Being a proud Anglo-American, I have long been a fan of the BBC soap opera EastEnders. (We see it here on TPT–the Twin Cities are a hotbed of British TV fans.) Everyone on this show, set in East London, eventually sleeps with everyone else, and there is an alarmingly high incidence of accidental death, felonious crime, and general high jinks. An episode that aired a couple of months ago got me thinking. Terry, a paunchy, headstrong, but generally likeable store owner, was having some trouble with Irene, his new-agey wife, who’d been struggling with a sort of female middle-age crisis. (She’d slept with one of her son’s friends, she was disgusted by her husband, she wanted more out of life, and so on.) Terry was increasingly agitated over their sex life, because it had, in his view, essentially evaporated–Irene was not “performing her wifely duties.” In intimate conversations with close friends, this was thought to be a very serious transgression indeed. Was it grounds for divorce? You bet it was. Irene was making things absolutely miserable for Terry. They were making love just once a week!
I have had enough conversations with enough friends to know that once a week means you’re doing pretty darn good; most of my married buddies would be happy as a pig in mud if they were getting that much intimacy. So I’m pretty sure this minimal requirement for “wifely duty” is not a function of English libido. No, I chalk it up to the writers of EastEnders, who have their pride, after all. Who besides a self-righteous celibate would brag about not having sex? Still, if they were shooting for veracity, the idea that once a week is not enough is intriguing. On the other hand, maybe these writers weren’t shooting for veracity, but rather trying to lay out some kind of standard or ideal.
As I get older, I wonder if most thoughtful, generous men wouldn’t be glad to be freed of the constant biological impulse to make whoopie. It makes life complicated, and it underscores one of the more annoying differences between men and women. (Why can’t the genders want to do this with the same frequency–much less at the same time? God is indeed a jealous god, judged by some of the incompatibilities he created in man and wife.) Sex is fun, of course, but is it worth all the trouble and all the energy it seems to demand of the male mind? I think most honest married women would answer that question with a resounding, “Duh!”
Being neither a scientist nor a statistician, I am therefore quite unequipped to understand the wild popularity of drugs like Viagra and Levitra. I do think I know why “erectile dysfunction” is apparently such a widespread affliction. Let’s just say “use it or lose it” probably has biological ramifications. But still, why would women suddenly want their husbands functioning at, um, such a high level again? When I try to figure out why the little blue pill has been such a hit, I think it has everything to do with the image men have of themselves. Just as the issue with male pattern balding demonstrates, because we cling to a few signifiers of manhood–a full head of hair, an energetic libido–we are thrown into a crisis of self-identity when these things begin to ebb. Honestly, do you really think that there are huge numbers of women out there who are pushing their men to get to the doctor and get that prescription for Viagra? Honestly, how many wives relish the idea of their husbands sporting a six-hour boner? What could better fulfill a woman’s dream of a meaningful, non-threatening, non-annoying relationship than one that, due to medical issues, is limited to snuggling and spooning and the like?
It’s been well established, by many different studies in many different ways, that men are more obsessed with sex than women. We think about it twice as often as they do, and our actions bear out our thoughts. Nine out of ten men self-pleasure on a regular basis (as I’ve said before, the tenth man is either a politician or a clergyman), while only five out of ten women do it. Married men are a lot more likely to have an extramarital affair at some point in the marriage–close to fifty percent of them–while only thirty percent of married women cross the line. In short, men like to have sex, even when they aren’t capable of having sex. And if that isn’t screwy, then I don’t know what is.
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