Monthly Archives: July 2007

Friday Random Ten: “overtrained and with a cold to boot” edition

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Aimee Mann and the McGarrigles don’t show up often enough on FRTs, and two lovely tracks from each are here. You can’t have been 13 in 1980, as I was — desperately insecure and hormonal — and not love track #4. And I play the “Hair” soundtrack more often than that from any other musical, even more than “Jesus Christ Superstar.” And I continue to fall for Rosie Thomas.

1. “Video”, Aimee Mann
2. “Past the Point of Rescue”, Hal Ketcham
3. “Rockstar”, Third Day
4. “Love Stinks”, J. Geils
5. “Let the Sunshine In”, Hair Soundtrack
6. “My Old Friend the Blues”, Steve Earle
7. “Talk to Me of Mendocino”, Kate and Anna McGarrigle
8. “For a Dancer”, Jackson Browne
9. “Since You’ve Been Around”, Rosie Thomas
10. “Two Pink Lines”, Eric Church

Bonus Track One: “This Flight Tonight”, Joni Mitchell
Bonus Track Two: “Good Ole Boys Like Me”, Don Williams

Private virtue, public justice: some very long thoughts on men, leadership, and the lie of “compartmentalism”

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Responses to my post about pro-feminist men and Antonio Villaraigosa’s infidelities have been, well, lukewarm. At her place, Sassy worries that by suggesting that the mayor treats women in his life as disposable, I’m reinforcing an anti-feminist sense of victimhood. She also writes:

Part of feminism for me though is recognizing that women have the ability to make the best choices for themselves, that includes making the choice to stay or leave a man with a wandering eye. I know very little about his wife, but I can assure you that some of those tears she has cried has been from the assumption of others that he treated her as “disposable” and what others must think of her…

No doubt, but those of who work as male feminists have an obligation to do more than counsel women to make “the best choices” when faced with infidelity. There’s a strain in many of the responses to my post that suggests that bad male behavior is to be expected, and feminism should focus itself solely on giving women tools with which to respond to that behavior. That’s fine, and I do share an interest in giving women those tools — but I’m also convinced that those of us who call ourselves male feminists ought to be doing more to challenge men to transform their sexual behavior. Feminism is surely about more than empowering women; it surely is also (in part but not in whole) about holding men accountable and setting new standards for what is acceptable.

In the comments below my post, Catty writes:

I do think this hand-wringing is counterproductive and sets people up for failure.
In this day and age, Roosevelt or Kennedy would have neeeever gotten elected.

I understand the exasperation many folks have with the media’s incessant prying into the sexual lives of public figures. I hear the FDR and JFK line a lot, too; some people clearly yearn for an era in which great men were free to be great in public and have their quiet, discreet, unreported fun. Catty seems to believe, as many now believe, that there is no connection between public justice and private virtue; they believe that a man can simultaneously betray marriage vows and be desperately loyal to other, loftier principles. In other words, they believe that many people — perhaps great men in particular — can live their lives in compartments.

My faith informs my feminism, and vice versa. Though I acknowledge that philanderers have made great leaders in the past, that’s due less to their personal success at compartmentalization and more to God’s remarkable habit of “writing straight with crooked lines.” At the end of the day, my faith tells me we will all fall short of the mark; we are all works in progress; we are all going to sin in one way or another. But acknowledging that sin is part and parcel of the human condition is very different from turning a blind eye to it. Recognizing that humans are often frail is very different from accepting private betrayals as inevitable. And understanding that we all make mistakes doesn’t mean that we ought to continue to enable the making of them.

JFK and FDR were notoriously unfaithful; the Marilyn Monroe and Lucy Mercer stories (among others) are well-known. But these two men grew up in an era where men were expected and encouraged to live their lives in compartments. They were taught that it was permissable to be one way in public, and radically different in private. They were also raised in a culture where wives accepted their husbands’ infidelity as inevitable, asking only that their philandering spouses be discreet. The male-dominated press, filled with journalists who may also have had girlfriends on the side, conspired with the JFKs and the FDRs and others to keep everyone’s sexual behavior out of the public eye.

A feminist society is one in which we raise both young men and young women to treat each other with dignity, with kindness, with radical honesty. Feminism is not merely about liberating women to behave as badly as men have traditionally been allowed to behave; feminism is perhaps also about asking men to live up to the same moral standards that women have historically been required to meet. Of course, that’s a position grounded firmly in both faith and feminism rather than the latter alone. Secular proponents of women’s equality do not all share the conviction that the best advocates of public justice are also those who practice authentic private virtue.

In this country, the right-wing emphasizes private morality and often ignores the requirement to provide justice through public institutions. The left does the opposite. The right doesn’t see the communal responsibility (expressed through state institutions) to provide for the health and welfare of the vulnerable. The left doesn’t see much point in encouraging monogamy as a solution to social problems. The right sees the “family” as the solution to all problems, while the left almost completely discounts it. That’s a broad generalization, but it’s not all that far off the mark. Both left and right often fail to see that we need a combination of strong, accessible public institutions and strong, kind, morally accountable citizens to build a just society.

From a feminist standpoint, I prefer Bill Clinton to George W. Bush. The former’s track record on women’s rights globally, while far from perfect, was much better than his successor’s. On the other hand, not even his worst enemies have accused W. of any sexual impropriety since his conversion experience more than two decades ago. Clinton’s personal life was characterized by recklessness bordering (if the stories be half true) on abuse: Bush’s private life is above reproach — but his public actions have been firmly anti-feminist. But I refuse to accept a false choice between being led by a man of private virtue and public misogyny on the one hand and being led by a man who embraces egalitarian principles in the open but fumbles disgracefully with young women half his age in a hallway off the Oval Office on the other. Public justice matters; private virtue matters.

It is only unreasonable to demand both when we buy into the notion that men are fundamentally weak. We often wrongly assume that “great men” naturally have great sexual appetites that cannot possibly be met within the confines of a marriage to one woman. Their energy and their commitment to the greater good require that they have a little “down time” in the arms and beds of a variety of young women (or young men). We insist that it’s both unfair and unrealistic to demand that these men honor all of their commitments — as long as they are good servants to the public, it’s none of our business whether or not they are lousy husbands.

Every man, howver, who holds a position of power (be he president or professor) is instantly a role model to younger people, especially to younger men. We do take cues, and rightly so, from our leaders about what is acceptable and permissable. A teacher, a youth minister, a cabinet secretary, a monarch, a president — they are watched and studied by the young. The young want to know if those who guide them and provide for them are matching their public language and their private lives. When they see hypocrisy, when they see a profound disconnect, when they see that even the most admired of men cheat — they learn not to expect too much from men, or from themselves.

Had they been raised in a different era and held to a higher standard, I have no doubt that FDR and JFK could have both been successful politicians and faithful husbands. Had they been raised in a culture that taught men to speak and act when they are alone with their buddies the same way they speak and act around their sisters and wives, they might well have turned out to be even better leaders than they did. While feminists ought to care more about a politician’s ideas than about his or her private sexual behavior, it is not unreasonable or overly idealistic to ask for decency in every aspect of a leader’s life. Our sons and daughters need to see men who can treat women as equals in the boardroom — and at the same time, keep their commitments in the bedroom.

It’s not too much to ask, it’s not too much to demand. And I am demanding it less for myself than for the young people who so desperately need to know that radical, authentic integrity is possible. I’m not asking for perfection, but I am asking for an end, once and for all, for to compartmentalization.

Student t-shirt update

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Seen on student t-shirts just this morning:

“You’re better looking on Myspace”

“Thank you for last night. What’s your name?”

The student with the latter shirt carefully put on a sweater before coming up to me after class to talk. She might have been cold, but I doubt it.

A note on the “enthusiasm gap”

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I’m a bit grumpy this morning. I got up at 4:15AM to do my Wednesday medium long run. I felt sniffly and tired, but pushed myself out of the house. A mile and a half later, I was spent. I turned around, jogged slowly home, showered, and went back to bed for forty minutes. I feel lousy, but can’t afford to drop any more class time in fast-paced summer school. More importantly, I’m worried about the marathon on July 29. Training went splendidly in May and June, but has been woefully inconsistent the last two weeks. I’ll lower my expectations and run the darned thing anyway, I suppose, but I’m still feeling a bit frustrated this morning.

I have more to say about Villaraigosa and the connection that I argue ought to exist between private virtue and public justice, but I’ll save that for another day.

I was talking to a very conservative cousin of mine last week. He’s a staunch Republican, I’m a loyal Democrat. We’re very fond of each other, of course, and our mutual affection is not threatened in the least by radically divergent political views. My cousin hasn’t yet settled on a Republican candidate to support for president. He thinks Romney’s an obvious opportunist; he loathes McCain for his support for “amnesty”; he thinks Fred Thompson will be revealed, in the end, as a lightweight without sufficient fire in the belly; he likes Giuliani best of the available major choices but is disheartened by his stances on the social issues. I suspect that Mike Huckabee would come closest to my cousin’s ideal, but he and I both know that we’re not likely to ever see a second Arkansas governor in the White House. So my cousin is still open, and not happy about his choices.

I feel — as most of the liberal wing of my family feels — as if we’ve got the most astonishing abundance of good choices. Some of us are backing Edwards, some Obama, some Clinton; my mother is supporting Bill Richardson. I do have relatives supporting Kucinich, and one firmly in Joe Biden’s camp. But almost all of us say we’ll vote with great enthusiasm for whoever it is turns out to be the nominee. Perhaps this is all just false optimism brought on by Bush weariness, but I look at the Democratic pack and I see an outstandingly strong group. Though I’ll likely stay with John Edwards through the primary, my sense at this point is that come the general election, I’ll vote with enthusiasm for the Democratic candidate, rather than for the “lesser of two evils.”

My cousin, on the other hand, says he’ll be voting with one thing in mind next fall: stopping Hilary. He’s surer than I that Senator Clinton wil be the Democratic nominee, and though he has no liking for any of his GOP choices, he likes the wife of the 42nd president even less. I can’t help but feel it’s a positive sign that so many of us on the left regard our own candidates with such enthusiasm, while the right seems largely focused on picking whoever they can (no matter how compromised) whom they believe has a shot at beating Clinton. That “excitement gap” encourages me.

But then again, I’m a liberal Democrat whose political memory now goes back nearly 35 years. I’ve seen far too many defeats snatched from the jaws of victory. I know far too well how easy it is to blow for the left to blow a sure thing. Much can and will happen in the next sixteen months, but for now, I comfort myself with the sense that “our team” has a bench deeper and more talented than the USC Trojan backfield will be this fall. It’s a good time for optimism.

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The Twelve Step guide to learning Los Angeles: some recollections

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I’ve been living in Los Angeles (or the immediately surrounding area) for eighteen years now. I moved down here from the Bay Area right after graduating college in the spring of 1989, and have called this place home ever since.

Please forgive the huge amount of privilege that the following anecdote conveys. Many people I knew got lovely graduation presents from their parents. Most of my friends from Cal went on long trips the summer after they finished college; one backpacked New Zealand, another went to Czechoslovakia (remember, this was the summer before the Velvet Revolution), others went off to France or Ireland. Me? I moved down to Los Angeles at the end of May 1989, and within a week got my graduation present: admission to a 28-day residential treatment program for alcoholism.

The hospital program I was in has long since closed. It was in a dingy and depressing mid-century building in Van Nuys; the program was called ASAP: “Adult Substance Abuse Program”. We were kept on locked wards in a hospital setting, allowed outside only for “smoke breaks” (which were blessedly frequent) and for closely supervised trips to Twelve Step meetings. It was these outings to AA and NA and CA that I remember best.

We were packed into fifteen-passenger vans, and driven, as my mother would say “all over the hell and gone.” While in ASAP, we went to meetings from Chatsworth to Century City; from Studio City to Saugus, Pacoima to Palms. A newly arrived transplant from the Bay Area, readying myself for grad school at UCLA, I was almost completely ignorant of the sprawling geography of greater L.A. But I got a marvelous crash course in navigating the city as a result of traveling in our little white van, going from meeting to meeting to meeting.

Being a rebellious and troubled sort, I dropped out of the program, going out AMA (against medical advice) after a couple of weeks.

The day after leaving ASAP, I took what little graduation money I had left and made a down payment on a used 1983 Honda Accord. It was a stick shift, and I didn’t know how to drive a manual transmission. But the flirtatious young saleswoman made me a deal: if she could teach me to drive it in less than thirty minutes, I’d buy the car. I bought the car at Keyes, the huge conglomerate in the Valley. The saleswoman took the car onto a side street, and in twenty minutes, had me shifting without stalling. I bought the car, and drove it to my little apartment in Westwood that very day.

One of my first purchases after the Honda was a Thomas Bros. map to greater Los Angeles. I had a little AA meeting directory, and I was determined to continue to pursue recovery even after having bailed out of the treatment program. And over the next couple of years, as I moved in and out of sobriety, in and out of my first marriage, and through my first phase of grad school at UCLA, I learned my way around Los Angeles as I went to Twelve Step meetings. Indeed, I wouldn’t know L.A. half as well today as I do if I hadn’t gone to as many meetings as I did.

Traffic was lighter in the late 1980s and early 1990s than it is today, and so it was easy for me to leave Westwood and hit an evening meeting in, say, mid-Wilshire or Reseda or Torrance. Armed with my Thomas guide (no cell phone or GPS for me in those days), I made my way around this vast basin. Most meetings were in churches or synagogues or hospitals. Even now, my wife and I will find ourselves driving down a little street in, say, Culver City (somewhere I hardly ever have occasion to go) and I’ll cry “Look, honey, see that church on the corner? I went to a couple of great meetings there in 1990!” My wife is a patient soul, but she’s only mildly amused that most of my knowledge of how to get around this town came from the steps I took to treat my addictions.

It was traveling to Twelve Step meetings that made me love Los Angeles. Like most Northern Californians, I came down to L.A. with a host of vicious half-truths and prejudices. Had I stayed in one small enclave around the UCLA campus, I might well have continued to harbor those prejudices for years. As it was, going out to Twelve Step meetings across the city, usually traveling on surface streets, taught me to love this unwieldy metropolis. I learned where all the 7-11s were, where I could buy my diet Cokes and my Parliaments. I learned where I could get my junk food fixes. And I learned that Los Angeles was a lousy place to visit, but could be — at least for the young and childless addict with a car and a map — a great place to live.

Eight Things Meme

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Jill tagged everybody, and I haven’t done one of these in a while, so here goes. It’s required by the rules of the meme to post this first:

THE RULES

1. All right, here are the rules.
2. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
3. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
4. People who are tagged write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
5. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

1. I have to have an unsharpened pencil with me at all times. I play with them as a nervous habit, and when I’m alone, I talk to them. One at a time works fine, but it needs to be unsharpened and I prefer Dixon Ticonderoga #2s. I’ve been playing with pencils as little “talismen” to center myself since I was a small child. I go through a box of 12 every two weeks. The house is covered in pencils.

2. I am a great maker of lists. Not the useful to-do lists, but lists such as “ten states in which I would least like to live”. I do this in my head, often when I’m driving.

3. The greatest struggle of my life has been with sugar. I love sugar, and can eat spoonfuls out of the bowl. As a child, I ate sugarcubes one after the other to the amazement and horror of friends. Nothing, nothing, nothing, is “too sweet” for me. I have tried to subsist on Cadbury Cream Eggs and Jelly Bellies for days. I’m on a periodic break from all sugar, and I feel much better.

4. I like rats, heights, spiders, and public speaking; the usual phobias don’t get me. I’m scared to death of snakes, and — inexpilicably — scared of turtles. Tortoises frighten me. I want very much to love them, and I do, from a distance. But I’ve never touched one, not even on the shell.

5. I have two small birth defects: the top of my right ear has no cartilage in it, and I have the beginnings of what might have been a sixth finger on my left hand.

6. After nine years of sobriety, I still have “drinking and using dreams” from time to time. They are terrifying, but I think I’ll worry more when I stop having them. Sometimes we need reminders of what we once were to help us to continue to become what it is we are called to be.

7. It’s all about boxer briefs, occasionally boxers, never briefs. Hey, if Clinton can share, so can I.

8. If I’d have been a girl, I would have been named Elizabeth or Katherine. My mother was convinced I was a girl until the delivery nurse reported otherwise. As it is, I am named Hugo for my father’s father’s father.

I tag anyone who wishes to be tagged, but in particular:

Sneha
Jeff
Sarah
Lindsey
Rudy
Cassandra/Antigone

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Reinforcing the “wolf in sheep’s clothing” stereotype: why I’m so mad at Antonio Villaraigosa

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When I was visiting my family last week for the Fourth of July, my Northern California cousins (who tend to regard the southern part of the state as a parched wasteland populated by the vacuous, the self-absorbed, and the undocumented) teased me a bit about the news of L.A. mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s divorce and extramarital affair with a television reporter. My family knows I’ve been a big supporter of the mayor in the past, and they were interested in my current thoughts.

I’ve been a fan of Villaraigosa for many years. Over a decade ago, one of his oldest daughters was a student in my women’s history class. She was my student at the same time that Villaraigosa was making his name as a key feminist ally; as a state assemblyman in the mid-1990s, Villaraigosa sponsored the bill that legalized breast-feeding in public. Under Villaraigosa’s bill, signed by Gov. Wilson and now California law, restaurants and other businesses could not force women to leave if they began to breastfeed their children. A seemingly small bit of progress, but it mattered a lot to have a dynamic young pol like Villaraigosa shepherd the bill through the legislature. His daughter was very proud of her Dad.

It was from his daughter that I also learned years ago what most people learned far more recently: that the future mayor had been born Antonio Villar, and when he married Corina Raigosa (not the mother of my former student), they blended their names rather than hyphenate. It seemed an extraordinarily feminist act for a young man from East Los Angeles. I ws deeply impressed by what I saw — and still see — as a defiant rejection of machismo and its attendant mores. I became a big Villaraigosa fan, supporting him in his failed 2001 and successful 2005 mayoral bids. Though I haven’t lived in the city limits of Los Angeles for many years, I spend so much time in L.A. I consider myself one of his constituents.

News broke weeks ago of his separation from his wife, followed last week by revelations he had been conducting an ongoing affair with a Spanish-language television reporter (whose beat had included Los Angeles politics). The story has been all over the airwaves and the local papers this week. And though there had long been signs that Villaraigosa’s private life was, well, colorful to the point of chaotic, I’ll admit I’m still disappointed and angry.

I agree with those who say that a politician’s private betrayals do not automatically signal an inability to lead. History shows us that leaders can be unfaithful to their spouses and be deeply and profoundly loyal to their countries (or cities). Some people do manage to compartmentalize very well, even if that compartmentalization costs their families dear. I don’t have the sense that if Villaraigosa cheats on his wife, it means he will automatically cheat on Los Angeles. To suggest otherwise is cheap rhetorical theatrics.

What makes me angry about Villaraigosa is that he spent years and years positioning himself as a pro-feminist. His voting record in the state legislature established him as a devoted progressive; he didn’t merely sign on to the “right” bills, he publicly and bravely carried them. He was excoriated and ridiculed for his stance on breast-feeding, but he pushed ahead. He made a lot of enemies, and he also made a lot of friends. As a feminist professor who teaches on a plurality-Latino campus, I was excited to see a Mexican-American man, a former bad boy from the mean streets of East L.A., seem so publicly and openly committed to egalitarian principles.

You see, as a white male who grew up in Carmel, raised by liberal college professors as my parents, I’m of limited value as a role model to my Latino students. My background is fundamentally alien to most of the young men and women with whom I work at PCC. Villaraigosa grew up where they grew up, with the same values and the same cultural expectations. After a series of what we all hoped were merely youthful indiscretions, he pulled his life together, becoming a union organizer, a politician, and a pro-feminist husband. His very name symbolized that he was a kind of New Latin Man. And I’ll admit I pointed to his name, to his public support for women’s rights, and his very identity as evidence that pro-feminist principles could be publicly embraced by Latino men.

Having an extramarital affair doesn’t prove that Villaraigosa’s feminism is all a sham. He would have to be been both monstrously calculating and extraordinarily prescient to know, back when he married Corina Raigosa in the 1980s while a young labor organizer, that blending their names and building his career as a fighter for gender justice would be the key to long-term political success. I’ve only met the mayor very briefly, back when he was still in the Assembly, and I can’t pretend to know his heart (though I know many people who do claim to know him very well.) My sense is — my hope is — that Villaraigosa’s public feminist commitments are genuine and sincere, rooted in conviction rather than in expedient ambition.

But the legitimate good that he has done is tarnished now. And more troublingly, Villaraigosa’s now very public infidelities (his affar with the TV reporter is hardly the first) does huge damage to the pro-feminist movement. When a man who openly allies himself with the movement for gender justice treats the women in his private life as disposable, he sends a message that there are limits to the possibilities for male transformation. When an ostensible pro-feminist like Villaraigosa is chronicly unfaithful and develops a reputation as a reckless womanizer, he reinforces a stereotype not only for Latinos but for all men. One commentator I heard on the radio said what I know many others are thinking: “The lesson from the mayor is that, well, most men will cheat if given the chance. And if you’re in power like the mayor is, you’re going to have a lot of chances. We shouldn’t be surprised.” I winced when I heard that.

Villaraigosa campaigned for office as a progressive; he campaigned for office not merely as a Latino, but as a new kind of Hispanic politician. He campaigned on a platform of gender justice. And while he never claimed to match his public pronouncements to his private commitments, his willingness to blend his name with his wife’s sent a strong signal that that was what he intended to do. When it became painfully clear that he had repeatdly fallen short of the mark, and indeed (according to some who know him well) had a chronic problem with women, the disappointment some of us feel is genuine. And the anger is genuine as well.

Over and over again, I work to challenge what I call the “myth of male weakness.” Over and over again, I suggest that authentic male feminism lies in part in treating women in your life as equals and partners, in treating them with respect. Pro-feminist men are committed to the principle that women ought to have access to the same opportunities, the same power, as their husbands and fathers and brothers. But it’s hollow to be committed to justice in the abstract when you can’t practice it in your own home. Cheating on your spouse publicly with younger women (or women of any age, for that matter) is an act of contempt for her. It sends the message that a commitment to justice can be trumped by the hormones, or by what the mayor has the gall to call “an affair of the heart”.

In the end, those of us who are publicly committed to feminism are rightly held to a high standard. In a sense, it’s right to be more disappointed when an avowed progressive feminist man fails to practice his principles in his personal life than when, say, someone who doesn’t see women as equals falls short. Many social conservatives (not all) do believe that “men are weak”, at least weaker than women when it comes to the capacity to resist sexual temptation. Pro-feminist men need to make it clear through their private lives that male weakness is a myth, just as they make it clear in their public pronouncements that they see women as radically equal with men. So many folks out there already believe that men who espouse feminist principles are political or sexual opportunists; we’re told over and over again that our commitment to egalitarianism is a thinly disguised strategy for getting women into bed. When a man who has publicly worked for women’s equality is repeatedly unfaithful to his wife and behaves recklessly with other women, he reinforces the “wolf in sheep’s clothing” stereotype. He does tremendous damage to the movement for gender justice.

I didn’t need Antonio Villaraigosa to be my role model. My commitments to my marriage and to my feminism aren’t contingent on him or any other leader. But I know many young men and women who did look up to him, and many who saw him as modeling not just a new face for Latinos in politics, but a new kind of man. The cynicism they are experiencing now, the disillusionment they are feeling now, the renewed sense that many have that “underneath it all, all men are dogs” — all this breaks my heart. And it makes me angry, very angry, at a man I still like very much but in whom I am profoundly disappointed.

Rejecting the “he who wants less, wins” model: a reply to Bob about marriage, faith and disparate desire

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I’m home from some happy family time in Northern California. Yesterday, while driving down Interstate 5 through the Central Valley, the temperature gauge in my Solara registered 113 degrees. ‘Twas a toasty day, and I did my best to expand my carbon footprint by keeping the inside of my car at a comfy 65.

A reader named “Bob” writes:

I’m wondering though what you think about the concept of sexual frequency “normalcy” in marriage or committed relationships. In other words, if one partner has a higher sex drive than the other, what are the responsibilities (if any) of one to the other?

I know how the Church generally feels about this issue. The feelings range from glorified body ownership (a wife should submit to her husband’s sexual “needs” no matter what) to lessons of “thorns in the flesh” (repressing sexual “needs” are a good sign of spiritual discipline).

But how does a feminist feel about this? What do you do (if anything should be done) about unequal libido within a committed relationship? As the partner with a higher drive in my marriage, I constantly question my desires. Am I too dependent on my wife for sexual fulfillment? Maybe I should show more restraint as an independent person and a Christ follower. Perhaps this is my thorn in my flesh, a test from God. But then the Christian ideal of marriage seems to say much of “two becoming one,” some kind of mysterious interdependence, or even a combined identity. To have two different ideals of sexual unity, or any other ideal for that matter, seems counterproductive to the married unit.

Obviously, my first recommendation to Bob and his wife is that they seek counseling. That doesn’t mean I’m pathologizing his wife’s low sex drive or Bob’s more boisterous one. I am a great believer, however, in the marvelous progress that can be made with a good marital therapist. There are increasing numbers of Christians who work as marital therapists, and they integrate spiritual and psychological insights very effectively. Most married couples could benefit from a periodic therapeutic “tune-up”, even if no burning problem seems to be presenting itself.

Too often, we do tend to over-analyze incongruent libidos. It’s a staple of pop psychology that the partner with the lower drive is “repressed” or perhaps dealing with abuse issues from his or her childhood. Similarly, we often assume that the partner with the stronger drive is emotionally needy, or someone who seeks to soothe their anxiety and stress through sexual activity rather than a more appropriate outlet. Too often, partners can get into a tail-spin; the more the one with the higher drive presses, the more the one with the lower drive resists. The one with the higher drive feels neglected, unattractive, anxiety-ridden, frustrated; the one with the lower drive feels pressured, nagged, frustrated. Most people who’ve been in long-term relationships can recognize themselves in one (or both) of those roles!

It is by no means always the case in heterosexual marriages that it is always the man with the lower sex drive. But that’s Bob’s situation, and that matches up with our stereotype, so I’ll say a little about it here. I’m not going to rehash the great and mysterious words of Paul in 1 Corinthians 7. I will note that the New International Version says:

The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband.

In the context of a chapter on marital sex, that does make clear that a married couple do have sexual obligations to each other. But it would be a huge mistake to assume that Paul means that the lower-drive partner must always acquiesce to the one who’s hornier. I like how the Message version handles this same passage:

The marriage bed must be a place of mutuality—the husband seeking to satisfy his wife, the wife seeking to satisfy her husband. Marriage is not a place to “stand up for your rights.” Marriage is a decision to serve the other, whether in bed or out.

That’s really good, especially the bit about marriage not being a place to “stand up for your rights.” The mystery lies in how we each serve the other without ever insisting on those rights. For the higher-sexed person to demand that his or her partner provide sex on some sort of a schedule is clearly not what Paul is suggesting. At the same time, each partner is called to be deeply concerned with the well-being of the other — and of the partnership itself. That concern will manifest itself in the higher-sexed partner practicing self-control, not only in terms of physical restriction but also by refraining from nagging and pestering. The higher-sexed partner can’t come from a place of entitlement.

Similarly, the spouse with the lower drive has the obligation to be alert to the various ways in which he or she can provide emotional reassurance; the spouse with the lower drive is also, I think, obligated to honestly explore whether some dynamic within the relationship is causing a lack of interest. There’s a huge difference, after all, between genuinely not being “in the mood” and withholding sex as a passive-aggressive technique to gain the upper hand in the relationship. I’ve known plenty of men and women who’ve pulled the latter trick. They know the ugly old rule most of us first learn in adolescence: “He who wants it less, wins.”

The bottom line is that the “Yes” or the “I will” of the wedding vow is not a permanent disavowal of the right to say “No” in the future. Whether we are married to our sexual partners or not, none of us has the right to demand that another human being please us. In practical terms, it’s safe to say that the greatest enemies of true eros are entitlement and expectation. Nothing is a greater turn-off than a petulant insistence that someone “owes” us an orgasm (or even a kiss).

Sex drives have a way of fluctuating over time, of course. Most of us will go through periods in our lives (or in our months) in which we are hornier than at other times. That’s true for one of us in our solitude; it’s all the more true for a couple over time. Some couples stay at the same level of frequency in terms of sex for years and years; others start off fast and furious and taper off; still others go through various fluctuations depending on any number of circumstances (ranging from children to job stress to, heck, you get the idea.) Having spent lots of time with religious and secular couples, I note that these anxieties about unequal sex drives show up equally in partnerships where the two “waited” and where they didn’t. Refraining from pre-marital sex is no guarantor of post-marital sexual bliss; by the same token, lots and lots of “experience” prior to marriage doesn’t make anyone an expert on how to have great sex for years and years after the wedding day.

So, to Bob: there’s nothing wrong with having the higher sex drive. There’s nothing wrong with wanting your wife more often than she wants you. I understand that it feels disempowering and scary to be the one who “wants it more.” But you’re not wrong for wanting what you want, and your wife is not wrong for not wanting what you want. The test of your marriage is not the equality of your passion, it’s the prayerful, courageous honesty with which you both work through this disparity together. It’s a hard thing to talk about, even with (and, I think, especially with) a spouse; our fears and resentments and anxieties can come up so quickly. But there’s no way to work through this without that kind of radical honesty, which is why having a patient therapist to facilitate is often a really good idea.

Look, I’m not quite two years into my fourth marriage, so I’m hardly a relationship guru. But I’ve been around the block a time or nineteen, and I’ve done a lot of listening and living in my time. And I know some great marriages where there isn’t a lot of sex; I’ve seen some marriages fall apart even while the spouses within them were getting it on nearly daily. This I can say based on my own experience and on that of countless friends of mine: the absence of regular sex is not an automatic indicator of trouble, and a regular and mutually enthusiastic erotic life is no prophylaxis against marital misery. What makes a healthy marriage is the way in which the two partners deal with their incongruent desires. If they each practice radical mutual submission, remembering that marriage is not a place to assert one’s rights, they’re probably well on their way.