Who Killed Sex?

Was it a Eureka moment , or wasn’t it?

Meg Wolitzer regales us with the story of a woman at a New York gathering who blurted out one evening: “I would pay someone to have sex with my husband.” Link here.

Wolitzer adds that the remark provoked “snorts and yips of laughter.”

And yet, whatever did the woman mean? Has she given voice to a real trend or is she simply one woman speaking from her own experience? Is this yet another manufactured trend, concocted to sell newspapers?

To her great credit Wolitzer asks the right questions. She does not presume to have identified a trend, and does not even presume to know the experience that lay behind the outburst.

She does find it intriguing that in our post-Freudian age, some, if not many women are finding sex to a burden that they would just as soon live without.

Not only that, but these women, who are post-thirtysomethings, seem to feel that they are not allowed to turn down their husband’s entreaties.

Somewhere along the line, Wolitzer suggests, women have lost the right to say No to sex.

Naturally, biology must enter the mix. The women who heard echoes of their thoughts in the outburst had already had their children and were not interested in having more.

Could it be that female sexual desire is inextricably linked to procreative possibility? Perhaps it has something to do with “the change.” About that Wolitzer has nothing to say.

How should we interpret the remark? Wolitzer astutely offers a number of different interpretations.

Lacking a more extensive interview, we do not know what the woman is fed up with her husband or turned off by sex altogether. Could it be that she has had it with her inattentive husband but would happily give herself to her trainer or the cute young man at the coffee shop?

We only know that she has lost interest in her husband and has been going through the motions, building up resentment and anger.

How does a couple arrive at such an impasse? Let us count the ways. Some men want what they want when they want it, have no real interest in whether their wives want it, and feel that they have a divine right to it. If she is not an active participant in the experience, after a while she might well imagine that, from her husband’s perspective, any female will do.

There are other possibilities. Wolitzer analyzes them well: “I have no idea of what goes on inside the marriage of the woman who made the crack about her husband. All relationships are mysteries. When no one else is there to watch, a couple might put on wigs and prance around, or engage in Santeria rituals. The woman’s husband might have been a lout. She might have been one, too. Perhaps they had never been well matched. Or maybe it was the fatigue of familiarity, and she was simply bored. Regardless, it seems to me that the woman who made the comment about her husband was most likely taking a defeatist position that degrades both of them.”

Without knowing which of these possibilities, is closest to the truth, we do not know whether she is being defeatist or not. And we do not know whether she would be happy with some sex, but not as much as he insists on.

But, why does she do something that she clearly does not want to do? Given that this comment occurred in a Manhattan salon, we can exclude the possibility that these women have been acting out of conjugal duty.

Women who were brought up on feminism strongly reject the idea of doing anything out of conjugal duty. The very concept is abhorrent to their liberated sensibilities.

I do not, however, agree when Wolitzer claims that the remark degrades both the woman and her husband.

In her own way, the woman is taking a step toward saying No. Since Wolitzer is going to use half of her column to explain that it can be a good thing to say No to sex,  why not consider that the woman wishes to farm out her husband’s lust in order to take possession of her own.

As Wolitzer points out we are all fascinated by this turning away from sex. Having suffered the influence of Freud and having lived through the sexual revolution, we have all learned that sex is an unalloyed good.

In her words: “But because we’re all post-Freudians, it’s as if we still believe sex equals strength, health and life; and therefore, not-sex equals weakness, illness and death.”

It also happens that those who wanted to cure civilization of its discontents by promoting more and better sex have encouraged more free and open conversation about sex. They have made it the key to lifting societal repression.

It is, truth be told, a rather dumb idea. Sexual desire does not thrive in the light of day; it needs darkness, it needs to be somewhat and suggestively covered up, it needs to be veiled by euphemisms. The last thing sex needs is to be called by its name.

Examine this sentence by Wolitzer: “Even if these women weren’t planning to fob their own husbands off on helpful neighbors or prostitutes, they were in agreement that at a certain point in a long relationship, a woman might very well just want less of ‘that part‘ of her life (’that part‘ being the linguistic first cousin to ‘down there‘).”

Adult women using euphemisms, doesn’t this suggest that in order for women to regain possession of their sexuality they need to stop talking about it in grossly explicit terms.

I would note, with Wolitzer, that wanting less is not the same as wanting none at all.

Wolitzer explains the value of saying No to sex? But she does not use the word abstinence. There is a veritable industry, especially in the public school system, indoctrinating children with the idea that abstinence is bad, or, if not bad, futile.

If we are wondering where women learned that they did not have the right to say No, perhaps they learned it in sex education classes.

How many women are fed up with sex because they feel that they have to say Yes, even when they want to say No.

Even though educated New York women are often impervious to the opinions of men, they are not impervious to the siren song of feminism.

And, let us recall that feminists have been promoting the dogmatic belief that women want it just as much as men, that men and women are sexually equal.

Some feminists even believed that women were more sexual than men. They argued that civilization was not built on the repression of libido, as Freud argued, but on the repression of the female orgasm.

Nowadays sex positive feminists are out promoting hookups as the road to sexual liberation.

Where does that put women who would rather say No. They are in an ideological bind. They have been inculcated with a system of beliefs that makes them feel obligated to try to match their husbands’ sexual desire, to sacrifice themselves for the cause, whether they like it or not.

Who killed sex?

There isn’t just one killer. Those who have tried to impose their ideology on sexual experience, whether through the sexual revolution, through post-Freudian theory, or through feminist efforts to liberate female sexuality, have killed sex.

Their earnest attempts to enhance sexual pleasure, artificially, as a recruiting tool to entice people to join their cause, has finally, for many people, wrung the enjoyment out of sex, and has made it into an unwelcome chore. Especially for women.

Now, to paraphrase the poet, sex is dying, “not with a bang, but a whimper.”