March 14, 2007
Longtime reader with a vanilla question: What to do about differing libidos? We're a straight couple together 20-plus years, and we've aged well. No weight gain, no radical changes in appearance. We are open and loving, and I am cognizant of her needs and feelings. Yesterday, I read an interview with Joan Sewell, author of I'd Rather Eat Chocolate: Learning to Love My Low Libido, and handed it to my wife and observed that this is the new ideal: women laughing at their male partners and shrugging their shoulders about women's general lack of desire. My spouse can now point at this book and say, "You see, I'm normal, and so are all of my friends, ha ha ha, live with it…"
While I want sex daily, I get it maybe five to 20 times a year—and I am lucky compared to some straight married men! Where are the women you hear about who want sex constantly?
Not Giving Up
I haven't had a chance to read Ms. Sewell's book, NGU, but I devoured Sandra Tsing Loh's review of I'd Rather Eat Chocolate in the current Atlantic Monthly. (Loh's book reviews are worth the price of a subscription.) And I'm saddened to report that, according to Sewell and Loh, there's no such thing as a woman who wants sex constantly. They don't exist—never did.
All that yammering about women with voracious sexual appetites during Sex And The City's long reign of terror? A cruel hoax. A figment of the straight-male imagination, a Big Lie picked up on and promoted by self-serving female "sexperts" eager to tell straight men what they wanted to hear. Women have naturally lower sex drives, Sewell writes. It's a hormonal thing. Testosterone makes humans horny, men have lots more than women, so men are hornier—and all the Sex And The City repeats in the world aren't going to change that.
So if straight women don't want sex—or as much sex—what do they want? Chocolate, says Sewell, or a good book. Massive amounts of carbs, says Loh, who approvingly writes of a lesbian couple she knows. With no men around demanding sex, Loh's lesbian friends are livin' the dream: "Teri and Pat have had a special Monday-night ritual. They order an extra-large cheese pizza," writes Loh. While they wait for their pizza, "they settle in on the couch with large twin bags of Doritos. Each chip is dipped first in cream cheese and then in salsa. Cream cheese, salsa. Cream cheese, salsa… The Doritos are finished to the last crumb, and then, upon arrival, the pizza as well." (No dessert is mentioned—I imagine it's just one wafer-thin mint.) Teri and Pat are 50 pounds overweight and suffer from "lesbian bed death," but for them, pizza-and-Doritos night is "better than sex." Loh, who has a sex-starved husband at home, is green with envy.
So the jig is up, NGU. For a while, women with high libidos were normal, and women with low libidos were freakish. Now women with low libidos can hand their husbands Sewell's book and rip open a bag of Doritos.
But there's a silver lining, NGU. Back when women with low libidos were regarded as abnormal—way back at the beginning of the month—it was fashionable to blame the man in a woman's life for her lack of desire. For years, whenever I printed a letter from a guy who wasn't getting any, or wasn't getting much, mail would pour in from women insisting that he had to be doing something wrong.
I called them the "if only" letters: If only she didn't have to do all the housework, she would want to have sex. If only he would talk with her about her day, she would want to have sex. If only she weren't so exhausted from taking care of the kids, she would want to have sex. If only he didn't ask for sex, she would want to have sex. Well now, thanks to Sewell, straight guys everywhere know that it doesn't matter how much housework you do, or how sincerely interested you are in her day, or how much of the child care you take on: She still won't want to fuck you. So leave the dishes in the sink, grab a beer, and go play a video game, guys. Your "if only" nightmares are over.