Amanda Marcotte has a short piece up at RH Reality Check on women and libido. For such a brief post, she manages to touch on two separate but interlinked issues: one, the problem with pathologizing low female libido; two, the root cause of widespread “lack of interest.” Here’s the marvelous final paragraph:
It’s an indicator of how male-dominated our society is that the fact that women have diminishing libidos and don’t seem to care that much about it is treated as the problem, when in fact it’s merely the symptom of a larger problem–that women feel overworked, underpaid, underappreciated, understimulated, and shamed about their bodies. If we treated the actual problems that women face, higher libidos would be the happy result, I’m sure. But in order to do that, we’d have to treat male domination like a problem to be solved, and since few people really want to do that, instead we’re left with articles that note women’s lack of libido, but carefully resist asking why.
That’s spot on.
The great sex therapist, David Schnarch, writes in his Passionate Marriage (the best sex advice book for couples in long-term relationships I’ve ever seen) that we do well to avoid the question “Why doesn’t my wife (or my husband, or my bf, gf, what-have-you) want to have sex with me?” The whole structure of the question, Schnarch says, misses the point. It assumes a strong libido is the default setting in any romantic relationship. Rather, we should ask “Why should my partner want to have sex with me?” And also “Why do I really want to have sex with him or her?”
This can be shaming, of course, if not asked rightly. Schnarch doesn’t want his patients following the “Why should my partner want to have sex with me?” with a sigh and an “After all, I’m unattractive, it stands to reason that they should have no reason to want me.” Buit it is a reminder, as I’ve written many times, that sex is never obligatory. The “I will” of the wedding day is not a blank check to be cashed daily, weekly, or monthly by whichever spouse has a higher libido. We ought to be answering Schnarch’s question not with “Because she’s my wife and it’s her job” or even with “Because we’re in love, and people in love are supposed to fuck a lot.” We ought to be answering it by having an honest discussion with ourselves (before we have one with our partners) about what it is sex means to us, what makes us in the mood, what we see as the purpose of sex in our lives.
I’m thinking about this in terms of my own marriage right now. My wife and I have a newborn. Though I wouldn’t normally share this sort of thing, it’s probably obvious that we haven’t had sex since before our daughter was born. My wife is recovering from a grueling physical experience, and is breastfeeding little Cerys on what seems like an almost hourly schedule. (And folks, thanks, but please spare us the advice about sleeping routines and so forth — we have tons of help.) I haven’t slept more than three hours straight in a single night since the baby was born, and am up changing diapers and soothing and cleaning at the strangest and most interesting hours. For a great many reasons, sex isn’t happening right now. Neither of us has a strong libido these days, though mine at the moment probably surpasses that of my wife. It’s an excellent opportunity for me to practice what I preach about self-soothing and about letting go of any lingering hint of entitlement and expectation.
One thing I learned in a liturgical church, and am learning all over again in my involvement with the Kabbalah Centre, is a great respect for seasons. We live differently, the great traditions tell us, at different times of the year. We have our penitential and reflective seasons, like Lent or the Omer; we have our seasons of celebration, like Easter; we have our seasons of activity and effort, like Sukkot and Pentecost. There’s a time and place, in enduring relationships, to fuck with violent abandon five times a day. There’s a time and place to make love reverently with thoughts of the divine (like midnight on Shabbat). There’s a time and a place, too, to take all of that carnality and put it elsewhere, focus it on some other aspect of living.
My wife and I are, like so many parents of newborns, like walking zombies much of the time. Last night, I changed Cerys after my wife had fed her, and I put my baby girl in her little night dress. We stood as a family at our bedroom window, looking out at the deck and the world beyond, and we placed Cerys between us. I held her so her head was near my heart, and my wife put herself around me in such a way that her heart and her chest was on the other side of our daughter’s head. Cerys nestled into us and we nestled into each other, skin to skin to skin. Let me tell you something: this is making love, making love of a different sort.
The imperious and real urges I feel are sublimated into something else, not because my sexuality is bad ever — there is never a season for shame, never a season for self-loathing. But they are sublimated because now is the season for sacrifice, for sleep deprivation, and for unconditional love. My wife’s libido is gone, for now, gone where it needs to go as she goes through the healing process and the mystery of first-time motherhood. Real love and real confidence is knowing it will return in due course, and that I will be fine in its absence. There is nothing to pathologize, nothing to doubt, nothing to question. All is as it should be, and right now, it’s all not about me.
beautiful
“The problem is that female sexuality has been considered shameful.”
“The problem is that low female libido is being pathologized.”
!!
As usual once Hugo gets away from the head-spinning assertions of theory, and gets into his personal experience, he becomes deep and wise.
He sounds like a man who used to be sexually selfish and has learned to accommodate and listen — “it’s not all about me”. Me, I’m coming from the opposite direction. I was so concerned about my partner’s sexual satisfaction and pleasure that I forgot about my own. For years I literally did not know how to receive and experience pleasure (unless it led directly to ejaculation). I think many hetero men are like this. That so many women do not know how to *give* pleasure is both a cause and a result. And when we finally learn to enjoy our pleasure, we are apt to let go so much that we forget about hers.
As Hugo shows, it’s all about balance, listening, and perhaps unavoidably, talking; realizing that nothing is normal or abnormal, and that above all sex is a good thing, no matter how much or how little of it you want at any one time.
It’s me again, delurking to comment not about me but about my sister. We’ve always talked about everything, including sex. (I’ve only dated women, and she’s the first person I came out to as a lesbian when I was in middle school. My sister is straight and married and had a baby a year ago, my nephew.
My sister was always in her own description “a horndog”. She gave me a vibrator when I was fourteen, and told me she’d been masturbating daily since she was eight or nine. She loved sex with her boyfriends and with her husband, my brother-in-Law. Even while she ws pregannt, she loved sex. But since the baby has been here, nearly a year now, she has had no libido. Her husband was patient with her for a while, but it’s become an issue. She’s gained weight and the baby has had a few (minor, thank GOD) health problems, but even she can’t figure out why a woman of 25 who was sex-crazed since before she got her period is now, all of a sudden since the baby came, not interested.
I say this not to freak you out, Huges, but to point out how much babies impact a women’s sex drive. Even though I know I will end up with women for the rest of my life, I do want to someday have a baby, and I do wonder if I will have the same loss of libido towards my girlfriend or wife.
Oh, and if you have any links to disparate libido in same-sex relationships, especially between women, I would love to have you post them. I thought you had mentioned something once, but can’t find it in your archives!
I still think it’s hard to beat Why Your Wife Won’t Have Sex With You for an intelligent, non-shaming discussion.
Luisa, your sis might want to have a checkup to make sure nothing is physically wrong, but I would guess that she’s feeling physically overwhelmed and ‘touched out’. When you have a little kid climbing on you all day (especially if that includes nursing), the last thing you may want at night is to have somebody else making demands on your body.
Don’t ignore, either, the fact that we live in a society that weirdly separates being a parent from being a sexual being. She may have problems bridging that mental gap from ’sexy young thing’ to ‘mommy’.
It is indeed a great link, myth. And you’re probably right about Luisa’s sister as well.
Luisa, I can’t recall ever-blogging about disparate libido in lesbian relationships, though I think that at least some of the same truisms apply. Perhaps I’ll reflect more and see what emerges…
I was once in a discussion with friends about something called the lesbian bed death syndrome. They were saying it was something that can happen when there is disparate libido between women in a relationship. They claimed that it was not much of a problem between male couples.
Several of my friends are openly gay and I suspect a few might still be in the closet. I have never known anyone, socially or professionally, that was openly a lesbian. However, I do think I have worked with some lesbian engineering coworkers and military officers over the years.
My gay friends claim they can tell most of the time if someone is gay or a lesbian, even if they are still in the closet. When I told them that I could not begin to determine who was a lesbian, they went down a list of things that might indicate someone is a lesbian. I could not tell how much they were joking with me and how much they were serious at the time.
Hugo,
you’re right that there are times when “it” is rightly not about you, or any of us. That’s what partnership is about. Yet that also implies that there will be times when “it” is all about us, or there’s also something unbalanced in our partnership.
Again, true. But it should be considered a fair and possible outcome of that introspection that there may be an imbalance of physical needs that non-physical love cannot bridge. In that case, the two people involved will have to come to terms with that, either by accepting the imbalance and suffering, compromising and suffering, or separating and suffering.