From February 2009.  (Note: my daughter’s full name is Heloise Cerys Raquel.  We initially planned to call her primarily by her second name, and that’s what we were doing when this post was written less than a month after her birth.)

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.

From February 2009

I suppose that many of my upcoming posts will touch, in one way or another, on the experience of becoming a father. My daughter is one week old today, and she and my wife are resting comfortably at home. Our little girl — whose name will be given soon — is perfect and lovely and captivating, and my wife has never been more beautiful and amazing in my eyes. It’s a happy time, albeit a sleep-deprived one.

It would be odd if going through this pregnancy with my wife and watching my daughter be born didn’t have a profound impact on how I see the world. The whole experience shaped, and is continuing to shape, many aspects of my thinking. I have no doubt at all that parenthood will continue to transform me, though that is hardly my child’s primary purpose in the world. My job is to love her, hers is to be loved unconditionally, and whatever insights come along the way are a bonus. And one way in which this journey has impacted me very profoundly is in my views on feminism.

Years ago, Susan Bordo wrote a wonderful essay: Are Mothers Persons? Reproductive Rights and Subject-ivity, which appeared in her Unbearable Weight. Bordo makes the point that our American legal system has an historic concern for the autonomy of the individual, but that a pregnant woman’s right to bodily integrity is uniquely subject to challenge:

The essence of the pregnant woman, by contrast, is her biological, purely mechanical role in preserving the life of another. In her case, this is the given value, against which her claims to subjectivity must be rigorously evaluated, and they will usually be found wanting insofar as they conflict with her life-support function. In the face of such a conflict, her valuations, choices, consciousness are expendable.

In other words, my wife’s status as an independent person collapsed, in the eyes of the world, the moment folks started to realize she was pregnant. And while I’d been quite prepared to discuss reproductive rights theory with colleagues and students, nothing has shaped my gut feelings about the issue of women’s subjectivity like witnessing my wife’s pregnancy and the birth of this daughter. And believe me, nothing has made me more committed to feminist principles than this experience!

It is much commented upon, but no less remarkable for its frequency: an amazing number of people seem to believe that they have the right to touch a pregnant woman’s belly. My wife, who has a keen sense of body integrity, did not like to have her stomach touched by anyone other than me and her various professional caregivers. But for the last four months of her pregnancy, as her belly began to swell, family and friends and even strangers made all sorts of attempts to get their hands on her tummy. My wife got very good at fending people off politely, and I did my best to remain cool while helping (particularly with my family) to keep prying hands at bay. Continue reading →

From May 2010

There’s been much talk this week about the adventures of Abby Sunderland, the Southern California 16 year-old whose attempt to sail solo around the world ended when her boat lost its mast in the Indian Ocean last Thursday. For several hours, there was fear — much of it hyped by the media — that Abby was “lost at sea”. The story is on its way to a happy ending, as Abby is now on a fishing boat headed for Madagascar, and, eventually, home to her family.

The debate, of course, is whether her parents ought to have allowed her to make this journey. (Her brother had undertaken a similar adventure a few years ago when he was just a little bit older than Abby.) That Abby had the technical skill to handle her boat is not in question; what befell her could easily have befallen an experienced sailor thrice her age. But lots of teenagers have the capacities of adults, but are still denied all the freedoms of adulthood. We all know 15 year-olds who know more about politics than their parents, but we don’t let 15 year-olds vote. We know, certainly, that plenty of 17 year-olds are capable of making responsible decisions about alcohol — and that plenty of 27 year-olds aren’t.

It’s not news that our lines of demarcation that separate children from adults are somewhat arbitrary. Whether we draw those lines at 16 (Austrians can vote at that age, which appalls many Americans; Americans can drive at that age, which appalls many Europeans) or 21 (a ridiculously late drinking age in the eyes of many around the world), any sensible person recognizes that some of those beneath the line are capable of handling the responsibilities that at least of some of those above that line are not.

Sensible people, however, recognize that society must draw lines somewhere. (This debate is as old as classical Athens, if not older.) We can’t test every young person to see if they are “ready” to vote, or to drink, or to have sex, in quite the same way that we issue driver’s licenses. And even with driver’s licenses, while turning 16 doesn’t automatically grant the right to have a license (the test must be passed), being under 16 automatically bars a young person from be licensed.

These lines are drawn based upon many things: history, tradition, collective assumptions about risk and maturity. These lines shift based on social trends and evolving beliefs about young people, rights, and responsibility. In the Vietnam era, a growing sense that it was unjust to send 18 year-olds off to die in wars while not permitting them to vote led to the passage of the 26th Amendment; a decade later, anxiety about other risks led to a Reagan-era mandate to raise the national drinking age from 18 to 21. These shifts don’t always make sense; they lead to the obvious silliness that a young soldier can operate a machine gun in combat but can’t buy a beer. That kind of arbitrariness grates. But the alternative to arbitrary line-drawing is far more grating: a kind of intellectual or maturational means testing that would be subject to abuse and overt politicization in a hearbeat. Continue reading →

From March 2011

After so many years of blogging, teaching, mentoring, and writing, you find yourself getting the same questions over and over again. (Questions about the wisdom of age-disparate and long-distance relationships, for example, are evergreen.) But there are other topics that come up often as well, like incompatible sexual desire. (See here, for example.) And as is often the case, I get multiple queries on the same topic at the same time from different sources; call it kismet or synchronicity, the topic of what happens when a woman has a stronger libido than her male partner has come up four times this week.

Our myths about sex drive tell us that men are supposed to peak in horniness in their late teens, while women only reach their full libidinousness on the high side of thirty. A lot of us suspect that to the extent there’s any truth to this at all, it has a good deal less to do with biology, and more to do with the long and difficult road so many women have to travel to discover and accept their own sexuality. Slut-shaming and sexualization work together to make girls acutely conscious of others’ wants and expectations while shutting them off from their own desires. It’s hard to hear one’s own “still, small voice” of longing if you’ve been raised to be a people pleaser!

But of course, so many young women don’t fit this model, just as the guys they date often don’t fit the male stereotype of constant randiness. And for many young women, finding themselves in a sexual relationship where they are the higher desire partner can be deeply confusing. One FB email this week from a former student of mine:

Before I had sex, my fantasy was always that a beautiful man would want me so much that he would lose all control, overpowering me. Not a rape fantasy exactly, just the idea of driving some hot guy crazy with lust. I guess you’d say my arousal was tied into how aroused the guy was by me. That was my number one fantasy for years and years. But Tom (name changed, of course) doesn’t seem to want sex nearly as often as I do. I’d like it almost every day, and he’d like it a few times a week. We don’t get much time together as it is, and this is driving me nuts.

I hear variations on that quite often (though rarely several times in one week.) And of course, my former student is hurt and confused. She knows enough to know how much of her own sexuality was shaped by cultural messages about uncontrollable male desire. She’s done a great job of leaving behind the message that “good girls don’t really want sex”. But while she’s given herself permission to want and to have, she’s still got the old tape playing that says that in heterosexual relationships, particularly among young people, the man should always be hornier than the woman. Continue reading →

This post originally appeared in 2009.

A friend of mine with whom I’ve had many conversations about feminism and older men/younger women relationships wrote me a note last week about a close acquaintance of hers, a young woman of 21 who is having an “emotional affair” with a man of 44.

I’ve blogged enough lately about age-disparate relationships, and I intend to do much more writing on the subject. Today, I’m interested in writing about this strange and troubling beast called the emotional affair, a phenomenon enormously abetted by modern technology.

I’m not treading on new ground when I remark that when it comes to love and sex, humans are generally very good at deceiving themselves. We are particularly good, as a rule, at justifying certain kinds of betrayals because they don’t meet our own contorted and legalistic definitions of what constitutes genuine infidelity. The paradigmatic example, of course, is that of Bill Clinton. A great many of us believed, and still believe, that our 42nd president was absolutely sincere when he denied an adulterous relationship with Monica Lewinsky; he had constructed for himself a moral calculus in which only intercourse constituted authentic infidelity. In 1998, as the nation watched the Clintons’ all-too-public agony, a great many folks were challenged to think about their own little webs of deceit and justification. If the politicians we elect are mirrors for our best and worst aspects of ourselves, then President Clinton — a man of extraordinary gifts and extraordinarily banal frailties — reminded us of our own capacity for duplicity.

Most people have no trouble labelling oral sex with an intern behind your wife’s back as adultery. Bill Clinton is easy to admire, and easy to ridicule. But lesser men than he — and a great many women too — have shown a similar capacity for self-deception. And we are particularly prone to this sort of self-deception when it comes to affairs that don’t have a physically sexual component. For those of us who define fidelity in terms of what actions we don’t undertake with other people, it’s all too easy to slide into an emotional affair.

For the purposes of this post, I’ll define an emotional affair as a non-physically sexual relationship characterized by mutually intense psychological intimacy, accompanied by words or gestures that traditionally are reserved for one’s romantic partner. That’s a vague definition, of course; emotional affairs are notoriously difficult to define. (One thinks of the perhaps apocryphal Potter Stewart remark about knowing obscenity when he saw it.) The slipperiness of the line between “good friend” and emotional “lover” allows those involved in these affairs a great deal of plausible deniability, both to themselves and to those around them. “We’re just friends”; “It’s totally innocent”; “You’re reading too much into this” are the sorts of things that can be said with genuine sincerity in response to suspicious queries from others. Continue reading →

From November 2009

Years ago, I wrote a brief post about feminism and language, but it didn’t go into very much detail. Here’s a new version, with a bit more detail.

One of the first gender studies courses I ever took at Berkeley was an upper-division anthropology course taught by the great Nancy Scheper-Hughes. It was in a class discussion one day (I think in the spring of ’87) that I heard something that rocked my world. We were discussing Andrea Dworkin’s novel “Ice and Fire” and her (then still-forthcoming, but already publicized) “Intercourse”. I hadn’t read the books at the time (they were optional for the class). One classmate made the case that on a biological level, all heterosexual sex was, if not rape, dangerously close to it. “Look at the language”, my classmate said; “penetrate, enter, and screw make it clear what’s really happening; women are being invaded by men’s penises.” Another classmate responded, “But that’s the fault of the language, not of the biology itself; we could just as easily use words like ‘envelop’, ‘engulf’, ‘surround’ and everything would be different.” The discussion raged enthusiastically until the next class irritably barged in and chucked us all out. I was electrified.

My classmates were having, as I came to discover, a classic intra-feminist argument: to what extent is the sexual domination of women by men part and parcel of our biology, and to what extent is it a construction maintained by language that deliberately disempowers women? The consensus seems to weigh more heavily to the latter position, particularly within the contemporary (so-called “Third Wave”) feminism which was very much still in its incubation when I was discovering Women’s Studies in the Reagan years.

In every women’s studies class I’ve taught here at PCC, and in many guest lectures about feminism I’ve given elsewhere, I use the “penetrate” versus “engulf” image to illustrate a basic point about the way in which our language constructs and maintains male aggression and female passivity. Even those who haven’t had heterosexual intercourse can, with only a small degree of imagination required, see how “envelop” might be just as accurate as “enter”. “A woman’s vagina engulfs a man’s penis during intercourse” captures reality as well as “A man’s penis penetrates a woman’s vagina.” Of course, most het folks who have intercourse are well aware that power is fluid; each partner can temporarily assert a more active role (frequently by being on top) — as a result, the language used to describe what’s actually happening could shift. Continue reading →