[Still on family vacation till next Tuesday morning. Still next to no time to write even though there’s lots to talk about. —fl]

Susie and Aretha Bright have an occasional advice column at Jezebel and cope nicely with a correspondent who’s having a first-hand collision with a highly recognizable component of the “no-sex” class paradigm.

Dear Aretha & Susie:

I’ve been in a relationship for over three years, and for the past year we’ve been talking about getting married. Since these conversations started, my boyfriend started to expect different things of me sexually. He gets upset if I use “dirty” words like cock, pussy, or fuck. He said, “The mother of my future children doesn’t talk like that.”

We’re having less sex, and the sex we do have is more vanilla. I like vanilla sex, but I would like it more frequently. I’m afraid that he isn’t seeing me as a sexual person anymore. If we do get married, I wonder if this will lead him to cheat. One of the things that I liked about our relationship before, was that we had a great sexual connection- and he told me over and over how important sex is to him. So if he can’t get it from me, will he look elsewhere? Help!

—Unhappy Angel in the House

She said it here.

The standard narrative has it that women are always the ones who lose interest in sex… typically because her partner “wears her down” with endless solicitations caused by his “naturally higher” libido.

That’s the descriptive part of the paradigm — the one of the expectation setting elements whereby men are indoctrinated to believe that, except maybe for that lusty, anomalous single moon after sex begins where honey flows smoothly, women would just never think about sex if their partners weren’t perpetually bringing it up.

And yet here the proscriptive mechanism is pretty clear: side B of the paradigm is that inside it men believe women shouldn’t be interested, shouldn’t be eager, shouldn’t be creative, shouldn’t be ready to say “yes.”

Rule #1 of my unfortunately non-cynical Two Rules of Desire is that it’s simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable that women should have sexual desire. The descriptive part says it’s inconceivable. The proscriptive part says it’s intolerable.

I say it’s incomprehensible. Not least because it causes so much misery and ill will in both victims and authors of the ideology.

Incidentally, Susie’s advice begins pithily: “I wouldn’t want him to be the father of my children…” Aretha’s conclusion is equally blunt: “Anyone who says “The Mother of My Children Doesn’t …” – Deal breaker.”

My advice, for Unhappy Angel in the House, anyone else who’s had her experience, and for you for when it happens to you is to confront the issue straight up! Say “You know, story has it that 99% of couples wind up with the man wanting more, more adventurous sex than the woman does. I don’t want to be one of those couples but when you say crap like ‘the mother of my children, blah, blah, blah’ I get the strong feeling you do! We need to talk about that because I don’t feel that way, I don’t want to feel that way, I don’t want you trying to make me feel that way, and guess what? I’m actually pretty sure you don’t want me to feel that way.”

I’m pretty sure that conversation doesn’t happen often. If it does I still don’t think it happens often enough.