress, seek out sexually, habituate to, fantisize about, and on and on…. this is what it is to be a sexual being– not merely a passive recipient of the sexual experiences a man might bring to us.
we started to replace the silence of a log-like wife performing her wifely duty in the most passive of positions, with the controlled disappointed sighs, sideways sarcasm, and slow withdrawl of intimacy of a woman passively accepting the dying passion of a long-term relationship.
it’s a step in the right direction to be dissappointed as opposed to believing a passionless relationship is the only sort that exists, but to accept the dissappointment is to tread water so slowly you risk drowning in your own sense of powerlessness. and in some ways, this is actually a less satisfying life than the woman who is at least contented by the fact that her passionless marriage is as good as it gets.