In Defense of Stuart

I am a female reader who really likes Stuart Greene’s column, and not as kindling for a fire. I hope I am part of a legion of such readers who have written to say “rock on.” I presented your debut column to my (male) team teacher as a potential piece to use in our college-level gender unit. He was thrilled to find this opinion in print, as our unit lacked any unpretentious, intelligent counterpoints to the status quo. As an added bonus, I think it saved his sanity—or at least encouraged his suffering conscience, which is down for the count after twenty years of marriage to a woman who seems, as you point out in the December 2003 column, to go “Def-Con Five” when he wants to talk about sex. Not for these reasons alone do I like your column. I know there are at least a few married women who can discuss sex as a sensuous plumbing issue without the emotional high jinks. They are my friends, and they certainly give me an earful. But many don’t, I surmise, because women’s insecurities about monogamy are so perfectly socialized that merely a discussion of sex without “all the other things that go into a relationship” is too threatening. “If my husband works up a froth about shaving me in the shower, what next? Pretty soon he’ll be taking appointments—and not with me!” It seems the Buddhists have it precisely right when they point out that it is our grasping and rejecting that makes us so unhappy. A lot of women grasp at the idea of monogamy as if it were the only available relational life raft. Though my choice to be unmarried and childless perhaps makes me atypical among women my age (mid-thirties), I have been like the women you described. Happily, circumstances have conspired to show me what a hypocrite I have been, when, in the past, I emotionally hijacked conversations with lovers and boyfriends. I was behaving as if emotional withdrawal was the only card I could play to keep the horny man from straying. But as you point out in your debut article, it ain’t quite like that. Not all men in relationships want to act on their imaginative nonmonogamous impulses. But many women are guilty, I think, of subverting our own desires. Maybe we think this will save us from abandonment. On the contrary, I have been liberated by expressing my own desires. Emotional withdrawal is not the only action open to me, but figuring that out wasn’t easy. Women, I think, are afraid to talk about sex because it threatens their security. Furthermore, even if they weren’t so threatened, if other women are like the way I was, I could barely choke up the words to say what I wanted. Ladies: practice! Get a journal. Rustle up some words that work for you. Start writing about what you want. See what happens.

Name withheld by request

***

In response to Jenna Sophia Hanson’s letter [December] ripping Stuart Greene’s column “Should Married Men Go to Strip Clubs?” [Sex & the Married Man, September], here is another take: The human body is a thing of beauty. That we grow up in a culture that shames that nakedness is the real problem. The fact is, the human body is an object of beauty that has been celebrated by the likes of Michelangelo with his statue of David to the Romans’ Venus Esquilina. The key word is “object.” Our Puritan culture dictates that erotica and nudity are sinful because humankind will fall prey to lust. Sexuality beyond the bedroom of marriage is a sin, yet the most vocal tend to fall prey to the very vice they against. The men who frequent strip clubs only go there because nudity has been so reviled that the very act of taking off your clothes has been routinely relegated to “the seedy side of town.” You don’t see men decrying the “exploitation” of male dancers who strut their goods to the crowds of dollar-fisted women on Ladies Night. Some marriages, both healthy and otherwise, can handle a spouse’s visit to a strip club. Others can’t. Some people have addictive personalities. Others don’t. Visiting a strip club doesn’t disrespect one’s partner any more than satisfying an urge for chocolate disrespects broccoli. Disrespect in a marriage starts and ends at home. Erotic desire is natural. What is sexually arousing to one may be a turnoff to another. The next time you look at a man (or woman) and have an erotic desire, Ms. Hanson, keep in mind that you don’t need to be in a strip club to “callously objectify” that person.
Peter Christensen
Minneapolis