This article in The Bulletin caused quite a stir in Australia last week and I was wondering how other people felt about women being encouraged to acquiesce to their husband’s ‘demands’.  For those of us in 213 it might be nice to couch responses in differing feminist perspectives – Mel

Happily married sexThe Bulletin   Thursday, July 26, 2007The hand comes creeping across the bed,and the wife once again pretends to be asleep. Nightly in the nation’s bedrooms women are turning off sex in their droves. Now, new research by Bettina Arndt suggests a provocative solution.Remember that wonderful scene in the movie Annie Hall when the camera switches between Woody Allen in his psychiatrist’s office and his lover, Diane Keaton, in hers. They are each asked how often they have sex. “Hardly ever,” Allen says plaintively. “Maybe three times a week.” “Constantly,” Keaton groans. “I’d say three times a week.”It’s great stuff, touching on the yawning gulf between men and women in everyday sexual desire. It’s true that most men feel they aren’t getting enough and women feel under pressure to come up with what the men want. That’s the elephant in the room in many relationships, the often unspoken source of much marital tension.Sex in marriage isn’t what it used to be. Gone are the days when sex was simply part of women’s wifely duties. Now most men find themselves on the back foot, feeling very much at the mercy of women’s whim. And that makes for lean pickings given the large numbers of women who go off sex.There seems to be a universal epidemic of women not wanting to have sex. Or at least not wanting as much sex as their partners. On daytime television there’s a passing parade of women worrying about their lost libido. “It would be totally fine if I never had sex again,” one young wife tearfully told Oprah Winfrey.That means trouble. How do couples deal with the strain of the man wishing and hoping while all she longs for is uninterrupted sleep? “That’s what we fought about most in the first 10 years of our marriage,” says 54-year-old Amy who, with her husband Jim, 56, is filling out diaries as part of my research on how couples negotiate their sex supply. “Every night he’d have a go. He’d reach across the bed and it was my decision whether it was on or not. It was this big ogre between us.”Amy continues: “Even if I refused him, I’d be so upset that I’d lie awake at night thinking, ‘Why did I say no?’ I might as well have let him have it because the next day he’d be so grumpy.” “That’s right,” Jim acknowledges ruefully, “I was a great sulker.” Even on days he didn’t approach her, Amy says she was nervous. “He’d be snoring loudly and I’d still lie there worrying that the hand was going to come creeping over.”It’s a drama being played out in bedrooms across the country. But this is usually a silent movie, with couples rarely talking about their subtle negotiations. His calculations: “What if I …? Will she then …?” Her excuses: dropping her book and feigning sleep as he enters the bedroom. Tensions. Resentment. Guilt. But still joy, of course. How reassuring that, despite the sags and bulges of a less-than-perfect body, you are still wanted. How comforting that warm and familiar body.It’s now almost 30 years since Amy lay rigid in bed, dreading the creeping hand. “I look back and am amazed now that we let sex become such a source of tension between us. It was because we couldn’t talk about it.” But there was another huge stumbling block – in Amy’s head. This was the 1970s, a time when women’s sexual rights had become a rallying cry. Women must no longer act as spittoons for men, preached Germaine Greer. Women were to reclaim their bodies for their own pleasure and that meant having sex only when they felt like it. Female desire must come first, pronounced the famous sex researchers Masters and Johnson. Without desire, there was no arousal, no pleasure, they said.But as Amy discovered, if she waited for her own libido to rear its weedy little head, the couple’s sex frequency would have hit the red very quickly. After one particularly nasty fight, Jim announced he was sick of having to approach her. “If you ever want sex again, you are going to have to ask me for it,” he told her. “That was a complete and utter disaster,” says Amy, describing how she’d lie awake worrying about not wanting sex yet knowing how grumpy he’d be.She’d got it all wrong, Amy now realises. As we all have had it wrong. The assumption that women need to want sex to enjoy it has been a really damaging idea that has wreaked havoc in relationships for the past 40 years. But now research by Professor Rosemary Basson from the

University of
British Columbia has shown that many women do experience arousal and orgasm if they have sex without any prior desire, provided there’s a “willingness to be receptive”.“Just do it!” suggests sex therapist Michele Weiner-Davis in her best-seller The Sex Starved Marriage. She says desire is a decision – you have to make it happen. She’s reached that conclusion after years of counselling married couples experiencing tension as a result of one of them – usually the wife – not being interested in sex. She found that many reluctant lovers reported that when they did have sex, they ended up feeling good.Weiner-Davis poses the revolutionary idea that there’s no point worrying about the reasons why women aren’t interested in sex – there’ll always be plenty of them: squalling infants, stress, tiredness, irritation that he won’t help with the housework. “Knowing why you are not so interested in sex won’t boost your desire one bit. Doing something about it will,” she says.It seems many women are willing to do it. They manage the sex supply by sometimes having sex when they don’t feel like it. An internet survey by The Australian Women’s Weekly found 73% of respondents reported that they sometimes have sex when not in the mood. Half of them gave the reason, “I know I am likely to end up enjoying it”, while a third did it to keep their partners happy.Amy discovered it worked for her. “It doesn’t matter to me whether I’m desperate for sex or not, whether I want it or not. As soon as it gets started, it’s OK. I’ll enjoy it. But that took me a long time to learn.” Amy now counsels other women through her church and finds many are extremely resistant to that message. “They often haven’t had sex for years because they say they have no desire, yet they are looking for love and intimacy and closeness to come back. I explain to them that’s never going to happen unless they start having sex again. But when I tell them to just do it, they are often horrified, saying that’s like being a prostitute.” But many find their sex lives improve immensely if they can get their head around this radical rethink.That’s the funny thing. The idea of having sex without desire is now considered radical – a challenge to long-time feminist orthodoxy. “To contemporary women, the notion that sex might have any function other than personal fulfilment is a violation of the very tenets of the sexual revolution that so deeply shaped their attitudes on such matters,” comments Caitlin Flanagan in her thoughtful Atlantic Monthly essay, “No Sex Please, We’re Married”.Flanagan points out this has made life very difficult for the poor married man hoping for a bit of comfort from the wife at the day’s end. “He must somehow seduce a woman who is economically independent of him, bone-tired, philosophically disinclined to have sex unless she is jolly well in the mood, numbingly familiar with his every sexual manoeuvre and still doing a slow burn over his failure to wipe down the worktops and fold the tea-towel after cooking the children’s dinner. He can hardly be blamed for opting instead to check his emails, catch a few minutes of sport on television and call it a night.”Joan Sewell is the author of a funny and provocative new book, I’d Rather Eat Chocolate: Learning to Love my Low Libido in which she acknowledges how difficult it is for men to keep women in the Zen-like state needed for arousal. And she admits that with her it’s a lost cause. “My libido is not very strong. It’s as fickle as hell. It’s apathetic and it’s not easily aroused or easily sustained,” she writes, concluding that’s actually pretty normal for women. Sewell argues that women have naturally lower sex drives. That it’s a hormonal thing. Testosterone makes humans horny and men have lots more than women. Sewell reports feeling envy for genuinely lusty women, mentioning she met one who described herself as a juicy tomato. “If you were a vegetable, what would you be?” the woman had asked Sewell. “I don’t know, maybe a celery stalk,” she replied.But are most women really celery sticks? Certainly not, says Susan Davis,

Monash
University’s professor of women’s health and a world leader in the study of hormones affecting female drive. She’s met lots of juicy tomatoes. “Oh God, yes. I have one patient who is an academic who tells me she sometimes has to close the door of her university office so she can masturbate,” adding there are also plenty of men who have a low libido. There’s a huge variation in both genders.
Davis says very little of it is due to hormones, although much of her recent work has focused on treating women with low sexual drive by using testosterone.Testosterone is the nearest thing we have to a pink Viagra. The Pfizer company abandoned research on women using Viagra-like drugs when it discovered that even though these increased pelvic blood flow, many women didn’t notice. There’s a disconnect between what’s happening in women’s heads and between their legs. New research is directed at drugs focusing on parts of the brain directly connected with arousal and orgasm. Meanwhile, testosterone is helping boost libido in some – perhaps one in every two – but the hormonal issue is very complex: some women have low sex drive yet naturally high testosterone levels and some very juicy tomatoes show very low levels.Hormones are only part of the story. Women’s libido is simply different from men’s. Female sexual drive tends to be less robust, more easily distracted and dampened by stress, fatigue and relationship hiccups; more bound up in the desire for intimacy. As one woman once told me: “I wrap up sex in all the garbage of the day.” Male desire is comparatively resilient, urgent and less dependent on the right conditions. That’s why Joan Sewell’s husband Kip would have sex five or six times a week if he could have as much sex as he wanted, compared to her once or twice a month. “If I had a choice between reading a good book and having sex, the book wins,” Sewell confesses.But she still feels guilty about it and has tried to rev up her libido. She’s tried everything from talking to therapists, taking hormones, to talking dirty and smearing chocolate on her husband’s genitals – all to no avail. Sewell concludes the real problem is that no one is trying to lower men’s sex drives. Why don’t we hear men saying, “Doctor, my sex drive is too high. Please do something about it. I feel guilty and ashamed that I don’t want less sex. It’s killing my marriage.”Her plea prompted a response from Don Savage, widely syndicated sex advice columnist ( www.citypages.com/savagelove). He comments that whenever he publishes a letter from a man who complains about not getting enough, he’s deluged by what he calls “if only” letters from women … If only she didn’t have to do all the housework, she’d want sex. If only he would talk to her about her day, she’d want sex. By proclaiming that low-libido women are normal, Sewell has done men a favour, suggests Savage: “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 childcare you take on: she still won’t want to f*** you. So leave the dishes in the sink, grab a beer and go play a video game, guys. Your ‘if only’ nightmares are over.”We wish. But “if only” days aren’t over. So many men, and the occasional woman, are still trying to find the key to a welcoming lover. There’s a great story about one of those old pubs which offer a row of bedrooms above the bar, all with paper-thin walls. This night, everyone was bunkered down trying to sleep when, from one of the rooms, there were sounds of bedclothes rustling, a bed creaking and then a plaintive male voice, “Oh come on, Beryl. Come on!” Silence … and then the rustling started up again. “Berrrylll, oh come on!” So it went on until another irritated male voice called from a nearby room, “For Christ’s sake, Beryl, give it to him! Then we can all get some sleep.”That’s the consolation. This is such a familiar bedtime story with men and women everywhere struggling through the same old, same old.