LOVE AND MARRIAGE (OH, AND SEX):

The Wifely Duty: Marriage used to provide access to sex. Now it provides access to celibacy (Caitlin Flanagan, January 2003, Atlantic Monthly)

During two strange days in New York last winter, 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 and chalked the whole thing up to the magic and mystery that is New York. But no sooner had I put my coat on the peg than it started up again. A number 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 American women in the aggregate are thinking about—noted on his Web site 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, the information always presented in the context of how to relight a long-doused fire. (And I must say that an article in Redbook that warns desperate couples away from a product called Good Head Oral Delight Gel—"the consistency is like congealed turkey fat"—deserves some kind of award for service journalism.) Patricia Heaton, a star of Everybody Loves Raymond, has published a memoir called Motherhood and Hollywood, in which she observes, "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 various techniques that married women use to avoid sex, from the age-old strategy of feigning sleep to the quite modern practice of taking on household night-owl 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 such a late-night project), features a woman so tired that she's frantic to escape sex with her husband, prompting Margaret Carlson, of Time magazine, to observe, "Sleep is the new sex." It has become impossible not to suspect that a large number of relatively young and otherwise healthy married people are forgoing sex for long periods of time and that many have given it up altogether. [...]

All of this makes me reflect that those repressed and much pitied 1950s wives—their sexless college years! 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 in addition to ironing her husband's shirts and cooking the Sunday roast, she was—with some regularity—going to 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 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 forty years ago, after lying dormant lo these uncountable millennia, is silly; more recent is the sexual shutdown that apparently takes place in many marriages soon after they have been legalized.

Jane Greer, Redbook's online sex therapist, has a thriving midtown-Manhattan practice. When I asked her about what I had been hearing, she told me that she has seen many married couples who have gone without sex for periods of time ranging from six months to six years. Why? "Marriage has changed," she told me. "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." I asked Greer the obvious question: 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!"

(What follows is purely speculative--even moreso than usual:)
It's easy enough to believe that the violence done to gender roles and family structure over the last fifty years has had an effect on sexual relationships in marriage. However, one wonders if this "crisis" doesn't start from a faulty premise. Thanks to things like no-fault divorce, the acceptance of alternate lifestyles, welfare subsidies for single mothers, and the like, stable marriages--which is obviously what would be required in order for there to be long periods without sex, since in a short and fractious one you'd not notice the sex going missing--aren't as common as once they were and would appear to be nearly the private preserve of folks who are serious about their commitment to one another and the obligation to create a family. Mightn't we need to consider that the pool of people we're examining are sort of a self-selected traditionalist, middle class bunch? And mightn't it be the case that they come to marriage with a different set of expectations than their grandparents--and, more importantly, everyone else's grandparents--once did. In a world that frowned on--or even made illegal--premarital sex, bastardy, abortion. etc., marriage provided the only safe haven for those who were primarily interested in sex, didn't it? (Unless, like Gaugin, they could go to Tahiti.) But today, if sex is your primary focus in life, why marry? You've reduced your available options from 6 billion to one--that hardly seems like a sensible thing to do.

If, on the other hand, you've met someone you intend to spend your life with, raising children and growing old together, someone who you actually like, a subject rather than an object, perhaps sex doesn't have the imperative it would for someone who is fundamentally alone. Perhaps, in fact, this is very much like what marriages among such people have been like. Maybe the image of the somewhat desexualized 50s was not an elaborate Potemkin Village erected to obscure the dark seething passions behind the scenes. Maybe that's what an affluent, middle class, world of family life really looks like. And maybe rather than being some new trend this one is just more noticeable because people discuss sex more openly than they once did and because the people in stable marriages are so much at odds with the sexualized culture of the day. Most of all, maybe they're telling the truth where others aren't. After all, if you're single and living in a world where skantily-clad no-talents are icons and whose motto is "If it feels good do it", it would be rather embarrassing to admit that you aren't getting much, wouldn't it? Who wants to acknowledge that they're not only unloved but unsexed? In this sense, much of adult modernity resembles our old college days, where at least half your friends were virgins but only 1% would fess up.

I'd be interested to hear what y'all have to say on the topic.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 9, 2003 4:31 PM