My buddy Ben saw an advertisement for a little boutique that specializes in sex toys for smart women—a small, independent shop owned and operated by women. It got him thinking. He told me it made him want to buy something for his wife, Val, as a surprise for their anniversary. Ben started to sort of drop hints, trying to figure out if Val would be into this. As far as he knew, Val has never had any little “marital aids”—so his assumption was that she would be horrified by the idea.
He was exactly right. When he jokingly said he thought it would be fun to buy her a vibrator, Val looked at him like he was a first-class pervert. Ben could not detect the slightest hint that she was putting him on for the sake of modesty, and that made him a little sad. Apparently, she sensed that Ben was half-serious, and said, “Honey, I want the real thing. You’re enough for me.” That’s sweet, of course, but maybe too sweet. Indeed, Ben told me he is afraid he married a puritan. He wishes Val could allow herself to be a little less orthodox about their love life—or at least be open to new ideas. How do you know you like something unless you try it? They still have fun in the sack, sure, but their repertoire is limited to a standard routine—which, he says, gets exercised less and less frequently. Yes, it’s the dread disease that one of my readers likes to call “SMBD”—sudden marital bed death.
Yet what’s interesting is that we horny married men tend to assume that Val is not being honest. Why do we insist that she is not interested in sex toys because of some kind of politically correct hang-up or sheer embarrassment? If I am serious when I say married couples should allow themselves the freedom to be whoever they want to be, then I must be prepared for the possibility that there are women who don’t want to be, well, all that sexy. That is, they don’t have much need for sex, or they have vanilla tastes in bed, and that’s that. At some point, we simply have to accept our lover’s words at face value. If Val does not want a vibrator, it is possible that she really does not want one. Then Ben will have to examine why it is such a big deal to him. Who knows—maybe he wants a vibrator, and is merely projecting his desire.
Part of this depressing, deterministic view comes from having seen the recent film about Alfred Kinsey, the legendary sex researcher. Kinsey’s groundbreaking work did two things: It proved that sexual variety—deviance, if you’re a fundamentalist preacher—was normal, or at least a significant, measurable phenomenon. Second, it categorized and quantified this variety in a scientific way. This is slightly depressing, because it suggests that even sex, one of the most transcendental and mysterious facets of life, is subject to a certain scientific repeatability. We know, but would prefer not to believe, that we have patterns and routines that we probably will never escape. Paradoxically, hardcore Bible-bangers and lefty women’s libbers can agree on loving to hate Alfred Kinsey for robbing sex of its divine spark, and seeming to legitimate a lot of uncomfortable fetishes and perversions.
And yet, the choice is, as ever, between what we are and how we see ourselves. Between reality and perception. If Val does not see herself as a person who wants to use a vibrator, what does that really say about her? Apparently, she falls into a Kinseyan category (women who do not wish to use vibrators). Should she feel reassured that there are others like her, or upset that there are so many others unlike her? (I suppose it depends on how she feels about other women using vibrators.)
So, does Val fall into the category of the radically normal, unexperimental women who begrudge their sexuality, just because she claims not to be interested in sex toys? Kinsey’s work has been so heavily politicized in the past fifty years that we forget: It is possible to strip sexual research of its heavy moral baggage, invariably projected onto it by the prudish and the frigid and the enraged. It is possible to actually read it in a merely descriptive sense, in a way that celebrates diversity in human sexual behavior. But does that automatically belittle those who are perfectly happy with missionary position, lights turned out, once a week? Maybe repression is a healthy, normal choice. What would Kinsey think?
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