Jessica of Jezebel brings up a point I’ve been thinking a lot about lately: the consequences of all the political, economic, and social turmoil in the last few months.

In times of trouble, we all like to turn to a guru we know and trust: Dr. Ruth. On the Forbes website, the tiniest sex doctor in the U.S. cautions that sometimes sexual recessions and fiscal recessions go hand in hand. Dr. Ruth discusses the case of a sexually frustrated wife, whose husband was not in the mood for sex because he feared he was going to lose his job. “He didn’t tell her about his fears. He constantly imagined the dreaded day when he’d be called in to see his manager, sex was the last thing he craved,” Dr. Ruth explains. “But since his wife didn’t know what was going on—and since he was being especially silent about his activities during the day—she began to suspect that he was having an affair.” Not surprisingly, Dr. Ruth prescribes a healthy dose of communication.

“Only when couples understand the source can they avoid the mistake, which is thinking any growing distance between them is a relationship problem,” Dr. Ruth counsels. In addition to open lines of communication, Dr. Ruth also prescribes naked snuggling. “Even if a couple doesn’t feel like making love, they should make an appointment, take their clothes off and climb into bed together. Most of the time this will be enough to get them started,” the good Doctor notes.

Read the quotes in context here.

It’s funny… and I think I may have a whole post about this one of these days… but it seems like one of the consequences of living under the Cold-War promis of nuclear annihilation through too much of the 20th-Century is that our cultural models for coping with global crisis tend towards every-man-for-himself survivalism. (Where too often the assumption really is every man for himself.)

Consequently it’s not too surprising that too many people’s response to the current crisis keep circling the bowl of “stock up on beans, rice, and jerky and get a gun to protect it.” And even those not quite so caught up in visions of apocalypse… who think more in terms of the long winter of Desmet, South Dakota in 1880 or of bankrupt Europe after World War II or just the U.S.‘s more-moronic-than-oxymoronic stagnant upheavals in the early 1970s and early 1980s rather than, say, the utter breakdown of Mad Max seem to be feeling more isolated than connected to broader communities.**

Nor is it surprising that couples might lie lovelessly awake. If you buy the testosterone theory, well, testosterone declines in the face of anxiety and stress. If you buy the Hierarchy of Needs theory, well, concern for shelter, warmth, food, and the wellbeing of loved ones stand higher than concern for either ya-yas or reproduction. And if you buy sociobiology/ev-psych then for most long-lived and slow-to-reach-adulthood species then we probably have genes that “dollar cost average” reproduction, and thus horniness, so that in times of unusual stress we’re less likely to start pregnancies that might not make it. Heck, if you’re just a Bible Literalist then you’re already familiar with Jesus’s dire concerns for those who are pregnant during the end of days. Or, like a lot of people who don’t know about those kinds of theories, we and our partners might just be too bummed out for social, let alone sexual intercourse.

And so it’s really good to hear Dr. Ruth putting in a plug not so much for sex per-se as for communication. Which can be an amazing conduit to the sense of unity, solidarity, shared purpose, and community that makes sex just a heck of a lot more appealing.

[** Keep in mind that unlike the Cold War we really aren’t looking at global, physical annihilation, meaning rather than modeling a response from A Boy and His Dog we could draw on the experience of the no more fictional Who’s down in Whoville who stunned the Grinch by maintaining community after losing everything down to the last can of Who-hash. Just sayin’ —fl]

Photo by Flickr user edwardoneill. Used under a Creative Commons license.

In my post about the perversity of sex as a chore a while back I mentioned what a joyless hassle sex can be for couples that are actively trying to get pregnant, especially when they’re having a hard time. About halfway through writing that post I started an aside about the MRA/anti-feminist relationship model where men are obliged to providing economic security and in return men are obliged to provide sex.

Very conveniently for me, in comments L recounted her experience with voluntary obligatory sex. It didn’t sound fun.

My husband and I tried for roughly 6 years to have a child. THis included different combinations of temperature-taking, intercourse-timing, medications both oral and injectable, invasive testing, twilight anaesthesia, tears, frustration, and failure.

It included very little joy, between the aforementioned failure and tears, as well as the mechanization of sex. Reading this post made me remember the online cycle-plotting software I used, wherein you marked every day you had sex. with (your choice) a heart or a smiley face.

That heart or smiley face was pretty much the only choice we were given (in day-to-day terms) in the progression of impregnation attempts. Whe we should or could do it, or when I got to go under anaesthetic for an “egg harvest” or how many days of bedrest was required post-embryo transfer was determined by number— dates on the calendar, blood tests.

Ah, you’ve provided a convenient (at least for me, I’m not sure how YOU feel about it, figleaf) forum for me to exorcise a little of the anger I still hold, 3 years on. I guess it’s implicit in my rant that I find what Ellie called “statistics-driven sex” to be pretty much repellent. For us, it WAS product-oriented. The fact that we were ultimately cheated out of the desired product isn’t really even germane to my reaction… at least I don’t think it is.

Anyway, I guess I’m skeptical as to whether numbers-driven sex can ever, in any way, make the numbers-cruncher happy. To me, the delight, the joy of being able to have sex when and only when we want to is something I could never throw away, because I’ve been on the other side and it sucks.

She said it here.

Hmm. “Anger?” “Repellent?” “Product-oriented?” “Cheated?” Sound familiar? Of course! It sounds like the terms used by both sides in the aftermath of so many “traditional” anti-feminist marriages. (Where “aftermath,” sadly, doesn’t always mean “divorce.” Especially in “traditional” marriages.)

Hmm… funny about that, eh? And yet that he’s-a-wallet/she’s-a-receptacle model is the anti-feminist idea? How’s that been working?

Photo by Flickr user Artiii. Used under a Creative Commons license.

This is all apropos of nothing, and a bit silly to boot, not that that ever seems to stop me. Anyway, it’s about a little bug in abstinence-only policies.

Ok, so… When I was taking that coordinated women’s-studies/interpersonal-communications/sex-education course last winter one of the great lectures we got was on the (as the professor put it) symphony of hormones in the menstrual cycle. One of the points she mentioned was that there are certain spike-y points in the cycle where libido tends to be a lot higher, and that, for a lot of women, that’s when they’re more likely to be in a “go for it” mood.

This is sort of rhetorical but does anyone here have that experience either for themselves or their partners?

Another thing she mentioned, and I’ve heard a lot of other women mention as well, is that by replacing the normal hormone fluxuations hormonal contraception also eliminates the go-for-it feeling as well with the result that while you can have intercourse more often without fear of pregnancy you’re not necessarily as interested.

This isn’t as rhetorical: have you noticed that either in yourself or with a partner?

So anyway, to the extent that’s a known side effect of hormonal contraception it wouldn’t have been considered much of a problem when it was being developed and introduced 50-odd years ago: men were still considered mostly interested in sex while, as disengaged members of the “no-sex” class, women were considered to be mainly concerned with, or concerned with avoiding, the resulting pregnancies, and so affects on women’s libido just wasn’t as much of a concern. (Given the still-primative state of social attitudes towards consent, even consent in marriage. Still a fuzzy concept for some people by the way!)

Nowadays not so much, sure, but there you go, right? Anyway, I was thinking that if anti-feminists weren’t so male-centric about sex it seems to me that they might be a little less wiggy about opposing hormonal contraception about women. Because (from an abstinence-only, “just say no” point of view) something that on average flattens out women’s libidos ought to be a good thing, right?

Photo by Flickr user pichenettes. Used under a Creative Commons license.

I don’t ordinarily get so excited by a post that I gabble incoherently in comments, hashing everybody’s names and posting addenda and corrections, but I was pretty jazzed when Debbie of Body Impolitic mentioned a pretty interesting article from the UK’s Guardian about men and sexual desire that challenges a ton of stereotypes about men.

So maybe part of the story is, as Peter Bell would have it, that “men and women are more sexually similar than they think.” Maybe when married men are as readily “available” to their wives as wives have historically been to their husbands, the power dynamic shifts. Maybe it’s not so much that wives know how to ask for what they want as that husbands are in unmapped territory. Before, their penises told them whether or not they were “ready” for sex at any given time; now, it’s much more complicated.

Read the quote in context here.

The article in question, Why men are telling their wives ‘not tonight’, tries to make sense of a growing number of couples coming to relationship counsellors to deal with low-male libido imbalances.

‘Men used to come to us with impotence – now known as erectile insufficiency – but Viagra has sorted some of that problem,’ said Peter Bell, Relate’s head of practice. ‘What we have is a lot of men who say, as women did in the Fifties: “I can have sex, but I don’t want to. It’s not rewarding”.’

Bell says that around half the men he is now seeing admit to a complete lack of libido. Ten years ago, he said, such complaints were unheard of.

Source: Guardian.co.uk

It’s pretty clear from the article that the men in question aren’t particularly masturbating more, using porn, having affairs, or otherwise taking their sexual outlets elsewhere. They’re just (to borrow a familiar slur) “drying up.”

Just for the record I’m pretty sure that Viagra’s making a difference in the reporting increases: what could once be begged off as impotence must now be confronted as loss of libido.

In fact there’s one very telling line from one interviewee that I hadn’t really thought about before.

The curious thing is that I can get erections, and I don’t fancy or fantasise about other women. It’s just that, over the years, my desire to have sex with anyone at all has faded.

There’s always been this assumption going the other way that, as Debbie puts it…

In a purely physical sense, human women are effectively always “ready” for sex. For tens of thousands of years, it has been physically possible to have penetrative sex with a woman regardless of her emotional or mental state or willingness to participate.

But here’s the trick: I’m pretty sure most men have noticed, at least in their youths and every morning for almost everyone else, that erections aren’t always directly related to arousal. (If you haven’t reviewed your Masters and Johnson lately erection for men is one of the earliest, and therefore least “committed” signs of arousal, corresponding to the point of initial lubrication in women rather than clitoral erections that, according to M&J, begin much further into arousal.) And so, sort of contrary to received wisdom, I’m wondering how many men have been able to sort of hide in plain sight their lack of interest behind their mechanical erections?

So! I’ve got a ton more to say about what this might mean (much of which, incidentally, I’ve been able to say only speculatively before) but I’m going to stop here for now.

For now I just want to say how nice it feels to find a little evidence to back up my strong, strong belief that men are no more automatic, reflexive, base-line-always-ready “sex class” members than women are inevitable, prim, lie-back-and-think-of-England members of the “no-sex” class. And that’s exciting to me because while “Doctor” John Gray plus everyone else back to Aristotle can claim that men are from Mars and women from Venus, I’ve come to realize that in fact the differences we do have are grounded almost entirely in circumstance rather than biological, gender, or evolutionary imperatives. And incidentally I think that’s a big deal because, well, frankly the status quo kind of sucks.

Because who, exactly, is served by a negative-sum system that severely screws women over in order to… prevent men from reaching their full potential either? If the only thing holding it up is lies about inevitability, and those lies start falling apart then…