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Dennis Prager brings us part two of, I can only hope, two of his Why Is My Penis Not Inside You? manifesto. This one focuses on the theory that women deny sex because they think too much with their woman-brains (also known as their hearts and minds) and not enough with their man-brains (also known as their nonexistent penises).
Here are eight reasons for a woman not to allow not being in the mood for sex to determine whether she denies her husband sex.
Reasons number 1 through 7: They’re women.
Reason number 8: Didn’t I already give seven reasons?
1. If most women wait until they are in the mood before making love with their husband, many women will be waiting a month or more until they next have sex.
You ever have one of those moments where you say something under the assumption that it’s completely normal, and it reveals some deeply abnormal part of your life that you wish you hadn’t revealed, like when you ask your friends about how they deal with having to wash their sheets every night after they wet them during a work dinner with people you barely know and you’ve already been to the bathroom five times?
Yeah, this is one of those moments for Prager.
When most women are young, and for some older women, spontaneously getting in the mood to have sex with the man they love can easily occur.
In other words, when his ex-wives were younger, they were interested in sex, but after years of being told that their feelings about sex didn’t matter, they were no longer interested in sex at all. Dennis Prager has found the antidote to horny - congratulations!
But for most women, for myriad reasons—female nature, childhood trauma, not feeling sexy, being preoccupied with some problem, fatigue after a day with the children and/or other work, just not being interested—there is little comparable to a man’s “out of nowhere,” and seemingly constant, desire for sex.
Men, however, face none of these issues, because our naturally hearty constitutions allow us to work all day, survive child sexual abuse, be bloated in the middle of bankruptcy and still want to bone like boning was going out of style.
What if your husband woke up one day and announced that he was not in the mood to go to work? If this happened a few times a year, any wife would have sympathy for her hardworking husband. But what if this happened as often as many wives announce that they are not in the mood to have sex? Most women would gradually stop respecting and therefore eventually stop loving such a man.
What if sex with your husband was a job rather than a perk of marriage? Well, then, sex would be a whole different thing. Sex is not a job, it’s not something you’re on call to do - it’s something two people do because they want to. Another way that you know that sex is different from a job? If I don’t work for months at a time, chances are I’ll be hungry and homeless. If I don’t have sex for months at a time, chances are I’ll be whiny and spending a bit more of my income on tissues. If you consider a man the boss of a woman, able to demand her sexual duties be fulfilled at any time and place of his choosing, then sure, this makes sense. However, your fear at newfangled motorized horse carriages and near-orgasmic rage at your wife’s bare calves probably makes her less than horny at the thought of having to service your anachronistic ass.
What woman would love a man who was so governed by feelings and moods that he allowed them to determine whether he would do something as important as go to work? Why do we assume that it is terribly irresponsible for a man to refuse to go to work because he is not in the mood, but a woman can—indeed, ought to—refuse sex because she is not in the mood? Why?
We do everything because of moods - how much we let those moods affect us differs based on how vital the task is to our lives. Sex is fun, but unless you’re a prostitute (which may be where Prager is with regards to women), it doesn’t help ensure that you stay alive. Work, on the other hand, keeps us in shelter and clothing and food and stuff. Dennis Prager is obviously incredibly bad at marriage, relationships, sex and quite possibly the very act of breathing, but it doesn’t mean that every woman he’s interested in is duty bound to make up for his inadequacy at existing.
3. The baby boom generation elevated feelings to a status higher than codes of behavior. In determining how one ought to act, feelings, not some code higher than one’s feelings, became decisive: “No shoulds, no oughts.” In the case of sex, therefore, the only right time for a wife to have sex with her husband is when she feels like having it. She never “should” have it. But marriage and life are filled with “shoulds.”
Can’t you extend this rationale to virtually any situation at any time? Reject the Gestapo of Feelings! Life has certain demands, including, among other things: Wiis for Christmas, a cheeseburger for $2 or less, not giving out speeding tickets on Thanksgiving and anal. You wouldn’t quit taking insulin just because you “weren’t in the mood”, so why won’t you just hang out by that glory hole for a few hours? Bitch.
4. Thus, in the past generation we have witnessed the demise of the concept of obligation in personal relations. We have been nurtured in a culture of rights, not a culture of obligations. To many women, especially among the best educated, the notion that a woman owes her husband sex seems absurd, if not actually immoral. They have been taught that such a sense of obligation renders her “property.” Of course, the very fact that she can always say “no”—and that this “no” must be honored—renders the “property” argument absurd. A woman is not “property” when she feels she owes her husband conjugal relations. She is simply wise enough to recognize that marriages based on mutual obligations—as opposed to rights alone and certainly as opposed to moods—are likely to be the best marriages.
A woman’s “no” must be honored in the sense that she probably shouldn’t be raped after saying it, but it shouldn’t be honored in the sense that she should be able to actually say it or think it. This is why Prager’s advocating marital rape, no matter what he says - he accepts that a lack of consent should be honored if given, but then spends his time arguing that it should never be given, because she owes it to the man to always say yes. Accepting a woman’s consent or lack thereof to sex is kind of meaningless if it’s bracketed by the belief that there’s almost never a legitimate lack of consent to be given.
5. Partially in response to the historical denigration of women’s worth, since the 1960s, there has been an idealization of women and their feelings. So, if a husband is in the mood for sex and the wife is not, her feelings are deemed of greater significance—because women’s feelings are of more importance than men’s. One proof is that even if the roles are reversed—she is in the mood for sex and he is not—our sympathies again go to the woman and her feelings.
If someone’s not in the mood for sex, they’re not in the mood for sex. Because enlightened people care about consent in sexual relationships, our “sympathies” generally go to the person who doesn’t want to have sex being free from undue force or coercion in the process. But really, making shit up is more convincing. Did you know that between the ages of 35 and 55, a woman’s vagina actually turns into a space-like vacuum capable of freezing and shattering a wang in under three seconds?
6. Yet another outgrowth of ’60s thinking is the notion that it is “hypocritical” or wrong in some other way to act contrary to one’s feelings. One should always act, post-’60s theory teaches, consistent with one’s feelings. Therefore, many women believe that it would simply be wrong to have sex with their husband when they are not in the mood to. Of course, most women never regard it as hypocritical and rightly regard it as admirable when they meet their child’s or parent’s or friend’s needs when they are not in the mood to do so. They do what is right in those cases, rather than what their mood dictates. Why not apply this attitude to sex with one’s husband? Given how important it is to most husbands, isn’t the payoff—a happier, more communicative, and loving husband and a happier home—worth it?
A hint: barring abuse or adultery, none of those people wants to put their penis inside the woman.
Besides this manufactured post-60s theory that apparently is focused on nothing but denying men three to six minutes of forgettable humping, the question must be asked: is Prager such a narcissist that he considers his libido a need on the same level as, say, a parent needing to go to a doctor’s appointment, a child needing comforting in the middle of the night or a friend going through a breakup? We do plenty of things because our desire to help with other people’s needs or wants override our aversion to the inconvenience of dealing with them (including sex, even). But I don’t drop my life every time a friend calls, I don’t pick up the phone on the first ring every time my mom dials, and I don’t have sex with my partner every time they drop trou.
And can I just ask something? Why is it that when a man wants to have sex, it’s just a natural desire that must be dealt with, but when a woman does or doesn’t want to have sex, it’s a part of some ethereal “mood” that’s inherently selfish and destructive? Do men not have moods? Do they not owe their wives any happiness based on their desires? Are women simply incapable of happiness?
7. Many contemporary women have an almost exclusively romantic notion of sex: It should always be mutually desired and equally satisfying or one should not engage in it. Therefore, if a couple engages in sexual relations when he wants it and she does not, the act is “dehumanizing” and “mechanical.” Now, ideally, every time a husband and wife have sex, they would equally desire it and equally enjoy it. But, given the different sexual natures of men and women, this cannot always be the case. If it is romance a woman seeks—and she has every reason to seek it—it would help her to realize how much more romantic her husband and her marriage are likely to be if he is not regularly denied sex, even of the non-romantic variety.
Shorter Dennis Prager: you’re more likely to get what you want if you stop demanding it and show that you’re willing to accept a lesser and vastly deficient version of it. Also, if you just take this magic pill, you will poop diamonds. And it won’t hurt!
8. In the rest of life, not just in marital sex, it is almost always a poor idea to allow feelings or mood to determine one’s behavior. Far wiser is to use behavior to shape one’s feelings.
That sentence is literally meaningless.
Act happy no matter what your mood and you will feel happier. Act loving and you will feel more loving. Act religious, no matter how deep your religious doubts, and you will feel more religious. Act generous even if you have a selfish nature, and you will end with a more a generous nature.
Lie to yourself, and you’ll feel like a liar, too.
With regard to virtually anything in life that is good for us, if we wait until we are in the mood to do it, we will wait too long.
Sex with a spouse when you don’t want to do it doesn’t sound good for us - it sounds good for our spouses. I’m still not sold on this wondrous pot of benefits bequeathed upon a patient and understanding wife who consents to sex any time it’s demanded of her without discussion or consideration of her feelings. We all have doormats - when was the last time you walked outside and asked it how it was feeling?
The best solution to the problem of a wife not being in the mood is so simple that many women, after thinking about it, react with profound regret that they had not thought of it earlier in their marriage. As one bright and attractive woman in her 50s ruefully said to me, “Had I known this while I was married, he would never have divorced me.”
And then, Penthouse, you’ll never believe what happened! She brought in her daughter, who was a seamstress. And she was the best “hemmer” I ever did see!
That solution is for a wife who loves her husband—if she doesn’t love him, mood is not the problem—to be guided by her mind, not her mood, in deciding whether to deny her husband sex.
So, ladies: if you think, “Christ, he spent all of dinner talking about his band again,” you can deny him sex. But if you feel it, get ready to spread those legs.
If her husband is a decent man—if he is not, nothing written here applies—a woman will be rewarded many times over outside the bedroom (and if her man is smart, inside the bedroom as well) with a happy, open, grateful, loving, and faithful husband. That is a prospect that should get any rational woman into the mood more often.
Let’s reduce this to a Pavlovian stimulus-and-response exercise.
Dennis Prager
Man is inattentive and generally a poor husband to Woman.
Man asks for sex from Woman, and is denied for his prior behavior.
Man, in response to negative feedback, and because he is Dennis Prager, does not change his behavior towards Woman.
Dog wonders why Man is stupid, performs backflip for table scraps from Woman.
Woman finally bows to pressure for sex.
Man, having finally gotten sex after refusing to change his behavior, changes it in numerous ways because semen is no longer clogging his pathways of decency and respect.
Everyone is happy.
An Intelligent Man
Man is inattentive and generally a poor husband to Woman.
Man asks for sex from Woman, and is denied for his prior behavior.
Man changes behavior because he realizes Woman is a human being and not his purchased vagina.
Woman, appreciating behavior, is legitimately more attracted to Man, and begins to consent to sex more often.
Man finally understands the difference between “harder” and “faster”, stops waiting for simultaneous orgasms, learns that foreplay is as much a part of sex as penetration is.
Prager watches from across the street, stewing.
What we have learned from this exercise: Dennis Prager should be kept away from marriage like an AA meeting should be kept away from happy hour.
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Posted by
Jesse Taylor on 02:33 PM •
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“What if your husband woke up one day and announced that he was not in the mood to go to work?”
Holy crap, the layers of wrong in that sentence are staggering!! Supplying sex to your husband is your job because obviously as a woman there’s no way you have a career outside of your household.
What if your husband woke up one day and announced that he was not in the mood to go to work? If this happened a few times a year, any wife would have sympathy for her hardworking husband. But what if this happened as often as many wives announce that they are not in the mood to have sex?
Thank you, Dennis Prager, for making it clear you think that my relationship with my husband is exactly like that between a prostitute and her john. Except, of course, that the prostitute can kick the guy out once he’s done having sex with her. I don’t get to to that with my husband, I’m stuck with him hanging around the house all the time.
I also love how he completely dismisses the idea that taking care of children or doing housework might actually be, you know, exhausting, I guess because it’s not “real” work unless you sit in front of your computer and spew whatever idiotic ideas come into your head. Doesn’t his wife know that touch-typing is way more physically taxing than chasing a 3-year-old around all day?
Act happy no matter what your mood and you will feel happier. Act loving and you will feel more loving. Act religious, no matter how deep your religious doubts, and you will feel more religious. Act generous even if you have a selfish nature, and you will end with a more a generous nature.
You know, this is a part of AA/recovery programs, too: “Fake it til you make it.” I’d reserve judgment on how well it works for stuff outside that problem domain, though.
Related to this is research where volunteers told to smile had the happiness centers of their brain light up on a CAT scan or some such thing.
I showed this to my wife and she thought this was a satire. I assured her it was not. Then she LOL until she cried. My thought is that Prager was homeschooled by wolves.
It brings to mind that I heard a geneticist postulate that mankind would evolve into two different species. One species will do all the physical labor and the other species who will do all things which involve higher brain functioning. Guess which species Prager will be…
“It brings to mind that I heard a geneticist postulate that mankind would evolve into two different species. One species will do all the physical labor and the other species who will do all things which involve higher brain functioning. Guess which species Prager will be… “
Wasn’t that a science fiction book?
I shared Prager’s columns with my wife, hoping it would convince her of the error of her ways. Interestingly enough, it did, and she took a step further, showing me how it applies equally to pegging.
I think someone better warn Prager about this.
So, basically, Prager’s entire philosophy is “ladies, fake it til you make it.”
He is revealing so much about himself with this manifesto; wise women will pay attention and stay far away from him.
1) This might be a silly question, but why doesn’t Prager just suggest that every man get himself a blow-up doll or a costco-sized bottle of handlotion? Is obligatory sex with someone who’s just not into it really that much more fun?
2) This: “But for most women, for myriad reasons—female nature, childhood trauma, not feeling sexy, being preoccupied with some problem, fatigue after a day with the children and/or other work, just not being interested—there is little comparable to a man’s “out of nowhere,” and seemingly constant, desire for sex.” might be the best sentence ever.
Outside of the fact that it’s nonsensical on it’s face, I absolutely love how he thinks “Not now, hon, I had Taco Bell for dinner and I’m not feeling so hot” is the same exact thing as being sexually abused as a child.
Somebody needs to stuff Dennis Praeger’s penis up his own ass. They also need to lock him in a basement closet, remove all writing materials, and access to communication with the outside world.
One species will do all the physical labor and the other species who will do all things which involve higher brain functioning.
OT: Heh. I work in tech support. One of the bitter little jokes we make is that we were told as kids to learn all about computers to ensure we’d be employed, and the nature of our employment is as wage slaves to much more highly paid people who chose not to learn all about computers.
“ My thought is that Prager was homeschooled by wolves. “
I think that even female wolves have the right to consent to or reject a suitor.
the nature of our employment is as wage slaves to much more highly paid people who chose not to learn all about computers
I thought the entire purpose of tech support was to blow off people until they did their own hacking, and then throw fits because “OMFG those elderly non tech support people touched stuff!!!!!!”.
Thank you, Dennis Prager, for making it clear you think that my relationship with my husband is exactly like that between a prostitute and her john. Except, of course, that the prostitute can kick the guy out once he’s done having sex with her. I don’t get to to that with my husband, I’m stuck with him hanging around the house all the time.
Actually, except that the prostitute gets paid to have sex and is allowed to say no (unlike wives according to Prager’s bizarre lack of understanding of Jewish and civil law).
Ironically, I seem to recall reading (years ago) that these days it’s more often men declining sex with their wives/girlfriends (often admitting to using sex as a weapon). Prager’s got another thing coming if he wants to claim a wife must have sex with her husband at his request (command) but that it’s OK for a husband to refuse sex with his wife &/or use sex as a weapon because the intelligence, job skills, earning potential, etc. of women somehow emasculates him. When it comes to sex between a husband and wife, the husband has the duty to pleasure his wife sexually (it’s noted in what I like to call the nookie code in the Ketubah). Sex, according to Jewish law, is supposed to be pleasurable and bring a couple together emotionally - the marital rape Prager suggests does quite the opposite.
Ugh. This guy makes me want to throw up.
Actually, except that the prostitute gets paid to have sex and is allowed to say no (unlike wives according to Prager’s bizarre lack of understanding of Jewish and civil law).
Apparently I have already been “paid” by the fact that my husband married me, presumably because all women who get married immediately quit their jobs and live off the husband’s salary. So since I get paid every week when my husband gives me my allowance*, clearly I’m a prostitute who’s being kept on retainer.
* Obviously, this is Prager’s view of how marriage works because I—like most adult women I know—have a full-time job and don’t get handouts from my spouse.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the variable nature of desire is something every couple has to learn to deal with if their relationship is going to survive. Proving that Dennis Prager is not from this universe.
What weirded me out was that with all those bullet points, he never makes the “fake it til you make it” argument. He can’t even conceive of a woman faking desire, she either has to want him right now, or just submit.
Didn’t Prager promise to cover the topic of what a couple should do when Wife wants sex and Husband doesn’t? Guess he got distracted by the urgent task of listing eight shortcomings of the female human. Perfect takedown, Jesse.
There’s a word for males who behave like Prager advocates: ex.
What’s rich is that Prager is probably a pro-lifer who will tell women with unintended pregnancies that they should have kept their legs closed.
this guy is scarey. really really scarey and wrong.
“Wasn’t that a science fiction book? “
Welles’s “The Time Machine”.
It brings to mind that I heard a geneticist postulate that mankind would evolve into two different species. One species will do all the physical labor and the other species who will do all things which involve higher brain functioning. Guess which species Prager will be…
Solyent green? I see no evidence in these articles that Prager is suitable for physical labor.
i’m not even in college yet and this post appalls me more than perhaps anything i’ve read on pandagon in recent memory.
Prager completely neglects the notion that his wife’s level of interest in sex might have something to do with his behavior and attitudes towards her. I submit reason #9: Husband is neglectful and clearly just looking for a warm place to put his dick as opposed to you know, making love.
Well Togolosh, he never said he wanted to make love to a person ... he said that he wants to fuck his wife!
Obviously, you are confused here! </snark>
What’s rich is that Prager is probably a pro-lifer who will tell women with unintended pregnancies that they should have kept their legs closed.
But Prager is only talking about sex within a marriage. And, as we all know, married women never, EVER get abortions. Abortions are only for those unmarried sluts. All babies within a marriage are automatically wanted. *eyeroll*
I noticed that Prager failed to list one other reason a woman might rarely be in the mood for sex: Her partner treats her like a blow-up doll, which leaves her feeling used, dirty and resentful afterwards.
Sexytime, ur doin it rong.
Mo:
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the variable nature of desire is something every couple has to learn to deal with if their relationship is going to survive. Proving that Dennis Prager is not from this universe.
He exlained how to deal with it: always do what the man wants. And say what you will, that does have the virtue of being simple and straightforward
With regard to virtually anything in life that is good for us, if we wait until we are in the mood to do it, we will wait too long.
While we’re compiling the list of Sentences That Offer a Far-Too-Clear Window Into the Deeply Disturbed Mind of Dennis Prager, let’s not forget this dark horse, OK?
Yes, sometimes things we weren’t looking forward to turn out to be positive experiences. But this is explicitly saying that we shouold ignore our own instincts and listen not only to what Other People think we should do, but what Dennis Prager thinks we should do. Gah.
Abortions are only for those unmarried sluts. All babies within a marriage are automatically wanted. *eyeroll*
Well, not automatically, but The Prager Principle says “fake it until you make it,” so they’ll probably only be angry, resentful and neglectful of their child for the first few years. It’ll probably survive. And then they’ll learn to love their child and everything’ll be OK.
Many contemporary women have an almost exclusively romantic notion of sex: It should always be mutually desired and equally satisfying or one should not engage in it.
Er, maybe most women do think sex should ideally always be mutually desired and mutually satisfying, and they’re entirely right to do so… but I’d be surprised if most women expected it to actually *work* that way in real life. I spent nearly a decade having sex with men and never expecting my orgasm to be a necessary or even slightly important part of the process. Perhaps I was just particularly backward, but I’d be surprised if there aren’t a LOT of women out there who would think the idea that they should have just as many orgasms as their partner is wildly unrealistic. Makes you wonder exactly HOW bad Prager is in bed if he feels like the women he’s been with have an unrealistically “romantic notion of sex” in which it ought to always be “mutually satisfying.” (And that’s not even addressing how he feels like it’s “romantic” and muddle-headed for a woman to think she should want to have sex if she’s going to have it.)
You know, I’ve never actually turned down my boyfriend for sex. I never really thought about it till now… and it’s certainly not for any of the reasons Prager states. I think my bf has just never asked for it when i’m not in the mood. I’ve been turned down by him though, when he’s too tired, but only a couple times. Pretty much we are both really horny, and keep each other very satisfied. =)
i recommend finding ppl who enjoy sex with you and you with them and preferably a similar libido, rather than marrying someone and expect her to “give” it to you. yuck
Well, not automatically, but The Prager Principle says “fake it until you make it,” so they’ll probably only be angry, resentful and neglectful of their child for the first few years. It’ll probably survive. And then they’ll learn to love their child and everything’ll be OK.
Years? Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no. Don’t you know how this works? If a woman is unhappy to be pregnant (rather than beatifically happy at fulfilling her natural function, as any Proper Woman(tm) would be), those feelings will slowly fade as the pregnancy - which has only minor, harmless, and indeed rather humorous, side-effects - progresses. Then, upon the birth of the baby (a process that is painful enough to make her beg for morphine if she was foolish enough to think she was tough enough for natural childbirth, but not actually dangerous), she’ll take one look into his (of course it’s a boy) alert, wide-eyed, smiling face and immediately fall totally in love with him, suddenly eager to devote every second of the next eighteen years to his care, no matter how much of a hard-hearted career woman she was before, and also eager to spend the rest of her life with the man who gave her this precious gift.
Don’t you watch the movies?
Jesse, you’re really hoping Prager is done with this? Not me.
This is FASCINATING. Like a visit to a sausage factory, if you don’t mind the metaphor here. ‘Cept I don’t want any of that sausage.
But hey, it’s an interesting peek behind the scenes.
“maybe most women do think sex should ideally always be mutually desired and mutually satisfying, and they’re entirely right to do so… but I’d be surprised if most women expected it to actually *work* that way in real life. “
This made me very sad. Of course the “mutually satisfying” bit doesn’t always work out that way, such is sex with humans. But, did you mean to suggest that women shouldn’t expect that it always be mutually desired? Did I read that wrong?
Ah. That was my mistake, Seraph. I was expecting real life to be like real life.
Maybe that’s why I’m basically happy and contented and in a good, steady, long-term romance and not spending my days trolling around the internets bitterly complaining that everyone’s idea of sexual happiness is wrong. I’ve been meaning to fix that; now I know how.
Not posting under my usual handle to avoid embarrassing my guy, but . . .
I have never turned him down for sex
I want sex every day we’re together, sometimes 2 or 3 or more times like we did when we first met
He has turned me down for sex, although usually just by not, ahem, warmly reciprocating my overtures but still being cuddly
Hell, this may change, since we’ve been together for a relatively short time, and married for an even shorter one, but still
The man isn’t always the more sexually demanding partner in the relationship.
And no, I never push the envelope, because who wants to have sex with a person who doesn’t want to have sex?
I mean, really?
Other than this Praeger fella, that is?
I’m still waiting for the post where Prager swears off women entirely, joins the clergy, and finally fills out that application to join NAMBLA.
Does he not get that many, if not most women actually want to have sex more than once a month? And since he has been married twice, I’m going to guess that it wasn’t a problem with a wife who simply has low-desire for whatever reason because the common denominator is HIM? Does he even get how much he is revealing about his own inadequacies?
I’m going to weigh in as another women who likes sex and likes it often. I have rejected sex on ocassion with my husband due to illness or fatigue, as has he. But in general, we mutually want to be with each other because we are good to each other, love and desire each other and sex is an excellent way to express that. My husband would not even consider touching me if I wasn’t all on board. That would skeeve him out big time. (and vice versa.)
If enough women went over and commented as such, do you think he might think twice about how he has treated his own ex-wives? Probably not, but it would sure make him look like an ass.
Not posting under my usual handle to avoid embarrassing my guy, but . . .
I have never turned him down for sex
I want sex every day we’re together, sometimes 2 or 3 or more times like we did when we first met
*sigh* I had a girlfriend like that once.
Could barely keep up, but god was it fun to try.
I was expecting real life to be like real life.
Rick, the scary thing is that I think anti-choicers really think that is real life. Haven’t you ever heard one describing pregnancy as “an inconvenience”?
“Perhaps I was just particularly backward, but I’d be surprised if there aren’t a LOT of women out there who would think the idea that they should have just as many orgasms as their partner is wildly unrealistic.”
I would be very disappointed if I had to scale back and limit myself to the same number of orgasms as my partner has.
Dennis Prager is telling is so much about his sad and gross sex life by telling us how we should live ours. As a lady, I don’t get it on when I don’t want to because it doesn’t feel good. It can even hurt. That Prager doesn’t mind if his partner isn’t aroused before he sticks it in is absolutely disgusting, and says a good deal about why he personally finds women so reticent to make sexytime.
A woman’s “no” must be honored in the sense that she probably shouldn’t be raped after saying it, but it shouldn’t be honored in the sense that she should be able to actually say it or think it.
Always an interesting ultimatum: I demand that you have sex with me, or else I’ll rape you.
Wow. This guy really hates women.
My thought is that Prager was homeschooled by wolves.
That can’t be right; Wolves mate for life.
It’s so sad, on so many levels, that Prager just goes around believing that women in general aren’t very interested in sex. If that were my experience, I’d start looking inward for an answer a year or two in my second marriage, I’d think.
Is Prager still married, does anyone know?
“To many women, especially among the best educated, the notion that a woman owes her husband sex seems absurd, if not actually immoral.”
Prager really has a bug up his ass about those educated women. Uppity bitches. Next thing you know, they’ll be running for president and shit.
I’m with anonymouse. What does Prager have to say about the men who don’t want sex as often as their female partner? I’d bet then he would ramble on about how the woman needs to be respectful of the man’s rights and feelings.
What a creep.
Is he from Innsmouth, MA by any chance?
I’ll repeat it here - Praeger is an equal opportunity asshole hater of all people not like him, and deserves to be on Jesse’s list of top conservative assholes for 2008 for this alone. This is basically an apologia and justification for mate rape. Fuckwad.
Yeah. I’m going to take advice on “marital relations” from twice-divorced Dennis Prager.
Just like I’m lining up to take business advice from George W. Bush. Or legal advice from Bernie Kerrick.
I’d feel bad for guys and gals who read Dennis Prager and think he’s giving them good advice, but they’re people who think Dennis Prager gives good advice. I’ll feel sorry for their spouses, though - sleeping with someone who thinks “sex == job” can’t possibly be all that much fun.
@ Jenny Dreadful. Thanks for that awful mental image. I need to scrub my brain now.
A few (hundred) people should comment on his original blog post that he is totally right, spouses should ALWAYS remeit sex when asked for, so husbands everywhere must bend over and let their wives have strap on anal sex with them when ever the wife wants to.
“One species will do all the physical labor and the other species who will do all things which involve higher brain functioning. Guess which species Prager will be…”
“Wasn’t that a science fiction book?”
“Welles’s “The Time Machine”.”
Actually, the description of a division of humanity into one group of workers and the other group of brains sounds a lot more like the world of Metropolis.
In The Time Machine, the split was more like one group that toiled underground to keep everything running (the Morlocks), and another group that just sat around and did nothing but look pretty (the Eloi). The Eloi might even have thought great thoughts about the proper relationship between men and women, much like Prager. Of course, H.G. Wells was perceptive enough to realize the Morlocks would use the Eloi for food.
Now why anyone would want to eat Prager is beyond me — he seems like 100% gristle, from his head down…
This is brilliant, and I will link to it on my blog.
I am astonished. ASTONISHED, I tell you, to learn that he’s been divorced twice.
I’d be more astonished that such a… ahem, fine man would have more divorces under his belt, but I am thinking it’s because by now he’s pinging too many sleazdar.
“I’d feel bad for guys and gals who read Dennis Prager and think he’s giving them good advice, but they’re people who think Dennis Prager gives good advice.”
What NonyNony said. The cretins who actually pay attention to the drivel that Prager spews are probably grunting pigmen married to clueless dopes. I doubt there are too many intelligent, feminist women (or men) who are partnered with the types of doofi who would take Prager’s advice to heart.
And if the pigmen and dopes actually end up having less sex with each other, and subsequently fewer children, all the better for the rest of us.
Act happy no matter what your mood and you will feel happier.
I’m pretty sure Marge Simpson gives this advice to Lisa, as well.
“I’m pretty sure Marge Simpson gives this advice to Lisa, as well.”
At least Marge later realizes what she said was wrong. Prager probably thinks he’s never said or done anything wrong ever…
As sad as this article is, Prager has been married twice. That’s two more times than me. *finds a rope and ties a noose*
Also, I don’t think the point of the Simpsons is that Marge Simpson is someone you would want your daughter to grow up to be.
For a Neanderthal, Prager’s advice seems reasonable.
This was just so upsetting I couldn’t read past #6.
Seriously. Sex isn’t something men do to women, and that women reluctantly let men do to them. Sex is something two people engage in together. It is a mutually satisfying activity.
If one partner isn’t into it, then what happens afterward is not sex, even should PiV occur.
As for expecting to orgasm as much as my partner? Well, why the fuck not? I admit there have been times when I realize it’s just not quite happening, and I’m happy enough, cause we both tried. It’s not like I count.
But faking orgasms is just wrong. Don’t do it. It helps NO ONE.
My sex drive is lower than it was in my youth, but I still want sex more than my partner. The thing is, even if I’m tired and think I’m ready for sleep, it usually only takes a little cuddling to get me in the mood for a little more and that gets me in the mood for a little more and then...no faking, no pretending, no giving in, mutually agreed upon sexual activity resulting in much pleasure for all concerned.
This would not happen if I were forced to have sex, or if, discovering I’m really not in the mood, my partner tried to force the mood upon me. Sex takes two active participants.
Prager is a sick rapist. There’s no other person who could write that shit. He thinks women should willingly lie down and be raped regardless of their ‘mood’.
We need to push not just the frame that sex takes two active participants, but also that sex with only one active participant is rape. Better to masterbate than to force someone to ‘put out’.
We should customize Prager’s advice for the newfangled phenomenon of GAY MARRIAGE.
Now...which one is the wife?
Act happy no matter what your mood and you will feel happier.
As someone who suffered from depression I can tell you that this is absolute bullshit and will only backfire. I tried this and it only made me feel worse and I was expending more energy pretending I was happy around people (not to make them uncomfortable) so I felt worse when I was allowed to be alone.
And this advice is bad on levels that haven’t even been reached yet. It would be one thing if Prager was married and had a “happy” wife to trot out, but he doesn’t and he’s been divorced TWICE. It would be like taking advice from George W. Busch on how to run a company. You are destined to FAIL.
There’s a reason why one generally pays to receive therapy.
“Wasn’t that a science fiction book?”
Brave New World? Except there were more than two classes.
This is all nothing but Prager, wondering, again and unfortunately out loud, why woman do not want to fuck him. And I don’t see one place where he pointed the finger back at himself. If he did, I’ve missed it.
And again I say, the stupidity is breathtaking.
We should customize Prager’s advice for the newfangled phenomenon of GAY MARRIAGE.
I’m not sure I want to rectify Lesbian Bed Death by raping my wife. But thanks for thinking of us.
Why doesn’t Prager just pick up some warm Krispy Kremes every day?
Really, we can’t blame the wolves for this guy. He may be a wire-mother monkey, though.
(Nb: this sounds like parent-blaming, but the wire mothers were actual chickenwire, not actual mothers. Cf. Goon Park.)
>>I thought the entire purpose of tech support was to blow off people until they did their own hacking, and then throw fits because “OMFG those elderly non tech support people touched stuff!!!!!!”.
I’ve never had any problem with users that know they don’t know what they’re doing (they’re always plenty helpful when you’re trying to find the problem), but I’m glad I’m a programmer now so I never have to meet another arrogant (and, of course, white male) MBA who thinks he knows more about computers than me.
What I’ve found most interesting about Prager’s two columns (if by interesting, you mean mind-numbing and rash-inducing), is that he never suggests that the man ought to change his behavior.
But for most women, for myriad reasons—female nature, childhood trauma, not feeling sexy, being preoccupied with some problem, fatigue after a day with the children and/or other work, just not being interested—there is little comparable to a man’s “out of nowhere,” and seemingly constant, desire for sex.
Right. So instead of thinking “Gee, honey, maybe you are tired from working full-time, taking care of the kids virtually unassisted, picking up after my manboy ass, and keeping our domestic life running. I think I should help you with the burden of all these obligations and then maybe you won’t feel so tired/resentful when I try to initiate sex. Heck, maybe you’d even initiate the sex because you wanted to.” Nope, Prager’s advice is for women to add sex to the list of chores.
What if your husband woke up one day and announced that he was not in the mood to go to work? If this happened a few times a year, any wife would have sympathy for her hardworking husband. But what if this happened as often as many wives announce that they are not in the mood to have sex? Most women would gradually stop respecting and therefore eventually stop loving such a man.
Leaving aside the skeevy equivalence between marital sex and a job, if my husband woke up every day complaining about his shitty job I would encourage him to find another job he enjoyed. Personally, I’d lose more respect for someone who continues in a job s/he hates when s/he has the ability to get another job at equivalent or higher pay.
But let’s use Prager’s analogy to make a further point: since in this scenario the husband is the boss, the job is sex, and the woman is the complaining employee, I’d also suggest she tell her boss (husband) that the job (sex) sucks and that she is going to find a job (sex) that is more fulfilling for her with a boss (husband) who treats her as a valued employee (wife).
If it is romance a woman seeks—and she has every reason to seek it—it would help her to realize how much more romantic her husband and her marriage are likely to be if he is not regularly denied sex, even of the non-romantic variety.
The logic doesn’t follow. IF women have a romantic view of sex but constantly sublimate their own sexual desires in order to satisfy their husband’s unromantic sexual urges, it does not follow that the husband will become MORE likely to satisfy her need for romance. Prager’s own advice nullifies a husband’s responsibility to change anything about his behavior in order to help his wife “get in the mood.” A husband whose wife always submits to sex, regardless of her own desires, has absolutely no incentive to become more romantic because his desires are being met.
I actually think that occasional rejection of sex is a good thing because it reminds one not to take her/his partner for granted but continue to find ways to seduce one’s partner. This is not to suggest people should purposely deny sex, just to say that sometimes your partner will a) not be in the mood, b) it’s okay, and c) if it becomes more frequent, maybe it’s time to see if there is something you can do to help your partner.
8. In the rest of life, not just in marital sex, it is almost always a poor idea to allow feelings or mood to determine one’s behavior. Far wiser is to use behavior to shape one’s feelings.
Funny that Prager doesn’t see how this could just as easily be used against the sex-demanding husband. By his own logic, if a man acts less interested in sex then eventually he will feel less interested in sex, which would solve much of the dilemma of mismatched desire. But of course, Prager thinks only women are supposed to make sacrifices.
Men who hate women this much really ought to refrain from having relationships with them.
Posted on the article itself, though expanded here since you can only post 2000 characters when you comment there:
Here are 8 reasons why this article is a sanctimonious piece of crap.
1. “If most women wait until they are in the mood before making love with their husband, many women will be waiting a month or more until they next have sex. “ And why do you think that might be? Perhaps she’s tired from cleaning your house, taking care of your children, cooking your dinner and listening to you complain about how Johnson from accounting screwed up the Henderson account again? She might be in the mood more often if you helped her get in the moon. “Let’s have sex, I’m horny” isn’t enough.
2. “What if your husband woke up one day and announced that he was not in the mood to go to work? “ Last time I checked, you got paid for work. If you dealt with the crap from your job, day after day, and got nothing for your work except room and food (which you had to clean and make), you’d be looking for a new job. Your wife will be much more amenable to weekly sex if you paid her. Perhaps you should start before she finds another “job”.
3. “But marriage and life are filled with ‘shoulds.’” What about your own “shoulds”? She should have sex, but you shouldn’t have to control yourself? What about your own shoulds, sir?
4. “They have been taught that such a sense of obligation renders her ‘property.’” I don’t know WHY she would think she is property, when you’re telling her that her wants don’t matter and she should just shut up and put out like a good little wife.
5. “So, if a husband is in the mood for sex and the wife is not, her feelings are deemed of greater significance.” Bull. The person who says no takes precedence. If you say no, she should respect your wishes too. And respect you in the morning, even though you don’t respect her.
6. “Yet another outgrowth of ’60s thinking is the notion that it is “hypocritical” or wrong in some other way to act contrary to one’s feelings.” So you would prefer to have sex with a bored, listless partner who is only pretending to enjoy what you are doing? You don’t mind that she’s doing the shopping list in her head while you’re doing her? Usually, when we do this, you complain about us being cold and manipulative. Would you like us to start pretending to have orgasms again too? Or do you not care whether or not we have any?
7. “Many contemporary women have an almost exclusively romantic notion of sex: It should always be mutually desired and equally satisfying or one should not engage in it.” Uh yeah, that’s usually the idea. Unless you’re doing this strictly for procreation: in which case, wouldn’t you prefer that it be fun too? Or just fun for you?
8. “Act happy no matter what your mood and you will feel happier. Act loving and you will feel more loving. “ What’s good for the gander here is also good for the goose, my friend. Act like you aren’t a spoiled brat for not getting sex, and she might be interested in having sex more often. Start respecting her wishes to not have sex, and she’ll start respecting your wishes to have sex more. Stop treating her like a sex toy with a dead battery, and she’ll start acting more human to you.
Your love life is awful because of your views towards sex. Why not try to see things from her point of view more often? If you aren’t considerate of your wife, she isn’t going to be considerate of you and before you know it, you’re on the road to divorce once again. Please learn from your mistakes sir before you christen another ex-Mrs. Prager.
Druidbros- “My thought is that Prager was homeschooled by wolves.”
Well, at least his poor wife would get doggie style once in a while....
“Lie to yourself, and you’ll feel like a liar, too.”
My nomination for the best comeback line of 2008.
“At least Marge later realizes what she said was wrong.”
Wasn’t it one of those scenes where both Marge and Lisa are obviously aware that the advice is dysfunctional bullshit even as Marge is doling it out?
“By his own logic, if a man acts less interested in sex then eventually he will feel less interested in sex, which would solve much of the dilemma of mismatched desire.”
Or the man could start forcing himself to have sex with his wife even when he’s really not in the mood for intimacy, thus forming a libido-killing negative association between feeling used and unloved and sex with his wife. Voila, problem solved. Now where’s my radio show?
FWIW, I believe that one of his great-grandfathers or grandfather was sent to America by the family by himself at something of an early age, and that said ancestor never saw his parents again.
Seraph @ 4:20- I about peed when I read that. Wait until I’m not in the leather chair before springing that on me!
Anon @ 5:41- You are a sick, sick person. I think that’s why I like you so much.....
Dark Avenger- Reminds me of Cid from Ice Age
“Uncle Fungus? They LEFT me! They DO this EVERY year!”
This is just odious on its face, and I have to commend Jesse for not only reading it, but also refuting it, even though it kind of refutes itself (or so one would hope).
And Mrs. W’s class, that was great.
Sex with a spouse when you don’t want to do it doesn’t sound good for us - it sounds good for our spouses.
Actually, it doesn’t. Sex with a person who doesn’t want to have sex isn’t good. It doesn’t do any good whatsoever. It’s rape.
Seriously, Prager is a sick sick fuck.
OMFG - I remember, when first learning about feminism, I had mixed feelings about Andrea Dworkin. I felt strongly that some of her assertions went way to far, but also felt that someone had to be out there on the bleeding edge, pushing the envelope of our understanding… prodding us to think deeper, and more creatively.
This is one of those times where I - a happily married heterosexual woman - think she might have been onto something when she said intercourse in a misogynist, sexist world was inherently rape. Again, I can’t go all the way out on that limb, but this Prager fool is showing me that there are still plenty of people who don’t understand (or don’t care to try to understand) the psychological and physical meaning of allowing someone else to be *inside your body.*
It’s a profoundly intimate act. It’s wonderful, delicious, and transcendent when it’s really good; a decent stress reliever when it’s playful, messy and fun; but it’s also a massively painful (sometimes emotionally, sometimes physically) act when unwanted, unappreciated, or otherwise “forced.”
I know you guys know all this, but I am just gobsmacked that this joker thinks that allowing a break of my bodily integrity is anything other than my absolute choice - no matter the reason. I won’t be surprised if he doesn’t spend the rest of his life as a very lonely man.
Wow ... our usual trolls must be sleeping at the switch ... 85 comments in, and there has yet to be a patriarchal attack on Amanda for posting this!
(yes, I know Jesse posted it ... that doesn’t seem to matter when there is misogyny to be vented)
FYI, Megan Carpentier (of Jezebel) will be discussing (debating?) this w/ Prager on his radio program at 1:00 ET on January 7th. You can call in - KRLA 870 AM.
Dennis Prager is the Ernest Shackleford of foreplay. Despite his many attempts, he’ll never get there and will likely suffer misery (and inflict it on others) in his fruitless pursuit.
My favorite thing about the whole article is that he frames the central question as one of women either *denying their men sex* or *granting their men sex*. I mean, it’s sort of obvious, and maybe that’s why no one has mentioned it yet, but doesn’t it just speak volumes that to him, a woman doesn’t choose to either “have sex” or “not have sex,” but to *deny it* or *not deny it*. If ever we needed an example of exactly what rape culture is, there you go.
Ew, I think I might be sick. What an ASSHOLE. Clearly he’s never been with a woman who desires him. And no wonder---who could feel sexual attraction to someone who has no consideration whatsoever for his partner’s feelings?
I bet he shoots his load in the first five minutes. (And I’m being generous with that...)
There’s a funny little caveat that praeger puts on this crap: “If her husband is a decent man—if he is not, nothing written here applies”.
Pretty much everyone I know makes disjoint sets out of “decent man” and “current unapologetic practitioner of rape or attempted rape”, so ultimately the whole essay is an even more thoroughgoing pile of wankery than it initially appears (yeah, hard to believe.) Because what he’s really saying is “Imagine that the moon was made of really yummy, healthy green cheese. Then the USDA would want to regulate the handling of any green cheese brought down from the moon for sale in school lunches. But since the green cheese would be healthy and yummy, that would just be bureaucratic interference. So anyone who doesn’t agree with the that the USDA should be shut down is a totalitarian.”
Just look at his smug face! It’s a rather regular-looking face made hideous by years of self-satisfied ignorance. Can you just imagine laying in bed, and you feel something digging into your back, so you roll over and it’s this guy, making this horrible expectant face, wanting to have sex?
He looks kind of feminine, in the softness of his face, which unlike most women’s faces, has a kind of gelatinal quality to it.
Jesse, this is priceless—my favorite post you’ve ever written here. A marvelous, funny, and effective fisking of the whole grotesque lie about women’s libido, male identity, and marital “obligation.”
...To many women, especially among the best educated, the notion that a woman owes her husband sex seems absurd, if not actually immoral. They have been taught that such a sense of obligation renders her “property.” Of course, the very fact that she can always say “no”—and that this “no” must be honored—renders the “property” argument absurd. A woman is not “property” when she feels she owes her husband conjugal relations. She is simply wise enough to recognize that marriages based on mutual obligations..
“Wise enough”, or maybe too uneducated to realize she can refuse.
You suck, Dennis.
Dennis Prager,
thank-you so much my friend, you hit the nail on th head.
....don’t expect emasculated, liberal men to agree with you though..
“Partially in response to the historical denigration of women’s worth, since the 1960s, there has been an idealization of women and their feelings. So, if a husband is in the mood for sex and the wife is not, her feelings are deemed of greater significance—because women’s feelings are of more importance than men’s. One proof is that even if the roles are reversed—she is in the mood for sex and he is not—our sympathies again go to the woman and her feelings.”
That is very true Dennis Prager, although mostly in American culture. You will not this type of rebellion in the far east or even in many european cultures...to same extent.
Dennis, thank you for speaking the truth, it’s long overdue…
...why are you addressing your comments directly to someone who doesn’t post here?
Well, yeah, our sympathies go to the person who DOESN’T WANT SOMETHING STUCK IN HER, not the person who just wants to splooge.
Or are you seriously volunteering to take it up the ass when your wife is horny?
Well, I guess being divorced twice has given Dennis Prager a bird’s eye view of everything that’s wrong with women—all women, including his ex-wives. And those are just the ones he married. Think on all the non-starters who struggle to forget their mercifully short stints as arm-candy for a real-live public intellectual. (Mwa ha ha ha ha!)
For the sake of the unfortunate woman who becomes Mrs. Prager III, I have the following advice for dear dumb Dennis – and it comes, ironically, from an anti-feminist:
Marriage is like a pie, and you’re 100% responsible for your half of it. If something’s going wrong, check yourself before offering crappy-ass advice to your partner—and definitely before offering crappy-ass advice to your readers.
The worst thing about this is how Prager has buried a nugget of truth under a mountain of bullshit: If the partner wants sex and you’re kind of ‘ho-hum’ about it, just go for it. Jump in with both feet and have a good time. And don’t withhold sex as punishment.
It’s too bad that Prager sees sex as a business transaction rather than as intimate act of friendship. He should just skip the whole marriage thing and content himself to fapping on pervert’s row while stuffing dollar bills in a stripper’s g-string. At least the dancer doesn’t care about mood.
James, you and that asshole Prager make quite a pair. Too bad you’re not gay, ‘cause it sounds like the two of you could have a very fulfilling relationship together...and you’d both be doing the female half of humanity a big favor…
James, fuck off. A penis is not the admission price for bodily autonomy.
Dennis Prager isn’t here, this isn’t his mailbox. If you want to go tell him how smart and wonderful he is, go to the comments section on his site and write it there. Don’t waste our time and your time with this “I think you’re smart, Dennis! Unlike, A-HEM, some people around here! A-HEM A-HEM!” nonsense.
Your trollery isn’t needed, RiM has got to be around here somewhere.
....don’t expect emasculated, liberal men to agree with you though
Yeah, Jimmy, because he-men don’t care about the fuckmuppets they marry; real dudes are concerned solely with finding - and there’s no delicate way to say this - a warm place to put it. And if the wife-bots won’t roll over on demand, a mistress will do just as well.
I hope you realize that’s the subtext of Prager’s message.
“Yeah, Jimmy, because he-men don’t care about the fuckmuppets they marry; real dudes are concerned solely with finding - and there’s no delicate way to say this - a warm place to put it.”
Devil,
I’m not referring to physical attributes in men, but an attitude that liberal men tend to have.
I’ve been to about 15 other countries, the cultures are somewhat different. One generally tends to believe that American culture in slightly conservative leaning, but in reality thats not the case at all. Men are respected more in different cultures.
Yeah, I show my man respect by fucking on command.
I’m not sure what European or Asian women you have experience with, James, but I suspect they’re all either behind glass windows in the Amsterdam red light district or in Bangkok gentlemen’s clubs. That’s not respect, it’s a financial transaction. Not really a representative sample you’re working from.
James, you really believe that married women have no right to bodily autonomy? you really, really believe that? in this day and age?
Boy, james, it took you a long time to get going on this thread. That neuron getting tired?
Dennis’s truth is that he’s been divorced twice - yeah, he’s the go-to person on how to make your marriage work.
If the problem with marriage is that women have started believing that they’re actual human beings worthy of human consideration, and the solution is to convince them to stop that and go back to being hired help with bed obligations, we’d be better off nixing the whole thing.
Fortunately there are solutions available that don’t posit the problem as being that the pesky woman-creatures think they’re human.
“James, you really believe that married women have no right to bodily autonomy? you really, really believe that? in this day and age”
Yes, of course they do. I would never force a woemn to sex, thats repulsive to me and turn off as well. You’re missing the point of Prager is saying..
That is very true Dennis Prager, although mostly in American culture. You will not this type of rebellion in the far east or even in many european cultures...to same extent.
Who else is not surprised that James has a mail-order bride because he couldn’t find an American woman willing to put up with him?
I’ve been to about 15 other countries, the cultures are somewhat different. One generally tends to believe that American culture in slightly conservative leaning, but in reality thats not the case at all. Men are respected more in different cultures.
In some countries, men are given primacy in legal matters and virtual immunity against domestic abuse charges. Women don’t respect cruel men, or rapacious men, or drunkards, or thoughtless fools. This is true regardless of culture. Instead, women tolerate these men for a lack of options.
Likewise, a wife won’t respect a sexually demanding husband who places his own desire above her comfort. She may take Prager’s advice and lay back while thinking of England, but that isn’t respect.
Prager is being foolish here. If he wants to be taken seriously, he should look at his own faults rather than scolding women.
Are women simply incapable of happiness?
If they are married to Dennis Prager (or James), the answer is “Yes, until they get their divorce filed”.
You’re missing the point of Prager is saying..
Really? An awful people are doing that....
If that’s the case, Prager can’t write for shit. He should actually write the point that you think he’s making.
i was raised in that backround, James, i understand EXACTLY what Prager is saying, and it is manipulative to women, and infantilizing of men. he can’t be expected to understand his wife’s sexual or marital concerns, so she should mollycoddle him, instead of him manning up and being a real partner. that’s so absurdly rude to men, while laying ALL marital issues at the women’s feet? how is that fair, or right?
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: unequal levels of sexual desire are common in relationships.
Mature people figure out a way to deal with it.
People like Prager write whiny articles like this one.
I made the mistake of clicking on the Townhall link above.
When I clicked to the second page of the article, I received a pop-up ad for Anne Coulter’s new book.
(shiver!)
Now I’m really going to have nightmares!
Mr. Prager needs to spend more time thinking about the Lord and less time thinking about his cock.
JB, I’d have to disagree. If he thought about it a bit longer, and used a bit of astroglide, he’d probably abruptly lose much of the urge to write two-essay odes to how much trouble he has distinguishing his wife from a prostitute.
Llelldorin, clearly he’s in with the abstinence-only crowd. He should be thanking God that these women were showing him the true path to salvation. Deny the cock, embrace Jesus.
Furthermore, do the soldiers dying for Mr. Prager’s freedom have time to cry about their penises? No, they do not. Why does Mr. Prager hate the troops?
I find it amusing that Prager cites the ‘free love” 1960s as the era when married women got the screwed up idea that we could say no. I always understood the 1960s as the era of The More Sex The Better, the era when even unmarried women weren’t supposed to say no, ever.
Also, James, those wussy liberal refusal-respecting men probably have more luck getting women to fuck them than you do. I’d certainly be more interested in having sex with a man who tried to make it look like it’d be fun for me than your and Prager’s “come on, don’t make me rape you, I’d hate that” approach.
James’ problem is that he raised to believe that “REAL MEN” take charge at all times, rule implacably and impeccably with an iron fist, and cannot show any emotion that doesn’t fulfill that job description. he further was raised to believe that women are emotionally children, and morally animals with no sense of right and wrong beyond what their masters - men - can train them too. good women are those who, like the pet dog, have learned to parrot “my husband is always right” lines.
the idea that men don’t have to be mosterous tyrants is totally outside of his worldview, and the idea of women being able to reason terrifies him.
someday, if he is very lucky, he will actually read his own holy book*. the one where Jesus said to treat everyone, no matter their gender, race or sexual desires, exactly as they would treat both Jesus and God Himself. with love and respect.
otherwise, like he threatens everyone with all the time, he will die and be judged, and It Will Not Be Happy for him.
but then again, i don’t know that i mind someone as intolerant, hateful and ignorant as he is being in Hell
*for some reason, in my experience, fundy Christians are INCAPABLE of living up to their own standards. as James has proven, in every thread i have seen him participate in.
Yes, of course they do. I would never force a woemn to sex, thats repulsive to me and turn off as well. You’re missing the point of Prager is saying..
I don’t think James is a native english speaker. James, where are you from, may I ask?
Wow..Denelian, that was harsh....now I’m a ‘monsterous tyrant’ because I think couples should have sex more often.
Prager confuses me in some ways, but I really shouldn’t be surprised.
Let’s set down a course of action a sociopathic narcissist like him can follow to SEEM decent, thus getting laid more often.
She says “no, I’m not in the mood.”
rather than immediately start whining with “cmooooooooon” take the equally irritating route. “why not?”
although phrase it better. “oh. Rough day? Do you want to sleep, or would you like a backrub?”
if she says she wants sleep, suck it up and go jack off. otherwise proceed as asked.
Rather than convincing her to IGNORE her mood, take steps to CHANGE her mood. offer whatever consolation she would need, actually engage her in conversation. absorb the information, so even if you don’t think of her as a person, you’re able to keep pace with the conversation and are aware of the situation.
After a period of this, woman feels better. her mood is different. which means her answer to the question likely will be. and having shown yourself a devoted caregiver who actually cares about how she feels, will like you more, and consent to mutually enjoyable sex.
This, incidentally is also defined as literally the least you can do.
James is a troll, and not even a good one at that. Ignore him please.
because I think couples should have sex more often.
The fact that you don’t see a difference between “couples having sex more often” and “women lying there and taking it regardless of how they feel because their husbands are owed sex” says everything that needs to be said.
I think couples should have sex more often
lol! except, of course, if the couples are gay, not married, using protection, using contraception, planning on aborting any resulting pregnancies, are poor, or having sex other than missionary position.
I don’t believe that men and women are different species the way Prager does, but I’m starting to think that social conservatives are a different species from normal human beings. When Prager uses words like “love,” “respect,” “sex,” and “marriage,” he’s clearly referring to completely different concepts from I what I associate with those words.
I thought nothing could top the bit in the first column where he declares the idea of a man giving himself to a woman sexually “funny.” If you think about it, that right there tells you all you need to know about the dude’s marital problems. But the new bit about how sex is a wife’s job may have topped it. I know there are men out there who see every woman as some form of whore, but most of the ones who write essays on the subject figure out ways to politely conceal it. Also love the circular logic of “Wives aren’t sex slaves because they have the right to say no. Now allow me to write two lengthy essays explaining why wives don’t have the right to say no.”
But hell, I’m still on my first marriage, so what do I know?
Is “James” somebody attempting to satirize “Rugged in Montana”?
Can somebody explain this double standard to me:
When it comes to the cleanliness of the house men have to adjust their standards upwards to that of the women.
When it comes to libido, men have to adjust to the women’s again???
Even if biology didnt give men a higher libido they are still expected to do most of the initiation even after countless rejections. To do that successfully you need to cut yourself off from some feelings. Oh but if you do that how is your antennae in perfect tune with your partner? I guess being able to put it on the line as the risk taker goes with our priveleged role in society.
Go on all you want about how media oppresses women with images of perfection and whatever but a fair person would also agree that today’s man faces many mixed messages and double binds. But acknowledging that current paradigm harms men too, I’m not talking about the patriarchy I’m talking about new non-traditional gains by women, is taboo.
Somebody tell me to “man up” right about now or call me a troll, NG or some other way of trying to shame into silence, you intolerant PC schm#cks.
Happy New Year and open your minds would ya!
Is “James” somebody attempting to satirize “Rugged in Montana”?
If that’s the case, he’s doing a terrible job. At least RiM amuses me. James depresses the hell out of me (on behalf of his wife, his family, and the people he treats like crap on a daily basis because of whatever delusional ideas he’s gotten about liberals).
NMMNG:
When it comes to the cleanliness of the house men have to adjust their standards upwards to that of the women.
Who says? It happens that my boyfriend is 10 times the neatnick that I am. I have no problem with towels on the floor or dishes in the sink for days. He would go nuts living in that kind of mess.... so we compromise and I come to a level that doesn’t drive him batty but where I don’t have to obsessively worry about a glass left by the computer or a towel strewn across the hamper instead of inside it (apparently it’s more acceptable if it’s in the appropriate area even if it didn’t make the actual receptacle… ok, I can live with that.... strange as it seems to me).
So you’re already starting out with a very false premise, and the rest of your comment and logical structure follows from there… fruit of a bad tree and all that…
Kodiak,
Maybe my logic is flawed but what if I’m making an emotional argument? Don’t my feelings count?
I love how NMMNG thinks of picking up after your fucking self as such an onerous chore for teh poor poor menz. I’m sure that his significant others regard “submitting” to him in the same way.
As for men being “still expected to do most of the initiation”...If you’re talking about dating in general and “making the first move,” NMMNG, maybe you ought to challenge the double standard that still stigmatizes “overly” aggressive women. Not to mention the paradigm that women “have” sex and men “get” it from us, which makes being shot down just a part of life for a straight man but a devastating judgment on a straight woman. I mean, if men really would fuck anything, then what does that say about a woman whom a man wouldn’t fuck?
And if you’re talking about sexytime...I dunno, most men I’ve been intimate with have welcomed me initiating it. Again, maybe you ought to take up the idea that “calling the shots” = “GRUNT GRUNT MANLY!!” with your fellow Neanderthals. Or is the loss of control over us just not worth all the extra booty you’d be getting?
“When it comes to libido, men have to adjust to the women’s again??? “
Who said that? All we’re saying is you have no “right” to anyone else’s body. If you want sex and she doesn’t, take care of it yourself. If you don’t want to wait, get out of the relationship.
End of story.
So enough with the whining, please. It’s transparent.
“Even if biology didnt give men a higher libido they are still expected to do most of the initiation even after countless rejections.”
You can thank Patriarchy for that.
“ I guess being able to put it on the line as the risk taker goes with our priveleged role in society. “
Of course. The point is, YOU (collectively) have the “right” to be sexually forward - you’re studs! If we do that, we’re “sluts” who “deserve” whatever happens to them.
“Go on all you want about how media oppresses women with images of perfection and whatever but a fair person would also agree that today’s man faces many mixed messages and double binds.”
Go on all you want about the mixed messages men get - and of course they get mixed messages (you can thank patriarchy for that too). But a fair person would also agree that the penalties for women are much higher, the blame directed at them almost exclusively and would not seek to shame them for not focusing solely on men.
“Somebody tell me to “man up” right about now or call me a troll, NG or some other way of trying to shame into silence, you intolerant PC schm#cks. “
That’s a very mature, reasonable, logical and totally not flame baiting way to prove you’re not just a misogynstic whiny troll. Good work!
Happy new year and move on from the nice guy crap!
Nobody- I admire women who have the guts to be forward very much. We need more and to reduce any stigma on that. Dont try and claim moral superiority though by saying your rejection is any more devastating than a guys if you want to achieve balance. There could be a lot of reasons for rejection. Women cant think that just going out there will work, they’ll have to become skilled at it just like some men have to work at it.
Gypsy Lee- What’s wrong with a lil shot of caffeine for a discussion in the morning. Again, nice try on getting the high ground for penalties being higher for women. If you want balance face the fact we all suffer . No more victimhood Olympics on your part please. I pointed out a few instances where there is some imbalance there is our side to the story too. You turn around the stigma on risk taking in women’s favor and an example of patriarchy. You could also see it as a convenient self esteem protection device for not taking any risks.
“But for most women, for myriad reasons—female nature, childhood trauma, not feeling sexy, being preoccupied with some problem, fatigue...”
It’s the “childhood trauma” part that gets me. Imagine being a woman who has experienced this, especially sexual abuse. She grows up, dealing with the aftermath of this and working hard all her life to build her self-esteem. Then she marries a guy who expects her to have sex with him even if she doesn’t feel like it. Yeah, this would just do wonders for her.
A kind and understanding husband who acted like a human being would understand the concept of foreplay in a situation like this. He would be romantic and tell her “you look beautiful,” you’re sexy,” and so on. A little building up like this goes a long way with any person, man or woman. Then the person would WANT to have sex with you. Otherwise, as many have pointed out, what’s the point?
I don’t find it hard to imagine that there are a lot of woman (and men) out there with low self-esteem issues that might be feeling some ambivalence about sex. But a kind, generous and sweet partner is what they need, not a big selfish jerk!
Obviously this Prager guy is about control because really, it’s got to be so much easier and smarter in a situation like this to approach it like a normal human being.
Prager evidently believes in the “trickle-down” theory as applied to relationships.
Woman provides the sex, the relationship “trickles-down” as a result.
It doesn’t work for economics, either.
Wow..Denelian, that was harsh....now I’m a ‘monsterous tyrant’ because I think couples should have sex more often.
Including gay couples, James??? No?
Now, explain to the class why the sex life of ANY couple not containing yourself is ANY of your business??
I’m all for couples having more sex. This occasionally means having sex when your partner wants to but you aren’t in the mood. (And that applies to men and women, gay and straight.)
But if sex is always an obligation for either partner, then “more fucking” alone will not solve this problem. This is what Prager doesn’t get. Sex is supposed to be fun. If one partner sees it as a duty, then the other partner is doing something wrong. Unless there is a genuine medical problem, the problem usually has to do with the other partner not caring about the emotional needs or the physical pleasure of the partner who is less interested in sex.
This is not rocket science, folks. Yet people like Prager just don’t get it.
I think Prager hates me, my wife, my mom, my sister, my dear departed dad and most people I like.
I’m going to go ahead and hate him back.
“Now, explain to the class why the sex life of ANY couple not containing yourself is ANY of your business?? “
I agree, It’s not my business. Does that also mean I have to keep slient on what I think is right and wrong?
I’m not referring to physical attributes in men, but an attitude that liberal men tend to have.
You mean that attitude that women are human beings?
Again: sex is not something men do to women and that women allow men to do to them. Sex is something both partners do together. If one partner doesn’t want to do it, what ya got going on there is rape.
Mr. Nice Guy, we’ve already discussed the fact that men and women have different libidos, and the fact that many of us women-folk have higher libidos than our partners, despite the fact that they claim to want it any time.
Libidos change over time, with age, with health, with medications, etc. If you are in a relationship and care about someone, say a spouse as Prager is supposedly writing about, then you deal with it. You discuss your desires for sex, and if your partner is too tired, YOU PICK SOME SHIT UP, WATCH THE KIDS FOR A FEW HOURS, DO SOME LAUNDRY (and not just your own clothes), AND OTHERWISE PICK UP YOUR SHARE OF THE SLACK. As above, offer a back rub. Let her sleep in some morning, while you handle the getting yourself ready and the kids to school. Don’t act like your house is a hotel and she’s the paid maid/prostitute. Otherwise show that you care about her life and her as a person, and you might be surprised at how she suddenly seems to care about you and to want sex with you again.
If not, if you have really found and married a frozen bitch from hell, divorce her. You deserve sex. Nobody deserves to be made an unwilling celibate. What you do not deserve is sex with a partner that doesn’t want to participate.
Sex takes two willing participants. Women are human beings, not strange alien creatures. Get those thoughts through your head, and we’ve got no problems anymore.
“What’s wrong with a lil shot of caffeine for a discussion in the morning”
If that’s supposed to be a joke, it’s flown right over my head.
“Again, nice try on getting the high ground for penalties being higher for women.”
Ha! Wait, I know the punch line to this: Men are the REAL and ONLY victims! Right? Next you’ll try to pull the “oppression olympics” fallacy.
“If you want balance face the fact we all suffer.”
Where did I say different? Oh right, no where. Nice try with the bait n switch, though.
“No more victimhood Olympics on your part please.”
*lol* Right on cue. Take heed, only NNMNG gets to play the victimhood Olympics! NNMNG gets to ignore, erase, and disregard the realities of women for the much, much, much more important issue of how his fee-fees get hurt if he can’t get pussy on demand. My heart bleeds for you, poor, poor victim!
“I pointed out a few instances where there is some imbalance there is our side to the story too. You turn around the stigma on risk taking in women’s favor and an example of patriarchy. You could also see it as a convenient self esteem protection device for not taking any risks.”
No, you gave one patently stupid and sexist strawman regarding cleaning and then another strawman. Both of which have been defeated already. Regardless, I said quite clearly that men do receive mixed signals from society. I don’t care if you don’t like that it’s patriarchy’s fault – that’s simply the truth.
As someone pointed out just before me, men wouldn’t have to be the sole “risk takers” if aggressive women, particularly sexually aggressive women, weren’t shamed, stigmatized and called “castrating”. Can’t have it both ways.
I, myself, have never shied away from taking the risk you speak of. Since my libido is quite a bit stronger than the BF’s, I’m usually the one getting turned down. Amazingly though, since I don’t think I’m entitled to the use of his body, it doesn’t result in my being hurt and needing to “cut yourself off from some feelings”. The benefit of not being a whiny, sexist nice guy™, I guess.
Actually, except that the prostitute gets paid to have sex and is allowed to say no (unlike wives according to Prager’s bizarre lack of understanding of Jewish and civil law
Actually, in Rabbinical law, sex is the WIFE’s prerogative. It is a sin to use sex as a weapon or to withhold it merely out of spite or revenge, but simply being “not in the mood” is a completely valid reason to refuse as far as Jewish law is concerned. In fact, Jewish law sanctifies spousal intimacy and absolutely forbids sex that does not flow from mutual desire. The concern with the emotional aspect of intimacy is so high that Jewish law forbids even consensual sex between spouses if they have been fighting—they have to fully reconcile first. In Judaism, sex isn’t something that one spouse owes the other (although the husband does have the added duty of “pleasing” his wife, which is understood to include sex), but a natural and mutually enjoyable activity between two people who love each other.
So Jewish law isn’t where Prager is coming from. He’s just a douche.
Can somebody explain this double standard to me:
When it comes to the cleanliness of the house men have to adjust their standards upwards to that of the women.
When it comes to libido, men have to adjust to the women’s again???
NMMNG -
There are a lot of things wrong with this analogy. At its core, I am still shocked that some men don’t see a difference between cleaning the house, going to work, or any number of mundane responsibilities and allowing another person access to the interior of a person’s body. To try to understand, imagine what it would be like if it were different...If human reproduction involved putting a dildo-shaped sperm delivery appendage into the male @$$. You’d want it to be a mutually-agreed upon activity, you’d want to be ready, lubricated, and appreciated. It’s not perfect, but if you ponder it for a little while, you might see how bodily autonomy is vitally important to the health and well-being of the person in whom a foreign item is being inserted (and in the case of sperm, left behind).
But on to your specific analogy:
Cleanliness of the home:
(1) Degree of comfort with housecleaning varies wildly across all genders
(2) Generally speaking, who is looked at askance if someone enters a couple’s house and it is messy? The husband? The wife? Be honest here.
(3) Do all people raise their level of cleanliness when partners ask them to, or does the one who cares more really just pick up the slack and clean more?
In sum, I can’t buy your first premise. I don’t see, among my circle of friends, a general imposition on men to increase their level of housecleaning tolerance. It may have to do with your experience, the kind of women you and your friends marry, the kinds of homes you and your friends came from. You may have a lot of stay-at-home moms who may (I know this is a major generalization and apologize in advance if I am insulting s-a-h-ms) be looking to exert control of their chief area of responsibility - the home and hearth.
Libido
I believe what’s being said is that, with respect to libido, couples should work together to find a satisfying arrangement, or cease to be a couple - men are not being asked be the only ones to adjust. If a man loves a woman for more than the hole between her legs (like her mind, her sense of humor, her kindness, her company, her interest in adventure travel, her race car....), he will want to engage with her to make all aspects of the relationship work for them both. If he is only interested in her “giving him sex” when he wants it, he’s not couple-material in the first place and should find another solution - perhaps bachelorhood is a good plan for him.
Having said that - as I tried to express at the beginning - sexual intercourse is slightly different than other areas of compromise, since you are truly talking about crossing the boundary of another person’s body. It’s very different than taking out the trash.
Which leads me to my final point - if anyone has followed me this far: James mentioned that we think we are conservative in the US but that other countries are more “conservative” because they “respect men more”. I would argue that it’s conservative and patriarchal ideas about sex that have added a layer of shame (virgin vs. whore), confusion (pledging chastity to your dad, for god’s sake), and uneven “punishment” for sexual activity (see the Feministe video @ http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2008/12/27/are-you-popular/ to see how the “loose” woman is treated vs. the piggish, bragging men.)
Hope this helps you to understand a bit more, NMMNG
At its core, I am still shocked that some men don’t see a difference between cleaning the house, going to work, or any number of mundane responsibilities and allowing another person access to the interior of a person’s body.
That’s certainly worth repeating.
Isn’t NMMG one of the MRA trolls from Hugo’s board?
Gypsy Lee, You dont “get” risk taking if you dont understand that shaming, stigmatizing and all the rest go with the territory of risk. Its called risk because there is a downside.
Real risk is not like what we see on Wall Street right now either. Take risk, lose and then expect to be bailed out. That’s called moral hazard where the risk is always cushioned.
And again your being castrated by society for aggressiveness is more harrowing than a man’s experience? How about saying screw society’s narrow view and I’ll live my life as I please. Risk might involve being ahead of the herd and its lonely so the denigrating judgements you dont like are the price to pay for change.
Maybe women helped build the lace curtain of prim and proper too? Are you gonna deny that the veil of proper behavior doesn’t have its advantages? Easy to blame it on the patriarchy.
Wayloopy, I need more help. In achieving intimacy if one partner values one thing more than another does is it Ok to say - the categories are different, let’s use my yardstick because my clever logic says it should be so?
Actually, you have moral hazard backwards. It eliminates the moral hazard when the risk is cushioned.
I didn’t understand your question directed at me at all. Can you re-phrase?
I am sorry to say that your comments seem to indicate to me that you still think my concerns about the sanctity of my bodily autonomy are simply clever logic and hold no merit for you. If that’s the case, we have no common ground on which to discuss this. Access to the interior of my body is not the same as whether or not you take out the garbage once a week or three times. If you can’t agree on that, we are done.
If you can, and you are talking about only yardsticks of sexual desire, I reiterate what I and others have said… sexual desire/libido varies widely among different people, changes over a lifetime, is impacted by all kinds of normal (e.g. fatigue, distraction, bodily changes, illness), and not-so-normal (e.g. trauma), life events. If you don’t love someone enough to navigate through those respectfully (understanding the issue, pleasuring yourself, helping to ease whatever is in the way...) , you don’t belong together. Neither party should have to be unfulfilled over the long term; but neither party should feel compelled to acquiesce if they do not want to.
At its core, I am still shocked that some men don’t see a difference between cleaning the house, going to work, or any number of mundane responsibilities and allowing another person access to the interior of a person’s body.
What’s so shocking? It seems apparent to me that those men are TERRIBLE LOVERS. They aren’t good at sex, they don’t get a ton of enjoyment out of sex, and they aren’t fond of women so the whole enterprise basically ooks them out.
And yet, they have these bodily urges and lust to contend with.
In other words...It IS like taking out the trash, if taking out the trash were something your genitals told you to do.
This comes not from theory, but actually with talking to the Dennis Prager in my life. (Get ‘em drunk, they’ll tell you everything! And then you need a shower with Brillo!)
Sucks to be them. And to be anyone who is so unfortunate as to sleep with them.
In achieving intimacy if one partner values one thing more than another does is it Ok to say - the categories are different, let’s use my yardstick because my clever logic says it should be so?
“Don’t rape me because I’m a human being and not a blowup doll” isn’t “clever logic.” Dipshit.
Queries:
Do any of the people in the “always say yes” boat think it is fun to have sex with someone who does not want to have sex with you?
Is it as fun as having sex with someone who wants to have sex with you?
Do you deserve to be desired, so that if a partner makes it clear they do not desire you, you should leave?
If sex was physically painful for you at certain times, or if a position your SO liked was physically painful, or s/he was into strap-ons, would you be a bad person for not engaging in that position/sex act?
Would your partner be a bad person for the same refusal?
Maybe I just haven’t been paying attention, but what exactly gives Mr. Prager standing to offer the world these prescriptions? Is he some sort of psychologist or counselor? Is he an expert on human sexuality and family dynamics?
Or is it that he “often conducts orchestras,” as it says in his Townhall bio? Maybe he’s just so danged smart that we need him to tell us all what to do?
Can anyone help me out here?
Wayloopy, I’m too tired to argue anymore. I could grab a coffee, put some energetic music on , concentrate and will myself back into the keyboard mood for you but there’s a hockey game I really want to see in a few minutes and I’ll live if you pout around. When I was younger I probably would have jumped on this and your concerns would have been more important but at my age I’ve had my thrills. I know you really tried hard to see things my way. Your integrity is all yours to enjoy.
Cool - It forces me get back to my “preventing workplace harassment” online training class that’s due for my job by 5 pm today. That really makes me pout - I hate myself when I procrastinate.
Trying to help you be a better partner and lover was a more hopeful distraction, but alas, teh hockeys triumph.
My bodily integrity being mine and my husband’s to enjoy; and my personal integrity on solid ground, I bid you adieu.
Cheers and happy new year, loop
The day, wayloopy, is yours. Yours I say!
Happy new year to you and your husband!
-Izzy
Maybe I just haven’t been paying attention, but what exactly gives Mr. Prager standing to offer the world these prescriptions?
He’s been divorced twice, so clearly he knows more about marriage than those of us who haven’t even been divorced once.
(Which is why I never paid attention to either Barbara de Angelis or John Grey once I found out about their histories of marital disaster (once to each other), but anyway ...)
“You dont “get” risk taking if you dont understand that shaming, stigmatizing and all the rest go with the territory of risk. Its called risk because there is a downside. “
Do you seriously think there’s no shaming and stigmatizing of women who get turned down for sex? What frigging planet do you live on?
“And again your being castrated by society for aggressiveness is more harrowing than a man’s experience?”
Where did I say that? Oh right, nowhere. Nice try playing victimhood olympics. Again.
“How about saying screw society’s narrow view and I’ll live my life as I please.”
That’s feminism, right there.
“Maybe women helped build the lace curtain of prim and proper too? Are you gonna deny that the veil of proper behavior doesn’t have its advantages? Easy to blame it on the patriarchy. “
Of course women had - and still have - a hand in it. (see Ladies Against Feminism, or the hilariously named “Prairie Muffins”, for examples). And, of course it has its “advantages” - if we use the word “advantage” to mean “minor benefits vastly outweighed by negative consequences”. The “advantage” of the lace curtain is that one wouldn’t be called a slut, told she deserved it, etc ad nauseum. Or maybe she’ll get really lucky and be married to a man like Prager, who apparently believes rape is a natural consequence of getting married.
Or, on the slightly lest bombastic end of the spectrum, maybe she’d get a husband who denies her any input in household decisions, but leaves her every bit of the household chores.
Whoo! We’re just drowning in “advantages”, aren’t we!
There are supposedly rewards for women who are compliant to the whims of patriarchy and the “lace curtain of prim and proper” is an obvious patriarchical requirement. That’s the virgin/whore dichotomy.
Now, men say they suffer stigmas should they be unable to “get laid” when they want to. The idea of men needing to be “slutty” to be macho comes from nowhere but patriarchy.
PHMT.
____
“Isn’t NMMG one of the MRA trolls from Hugo’s board? “
Since he had the disgusting gall to refer to a woman’s bodily autonomy as “clever logic”, I’d say his being an MRA is a given.
How silly those chicks are thinking they have an actual right to decide who gets to enter their bodies and when!
I could be wrong, but I suspect that what Praeger (and men like him) wants is not just a wife who says, oh okay, stick it in & I don’t htink he’s exactly advocating marital rape (though I think Jesse’s analysis is in many ways right on, and totally hilarious).
I think Praeger wants something much more manipulative—a full demonstration of “willingness” and affection, not just basic physical submission. This, to me, belongs to a different part of the gnarly complex we know as sexism than rape. I suspect that if Praeger’s wife made a deal with him that was effectively, okay, any time you want to stick it in, grab some k-y and I’ll stare at the ceiling and think of England, he wouldn’t be satisfied—he’s just being a liar about that.
What he wants is to be able to demand pliable affection regardless of context, or of his previous behavior toward his wife. I think a lot of marital power struggles involve this kind of displacement—one person says “we don’t have sex enough” when what they mean is “I’m not getting enough of your affectionate attention but I’m going to call it my sex drive which is totes beyond my control and totally unrelated to any kind of emotional neediness I might be trying to wrap around your neck”. I suspect that when Praeger was asking for sex it was a way of getting his wives to “be nice” to him in contexts when he’d been a jerk and didn’t want to back down on that, but he tried to frame it as “I’m a man, I have needs” not “I don’t want to apologize for being an asshole but I have a deep narcisstic need to have you demonstrate you love me anyway, I think I’ll call that my manly lust which is beyond my control not my selfish egotism which could be under my control if I worked on it”
And, you know, I think women do this too, in relationships—just not as much as men given the way most heterosexual relationships are structured. As everyone else here has said, truly sexy sexytime is eagerly looked forward to and enjoyed by both parties, and when it happens a lot it’s because both people are making sure that lots of space for mutual affection is created/protected in the relationship.
what exactly gives Mr. Prager standing to offer the world these prescriptions?
He’s a white conservative American male.
Do any of the people in the “always say yes” boat think it is fun to have sex with someone who does not want to have sex with you?
Is it as fun as having sex with someone who wants to have sex with you?
This is what I keep wanting to ask these guys, over and over. If you’ve actually had sex with someone who truly enjoyed sex with you, how could you possibly want anything else? How does the very experience of bringing another person to orgasm not humble you with its awesomeness, and how could anything else take its place, much less sex with someone who’s just waiting for it to end?
I get the feeling No More Mr. Nice Guy actually thinks he *is* a nice guy.
So it’s New Year’s Eve, and NMMNG is single and horny and feeling sad that he doesn’t have a partner when so many other people do, and he’s clearly been rejected enough times that (for whatever effort he put in) he’s now feeling dejected and lonely.
At least, that’s the impression I get, based on his comments.
So all these (probable barroom) attempts at getting laid or getting a girlfriend have resulted in many more “noes” than “yeses” and NMMNG is feeling insecure or likely even more insecure than he already was - especially if he’s ever successful at getting a woman into his apartment, and she sees what a complete fucking slob he is.
And now he’s angry. He’s angry at the women who rejected him, he’s angry at women generally, and he’s angry at “liberal men” for not siding with him by being equal assholes and by letting women get away with controlling their own vaginas.
Newsflash: EVERYONE wants “the pickup” to be easy. NOBODY likes rejection. Short guys have it hard. Seriously overweight men and women have it hard. Anybody who doesn’t look like Matthew McConaughey or Heidi Klum is going to get rejected AT LEAST ONCE IN THEIR LIVES.
And if you’re being superficial in your choice of women, don’t be surprised if women are superficial in their rejection of you. If you have no game, don’t be surprised if women don’t respond to you. If you’re not interesting, don’t be surprised if a woman isn’t interested in you. It sucks to be the one in the group who’s not getting attention from the women at the next table over, but them’s the breaks. If you think you can fake it, without all those weeks/months/years (whatever) of resentment from rejection building up in your psyche and it radiating off you when you approach a woman, you’re totally fucking kidding yourself.
I would almost feel sorry for you, but you’re clearly one of those guys who just doesn’t want to get it: If women aren’t responding to you sexually, maybe you ought to try interacting with them as just PEOPLE, without any expectations for romantic involvement, even if you have hopes for it.
He’s been divorced twice, so clearly he knows more about marriage than those of us who haven’t even been divorced once.
------------------------------------------
He’s a white conservative American male.
Well, OK then. I can at least pretend that I have been paying attention. His qualifications are just about what I guessed.
Now that I think about it, I once met a woman who traveled a lot for fun and had visited just about every country in Europe and a few in Asia, but never spoke of any particular place with much enthusiasm. When someone asked her the appeal of traveling so much, or why you would visit a particular place, she said it was so you could “say you’d been there.” I have a feeling some of these “you fake it till I make it” guys have more fun telling their friends how much they get laid than actually getting laid.
I think a lot of marital power struggles involve this kind of displacement—one person says “we don’t have sex enough” when what they mean is “I’m not getting enough of your affectionate attention but I’m going to call it my sex drive which is totes beyond my control and totally unrelated to any kind of emotional neediness I might be trying to wrap around your neck.”
I remember reading somewhere (damned if I can remember where) that one of the differences between men and women is that women need to feel loved in order to have sex, but men need sex in order to feel loved. It does make some sense if you think about it: even today, men are often taught that they’re not supposed to have any emotions other than anger and lust, so the natural human desire for affection gets channeled into the “appropriate” slot of wanting to fuck even if what the guy is really looking for is reassurance and/or affection. It’s also why some guys get so out-of-proportion pissy at being turned down—in their minds, you’re not just turning down sex, you’re refusing the one outlet they have that allows them to feel loved.
Which is why Prager wants his wife to not only acquiesce to sex, but to at least pretend to enjoy it—the actual intercourse is not necessarily what he’s looking for, but that’s the only channel for emotion that he’s allowed to have in his constricted worldview.
It gets really depressing if you think about it too much.
Prager’s like Rosie the Riveter for bad sex and the dehumanization of women.
Wow, wayloopy.
You created an impressively detailed, logical, and convincing argument to convince NMMNG, about a topic that can be somewhat hard to describe in those terms. Congratulations.
Wayloopy, I need more help. In achieving intimacy if one partner values one thing more than another does is it Ok to say - the categories are different, let’s use my yardstick because my clever logic says it should be so?
Too bad NMMNG apparently just doesn’t wanna hear it.
i’ve already broken my “no specific personal information”, so i might as well go whole hog. in an attempt (probably futile, once again, but what can i say, i’m much more used to pain than the absence of pain, let alone pleasure) to show the various MRA’s and “Nice Guys” who are hanging around some of the errors of their thinking.
i am not quite 32 (5 weeks until). . committed relationship, almost 5 years. We just moved in together in October. Pete likes things to be neater than I do – not to say like I like things dirty, but that he has a lower threshold for “messy” than I do. When we first started dating, I had roommates. I refused to pick up after them, and after a certain point I quit spending any time at all in common areas, because it got so dirty. Pete would often ask me why I didn’t clean? And I would say, over and over, not my mess, not my job. He could clean it if he wanted, but I would not. I know this bothered him (because he told me). I never did clean up after them, and he eventually decided that I wasn’t going to clean up after other people, and made the decision to get over it.
Then I got my own apartment. And he was *shocked * that my apartment, aside from my bedroom, was always clean. Not because I spent a lot of time cleaning all of the sudden, but rather because while I refuse to clean up after other people, I have no problem at all not making messes. Use a cup, rinse it, put it in the dishwasher.
When we moved in together, sadly we had to have a roommate. And roommate is very messy. And I refuse to clean up after him (or Pete, for that matter. Pete’s an adult, he can clean his own messes). I pay a third of everything – rent, bills, groceries – and therefore it is NOT my job to clean. And I do not. And Pete knew that I would not before I moved in. this causes us very little strain (the only real problem is the roommate)
*continued next post, as it seems i talk too much*
The sex issue? Before last winter (the 07-08 winter) *I* was the one who wanted sex more. I was rebuffed often – probably 3-in-4 times. And that was fine. Then… my leg got messed up. This summer, I had 4 surgeries on my hip, I STILL have trouble WALKING TO THE BATHROOM. Sex… there is no way to have actual PIV sex without involving the hip. Period. I give Pete all the bjs he wants, doesn’t bother me – but he wants sex. So, I decided to suck it up and have sex.
It hurt. And he lost his erection the second he realized it was hurt. (sorry if that seems TMI, but it is very important, to me at least.) Pete was INCAPABLE of having sex that hurt me. Then, discussing the problem, turns out that what Pete wanted wasn’t specifically sex, it was the interaction, the making me feel good while I am making him feel good. The intimacy. And knowing that, we fixed the problem (and quit hurting me) Mr. Prager up there apparently is incapable of communication, at least with a physically present woman. I’m pretty sure that he would have continued on, no matter how it hurt me. Which would, very quickly, lead to *me* hurting *him*.
Can you see what’s going on here, NMMNG (and everyone else). Up until it became impossible for me to have normal sex (without extreme pain) *I* was the one with the higher libido, and I had to tune it to him. And HE was the one who wanted things less messy (which is an argument that still bothers me – if a guy is ok with messy but his SO isn’t, and so therefore he now has to take the trash out instead of raising colonies of mold, how does that equate to marital rape? How is it bad that most guys move in with their SOs and then QUIT DOING HOUSEWORK BECAUSE IT’S A WOMAN’S JOB make marital rape ok? And before it gets pointed out to me that obviously Pete doesn’t expect me to do all the housework – because I have made it clear and shown my willingness and iron resolve on this, even unto dissolving the relationship if he tries to force me into a house slave – I should point out that roommate DID. When a week had gone by without dishes being done, he asked my I hadn’t done them. I said “I cleaned the ones I used. I am not cleaning yours. Also, get your laundry out of the bathroom and quit piling trash outside my bedroom with notes about me taking it out. I AM NOT CLEANING UP AFTER YOU. Except to the extent of throwing cloths away if I find them in the bathroom again.” He didn’t believe me. He left trash outside my bedroom the next day (I have no clue why he ever thought I would take out his trash, or if I was going to do this why he had to leave it where I would trip on it. I can barely walk, but I’m supposed to take out his trash?). I put it on his bed. I took the clothes he left in the bathroom, bagged them, and put them in the kitchen trash (it was the first time, I needed to prove I would do it while allowing him the chance to retrieve them). I told him I was not his maid, nor his mother. And told him. and told him more.
Eventually, although he has yet to stop bitching, he started picking up his own socks, taking out his own old coffee grounds, and washing his own bowls. I wonder who did it before? i can’t wait until we can move.
I remember reading somewhere (damned if I can remember where) that one of the differences between men and women is that women need to feel loved in order to have sex, but men need sex in order to feel loved.
Prager says this himself, with all his talk in his first essay about how women have to have sex with men because it’s the only way men can accept love. I think where Prager and I part ways is a) he thinks this is just naturally the way men and women are, rather than the result of social ideas about gender roles and what kind of emotions are acceptable for men (as you noted, lust and anger are manly, so Prager’s need for affection comes out as wanting sex and being angry at women for not providing it), and b) Prager thinks the best way to deal with this problem is for women to put aside all their own feelings and needs to service their husbands on demand, whereas I would suggest that men who have this problem learn to express and accept affection in other forms.
I’m not saying this to put the onus to change on the men; I just think both partners are likely to be happier if they can be openly affectionate and loving to each other and not have to fight everything out in the bedroom. I know it’s hard for a lot of guys to be all touchy-feely, but honestly, if you can’t feel comfortable expressing affection for the person you’ve chosen as your lifelong partner, you have some issues that need to be dealt with.
Again, this is all totally alien to my concept of marriage or sex, so it’s a little hard for me to understand. I don’t think my husband or I have ever turned down sex with one another unless we were ill or really tired (which has happened with both of us), but sex is part of a whole continuum of ways we’re affectionate with one another. If it were the only way we had of feeling close, I imagine there’d be a lot more physical and emotional pressure involved each time.
I remember reading somewhere (damned if I can remember where) that one of the differences between men and women is that women need to feel loved in order to have sex, but men need sex in order to feel loved.
Mnemo:
I know that John Gottman, today’s premier researcher on marriage and relationships, has stated that women generally (but not always) see emotional intimacy as a pre-requisite for good sex, whereas men generally (but not always) see sex as a pathway to emotional intimacy. Of course, this does not in any way imply that the partner with the lower libido is obligated to have sex when she/he is not in the mood. Indeed, Gottman believes that differences in sexual desire are a what he calls a Perpetual Issue of most marriages; in other words, the issue is unlikely to be “solved,” but it is imperative that the couple figure out a way to have a dialogue about the issue so that both feel heard, understood, and respected.
The recognition of male/female differences on this score can be helpful in promoting mutual empathy and understanding, which can be a potent antidote to the hurt feelings that come from being denied/feeling pressured for sex. For example, if the man in a heterosexual relationship recognizes that his wife requires more emotional closeness, intimacy, understanding, etc. in order to feel in the mood for sex, he is less likely to take it ill when he is rejected, but instead can work toward better mutual satisfaction in those (emotional) areas. Similarly, a woman can recognize that her husband’s desire for sex can represent, among other things, a desire for intimacy; in other words he’s not just some slavering beast in the rut, but may be trying, in his own clumsy way, to get close to her. That recognition can lead to a productive conversation (O.K., hon, I know you’re trying to get closer to me, but here’s what I need from you...). Of course, not all couples can or will do this, and your mileage may vary…
Again, this way of framing the issue does not in any way obligate either partner to have sex if he/she doesn’t want to, but it can help to cast the other partner’s desires in a more sympathetic light and can pave the way for a dialogue that can lead to greater mutual understanding and acceptance (i.e., I want this and you want that, and that’s O.K. How do we get to place where we both get more of what we want without giving up what’s important to us?).
Unfortunately, choads like Prager can’t seem to think outside of the sort of zero-sum-game that says that sex is something women have that men want, so women had better give it up if they know what’s good for them and the marriage. Not the best way to have a happy relationship, to be sure.
Mnemosyne—I agree with you, except I think this dynamic actually goes both ways (just not statistically as frequently). The one relationship I was in where I was way more interested in sex than my partner was the one where my partner just didn’t like me as much as I liked him. That was impossible to talk about, humiliating, would produce denials, blah blah blah, so instead we talked about sex—why I wanted it so much, why he was “too tired” to get into it. I don’t really believe in the “different sex drives” explanation, if both people are relatively young and healthy. I think I wanted emotional affirmation that I wasn’t getting; I think Praeger wanted emotional affirmation that he wasn’t getting. From the rest of what Praeger has to say, my view is he was sabotaging the possibility of real connection by being an asshole; but there are a lot of different circumstances under which sex (because it is such a distinct, concrete thing) stands in for other messy, complex, hard to articulate/admit stuff.
Gee, I read both articles and I don’t perceive what he has written as a demand for submission or a call to marital rape.
First, he addresses women who aren’t “in the mood,” not women who are “morally opposed and obdurate concerning the possibility of sex with you.” To most people, being “in the mood” is a product of caprice, and subject to change. I’m quite able to change my mood concerning most things with just a smidge of effort. I love milady dearly, and if I knew that she wanted something, I’d move heaven and earth to get in the mood for it, even if it is something I wasn’t initially keen for. You see, I think about her and how I couldn’t be happy if she was unhappy, and I can find the motivation for just about anything.
Is it wrong that I first read “William Brunskill” as “William Numbskull”?
“Is it wrong that I first read “William Brunskill” as “William Numbskull”?”
Depends upon your mood, as I have gathered from this thread.
William Brunskill-
You see, I think about her and how I couldn’t be happy if she was unhappy, and I can find the motivation for just about anything.
While a very nice sentiment I’m very sure it’s not true 100% of the time. I’m sure there are times when you don’t feel like moving the garbage right now, or talking about something when you just want to veg in whatever fashion you like. And, besides that, not wanting to have sex isn’t about making your guy “happy”.
“While a very nice sentiment I’m very sure it’s not true 100% of the time. I’m sure there are times when you don’t feel like moving the garbage right now, or talking about something when you just want to veg in whatever fashion you like. And, besides that, not wanting to have sex isn’t about making your guy “happy”.”
Well, I would say that the more important ["X" that I’m not in the mood to do] is to her, the more applicable my statement. If I engaged in a consistent course of conduct that made her feel unattractive, unwanted, and unloved, I’m rather certain that I’d adjust the “mood” that caused my behavior. She’s also enough of an adult that my not taking out the trash doesn’t cause her to descend into a bout of ennui.
I never said anything about sex for the sole purpose of making a man “happy.” What I think Prager is saying is that we all have a good deal more agency over our “moods” than you’re allowing.
And I don’t know any man who can’t get off because the vacuming hasn’t been done.
William,
I think I see what you mean, but there’s a difference between making a conscious decision to get yourself in the mood because you genuinely care about your partner and feeling obligated to have sex at your partner’s behest whether you feel in the mood or not. The former is admirable, something loving couples (including you and your lady, apparently) do all the time. The latter appears to be what Prager is advocating, for women at any rate.
I don’t even remember how I ended up here (the joys of link-hopping!), but this is one of the most interesting threads I have ever read on the internet. Especially the part about wanting affection, but calling it lust instead. That never occured to me before, but it makes so much sense!
Another thing I’d like to know is what that guy thinks about women like me whose injuries from childbirth never healed and who are now incapable of having sex at all. It is entirely possible that there is a solution to my problem, it’s only been a year and nobody knows what went wrong in the first place, but there is a chance that I will never be able to have sex again and the thought scares me and my boyfriend greatly. We discuss this topic a lot and he always makes it clear that he would never leave me or cheat on me or anything of the sort because he loves me for my personality and all that, but I am also very aware of the fact that he is quite desperate sometimes.
Now, according to Prager’s logic I am suddenly incapable of making my boyfriend happy. Excuse me, but I beg to differ. No matter how unhappy the problem itself makes us sometimes, I still make him happy as much as I used to and vice versa. Relationships can definitely work without sex. He is not lacking testosterone by any means, and his oh-so manly desires can be frustrating, but for some reason he still acts like a human being as opposed to an animal and appreciates other forms of expressing affection. Wonder why that is. Hmm, maybe it’s because he’s a “good man” ... oh wait ...
Oh, and also: “Many contemporary women have an almost exclusively romantic notion of sex: It should always be mutually desired and equally satisfying or one should not engage in it.” Yes, and many contemporary MEN have exactly the same, strangely romantic notion of sex. FUNNY, ISN’T IT?!
Let’s see. Dennis Prager has been divorced twice. I’ve been with my (sole) wife for nearly twenty years and we’re doing—how shall I put this?—fucking great.
My advice to Dennis Prager: if you can’t get your wife interested in sex, you are not attractive to her. Either (a) make yourself more fucking attractive*, (b) learn to masturbate, or (c) get a divorce.
Those are the, er, fucking options**. That’s it. It’s not her fucking problem, Prager: it is yours.
*For (a) knowing the location of the clitoris might be extremely helpful.
**For people who are not Dennis Prager, there is a fourth option: hire a sex worker. But I wold not want to inflict Dennis Prager on any sex worker.
Smiley--Love the handle. Big LeCarre fan. And thank you for your consideration re: sex workers, I have been very concerned where on other threads people want to foist that dreadful man on sex workers. I mean, puh-leaze, we all deserve respectful partners!
Faevii--good on you and your bf. I think it must be a head-exploding moment for inadequate people like Prager to contemplate what a healthy, mutually loving relationship looks like.
Here’s my theory on marriage and female sexuality:
I see a lot of sexless couples around me. And in my marriage, sex has come and gone and come back again. And I know what happened in my marriage, and what I see happen in couples around me, and what I generalize into a theory about all marriages (not really, but I do think it happens a lot), is that spouses stop liking each other. I think when you get married, frustrations have a way of accumulating. And the reason women lose sexual interest in their husbands is because women aren’t aroused by guys they find frustrating and unlikable.
Guys don’t have that problem. Guys can be like “I find you annoying, but I’d still like to have sex tonight.” But it’s not like women lose their sex drive. It’s not like if they found themselves single again, they’d be uninterested in finding a new love interest and having sex with him. But for a lot of women, when she is annoyed with her husband she cannot set that aside and say “but I still want to have sex tonight anyway”. When a woman gets frustrated, or feels unappreciated, or is otherwise dissatisfied with her spouse, it puts up this wall of “the last thing I want tonight is to be touched by you,” which seems reasonable enough but is not how guy’s think.
I’ve been married for seven years, and what brought it back for me and my wife was re-connecting with the idea that we really, really like each other. That we got into this because we think each other are awesome. But I think a lot couples lose that and never get it back. And sexlessness isn’t really some female dysfunction. It’s a symptom of the fact that a lot of married people don’t like each other. It just happens that that interrupts a woman’s interest in having sex with her husband in a way that it doesn’t interrupt a husband’s sexual interest in his wife.
Really, Dennis Prager doesn’t get laid because his wife figured out he was an unlikable asshole. And, really, women don’t need to force themselves to have sex. Both partners need to work at figuring out how they’re making themselves annoying to each other.
wow, wallace.
i can quibble over word choice - i wouldn’t say “dislike” so much as something along the lines “that contempt of familiararity” or maybe even “boredom” - but quibble aside, that was incredibly insightful *AND* useful. if you could replace Prager, i think tens of thousands of people could sit up and say “AH-HA! that’s the problem, and the start of how to fix it!” the general idea behind fixing this problem is well known. date-night once week appears (to me anyway) to be the most common “fix” suggested. but, any way you do it, making sure you and your partner continue to engage is definately where it’s at. thank you for say that so clearly and succinctly.
Prager needs a brain douche. Preferably one with chlorine bleach.
I wonder how many times his two ex-wives were in the mood for someone other than him!
He’s got nothing going for him physically and his personality is shit.
Guys can be like “I find you annoying, but I’d still like to have sex tonight.”
So can women, only they’re fantasizing about someone else. A person who isn’t annoying the shit out of them. You know, I can’t recall one time my boyfriend wanted to have sex with me when he was annoyed with me. Kudos to him. There are plenty more where he comes from. Wallace, I can only hope you’re in the minority.
James:
I agree, It’s not my business. Does that also mean I have to keep slient on what I think is right and wrong?
If what you think is right and wrong has anything to do with things that aren’t any of your business (i.e., the overwhelming majority of the daily goings-on of any individual other than yourself and a very tiny number of your relatives), you’re damn right you need to keep your fucking mouth shut.
That’s because — and I realize that you have, and will continue to have until your death, rather serious difficulties understanding this — IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT YOU. Seriously. I’ll bet I could cut off my thumb, index and ring fingers and still be able to count on one hand the total number of people on this planet who give a flying fuck at a rolling donut what you think about their sex lives.
A crucial part of becoming an adult is coming to the understanding that most people don’t give a shit what you think.
Guys can be like “I find you annoying, but I’d still like to have sex tonight.”
Ooh. Gotta say, if a guy had this attitude towards me and I found out about it, I’d find it extremely demeaning and using. Cause ultimately it does that “reduce me to a warm hole” thing.
“I don’t find your personality attractive and actually you irritate me but come on over here and I’ll stick it in you, sure” is NOT cool. And I don’t accept that it’s the norm for guys, at least not without the patriarchy creating and supporting it.
Leslie and Kristin, both - I think you need to separate a dating relationship and being annoyed one evening, from a marriage where both people have reached a constant level of frustration with each other. Which is common. There are a lot of marriages where there is a constant level of friction between the two partners. In fact, I think most marriages are this way. I think my wife and I are exceptional, because among the married couples around us we seem to be one of the very rare couples that really still like each other.
What I’m saying is that in the context of a relationship like this, guys still want to have sex with their wives. They will be open to and pursue sexual encounters with their wives, and the friction in the relationship won’t seriously diminish the guy’s ability to perform. But the friction blocks a woman’s sexual interest in her husband. It’s not that her sexual appetite has gone away. It’s that her husband, in particular, becomes a guy who she doesn’t want touching her.
And, I don’t know. Obviously, I’m generalizing. And with more space I could be more nuanced and add caveats and acknowledge the exceptions. But I think in most cases, this is the root of sexlessness in marriage. The real problem isn’t women and their sexuality. The problem is married people lose track of liking each other. And not “love”, but “like”. I think liking each other is more important for sex than loving each other. And it’s liking each other that loses steam in a marriage.
Laugh if you must, but Dennis made love to me like some kind of unholy combination of alien and predator and it was magical. Magical, I say.
Wallace, I get what you mean.
You didn’t get into why the women would find their husbands frustrating and unlikeable, but what came to mind for me right away was “housework chicken.”
And I don’t know any man who can’t get off because the vacuming hasn’t been done.
/raises hand.
Well, not quite. But I can’t get off unless I’m somewhat relaxed, and I can’t relax unless I feel that things around the house are under control. I also can’t get off if I can’t breathe properly because the house is so frikken dusty.
Before anyone flips out at me for enforcing domestic servitude - I’m the one who does the chores. Adult ADD means that if something doesn’t actively bother my wife, she doesn’t notice it’s there at all.
Wallace,
Yes, yes yes yes!
I’d have to say that’s just what happened in my marriage. I really thought there was something wrong with me for awhile, but then I realized that it wasn’t my sex drive that was gone, it was just that I didn’t want him any more. “Yes I do, but not with you!”
The sad part is that this tends to get blamed on the woman (because he’s the man and it can’t be his fault, right?), which then makes her feel even worse and the downward spiral deepens. It didn’t help in my case that it led down the verbal/emotional/psychological abuse path. Or should I say, further down the path that I hadn’t realized we’d been on for awhile.
Anyway, I’m through with that now (mostly, except for the kids and etc) and completely agree that I shouldn’t have to have sex if I’m not feeling it, and neither should my partner.
Random anecdote:
My brother in law was engaged to a woman. I visited their house and it looked like a bomb hit it. I assumed he was a messy person and didn’t think more about it (other than to avoid sitting on the floor). They split up and, a couple of months later, he invited my husband and I back for a party. I admit, I cringed. If his house looked like a bomb hit it when she was living there, what would it look like now? To my surprise, the place looked wonderful (if a bit sparse since she contributed much of the furniture). I had unthinkingly assumed she was the housecleaner burdened with a messy SO, when in fact he was the cleaner.
This obviously doesn’t prove anything, other than the fact that I was rudely awakened to a sexist stereotype I wasn’t aware of until now. This current turn in the discussion just reminded me of that.
I had unthinkingly assumed she was the housecleaner burdened with a messy SO, when in fact he was the cleaner.
Perhaps your brother unthinkingly assumed she was the housecleaner, too. I’ve seen that more times than I can count - when a woman lives there, it magically becomes HER problem. Woman leaves, and man assumes the responsibility.
My own father fits that category.
I’ve read through all the comments and the essay.
I don’t agree with Dennis Prager about much, but I’ll share my sense that he has enough of a point to not warrant the intensity of criticism he has received.
Recently there was a story of a church which asked all married couples in the congregation to have sex each day for a week. We could also imagine a counselor prescribing such an exercise.
My expectations are that this would be a positive experiment and that at the end of the week couple’s who participated would feel closer than they did before.
We hear too of couples who are so busy that they schedule time for sex because otherwise it gets overlooked. And I would understand that too as creative and positive for the relationship.
So I think there is some scope for conscious choices and decisions about sex to override mood and inclination in a way that does not violate integrity but rather strengthens love and commitment in a relationship.
Actually, sex every day for a month (or longer) is not all it’s cracked up to be if the emotional relationship is damaged. In fact, it can highlight the discrepancies between the physical urge to have sex and the desire to be intimate and connected to your partner. My husband and I tried this “have sex constantly while trying to repair the emotional damage” and we are now going through our divorce. After six months it was obvious that constant sex was not going to sustain the relationship. We operated under the theory that if you have more sex you will want more sex and then it will ease tension elsewhere in the relationship; turns out it just made me want more sex with other people (not acted upon) or to just use a vibrator (about the same level of emotional connection) and highlighted the fact that I was no longer interested in a relationship with my spouse, despite my love for him.
Having sex when you don’t want to is dehumanizing in a relationship where one partner makes it the only acceptable way to establish intimacy (a la Prager) and sex becomes a cookie for one partner doing their fair share of the domestic labor. Partners do need to pay attention to each other enough to know when a fun board game would be preferable to sex, or when one partner is stressed and overloaded with work, or when one partner is physically unable, or when one partner needs more emotional connection before sex can take place, etc. Pushing your sexual needs on someone who cannot reciprocate for some reason (rather than simply trying to initiate sex and graciously retreating when refused) is emotionally abusive and will lead to further rejection as your partner realizes that their needs are less important than your desires. If every act of physical intimacy is interpreted as a sexual advance and accusations of “teasing”, then things are seriously wrong. The correct way to address this issue IS NOT BY TELLING WOMEN TO SUCK IT UP AND FUCK ON COMMAND.
copithorne: in other words, a different but related point applying to men, women and intimacy in general could have been made intelligently, in a way that suggests women exist for reasons other than to keep their husband’s dicks warm. Prager didn’t make that point, so why are you defending him?
Wallace, good points. An acquaintance of mine had a spouse who was a marriage counselor. She had to explain to a lot of her male clients ‘if she thinks you’re an asshole, she won’t want to have sex with you,’ because they didn’t understand why their wives couldn’t simply ignore their assholery and still want to have sex.
One reason Mr.Prager why your wife may not want to sex you up anymore is because one day she discovered exactly what kind of asshole you are.
Thanks, Jesse, for the best critique of this piece of crap I’ve seen so far.
1. If most women wait until they are in the mood before making love with their husband, many women will be waiting a month or more until they next have sex.
You ever have one of those moments where you say something under the assumption that it’s completely normal, and it reveals some deeply abnormal part of your life that you wish you hadn’t revealed
No shit, when this started happening, we started couples counseling and I switched antidepressants. Progress is being made. More progress would be made if his work schedule weren’t weirdly skewed from normal life, but there’s nothing that can be done about that. Me putting out when it hurt? Would have made things worse, what with making me want sex even LESS, since oddly enough, my partner actually wants the intimacy and closeness, not just orgasms (hell, when he was dating someone else, he still wanted more sex with me, since he doesn’t view women as interchangeable vaginas).
Also? My JOB is my job, not having sex. And I really don’t want sex to be a chore, since that would put it in the same category as cleaning the litterbox, vacuuming, and driving my partner to the goddamn bank since he still doesn’t have his driver’s license back. I’d rather keep sex in the “fun” category, thx.
Incidentally, not all men do angry sex. People are more variable than pop psychology would have us believe.
I’m sure I’m restating things that have already been said, but I’ll risk sounding repetitive.
I can honestly say, being raised in the super conservative religious home, I can understand that parts of what he is saying is not out of purposeful hatred for women, but ignorance being perpetuated by both men and women. He is wrong on so many levels, including those which ignore the importance of an actual relationship. It’s horrifying that he seems so comfortable referring to women as the housewarming gift that comes with family. But from his religious perspective, women are simply objectified. He even tries to argue that he doesn’t.
The main problem with this article is that he seems to be trying to complain about not getting enough sexual fulfillments. And this happens in many relationships that I know of. But he takes it too far. If he’s going to rant emotionally about the reasons that it’s unfair for his wife to deny him, he should blog. Instead he attempts to turn his personal frustration into some universal set of rules for relationships from a male perspective.
His article is full of generalizations and assumptions about women and men. Upon reading his articles with my fiancé, we both found ourselves laughing hysterically, in horror and disbelief. He insults men as well as women. Assuming his articles represent the real man, he works hard all day and comes home to an ungrateful wench who denies him his “love” in the form of orgasmic servitude. He assumes that the woman will be the stay at home house and sex slave, and he also goes on and on about the way that men equate sex with love. That’s ironic, because I’ve always heard it the other way around. But I think that’s bullshit either way. My fiancé, a male, links our sexual interaction emotionally and sees it as an expression of love. I enjoy the recreational benefits, and physical intimacy, but I have little emotion tied to it. I have many close friends who experience the opposite situation. I think it’s ignorant to preach that one gender has a consistent emotional tie to sex. It’s different for everyone.
Part 2
There are literally so many examples that I’m tempted to examine. Here are just a few…
“Many contemporary women have an almost exclusively romantic notion of sex: It should always be mutually desired and equally satisfying or one should not engage in it.”
Honestly, I had no idea that consensual fulfilling sex was romantic and contemporary. Equally satisfying? This is romantic? Equality in the bedroom is suddenly a thing of the past. Apparently if I say no, I’m just desperately grasping onto this impossible “romantic” ideal relationship that eventually a man will only want to have sex with a willing and able partner.
“Of course, most women never regard it as hypocritical and rightly regard it as admirable when they meet their child’s or parent’s or friend’s needs when they are not in the mood to do so.”
Apparently, a man needs to get off routinely. He can “feel” horny and that feeling is valid. But if his wife isn’t “feeling” horny, that is insignificant. And no, he be may independent enough to be the breadwinner and put up with his insufferable wife who has those darn emotions, but he is not independent enough to jerk himself off. Even though he did it for the first twenty years of his life, masturbation is suddenly the impossible act.
“So, if a husband is in the mood for sex and the wife is not, her feelings are deemed of greater significance—because women’s feelings are of more importance than men’s.”
Apparently it works in reverse. He’s in the mood, she should satisfy. She’s not in the mood; she should get in the mood. He goes on and on about the importance of ignoring emotion in favor of logic, but then his emotions, or what he equates sex as emotion, always count.
“A woman is not “property” when she feels she owes her husband conjugal relations.”
When did sex become this big chore? Why can’t Mr. Prager’s wife want to do it? Do women no longer have hormones? I mean, there’s just this assumption that she’ll have to feel like she owes him. There’s the problem right there. He’s fine with his wife feeling like she “owes” him sex. I don’t want my relationship to be based on indebtedness and gratitude.
“In Part II, I advance the argument that a wife should do so even when she is not in the mood for sexual relations. I am talking about mood, not about times of emotional distress or illness.”
“But for most women, for myriad reasons—female nature, childhood trauma, not feeling sexy, being preoccupied with some problem, fatigue after a day with the children and/or other work, just not being interested—there is little comparable to a man’s “out of nowhere,” and seemingly constant, desire for sex.”
Ok…reading the first comment. I see that he doesn’t care how his wife feels. That much is clear. But at least he says you don’t have to have sex if you’re in emotional distress.
Then the second comments…oh wait. I was unaware that childhood trauma and low self esteem were in fact, not emotionally stressful. Mr. Prager’s imaginary wife has spent her entire day watching the children, cleaning his house, feeling ugly, being abused as a child and she has problems to deal with. This is apparently not emotionally distressing, and should be pushed aside. Her own happiness and well being are not important. And can explain to me what the fuck “female nature” means as a reason that we would deny sex? What the hell does that even mean? Is it suddenly “female nature” to ward off assholes who want to simply use their house slaves as fuck puppets when they have spent all day doing unpaid physical labor and babysitting? In that case, I know a lot of audacious females who embody female nature. What a stupid thing to add to an already ridiculous list.
He goes on to talk about the comparisons of work and sex in marriage. Apparently, men make the money and the women make the love. I guess if the female was working, she could come home and force her exhausted husband into bed with nothing but a guilt trip and ignorance of things he actually needs, like rest.
Part 3
He claims that screwing your husband means that he’ll love you. He talks about the way that women would stop loving their husband if he stopped working. I can’t speak for everyone, but if my husband were so unhappy at work that he didn’t want to go, then I would want to help him find a better job. And this is based on the assumption that sex slave falls under the category of wife. It’s apparently a job. I guess being allowed to raise a man’s children and clean his house constitutes payment. So pay up and get him off?
After reading both of his articles, I naturally scrolled down to the comments sections on the Townhall pages. I don’t know if I was simply being naive but I was expecting people to have strong reactions against it. I mean, a man writes ten pages of chauvinistic crap and I figured that some people would be relatively upset at his assumptions. I pity the older woman he talks about who says that her husband wouldn’t have left her if she had known that her job was to be a fuck puppet. I just feel so sad that she is made to feel inadequate because her husband left her due to his insatiable horniness and lack of care for her well being.
This is the worst part of the situation. If he was simply an eccentric who others ignored and denied, it would be a relief. But instead, I scrolled down to read the most horrifying comments. And many of you have said that the men on Townhall are shameful because they are perpetuating this information. But WOMEN are the ringleaders of the commenters on Townhall. I kid you not. There are many women who agree with Prager wholeheartedly. They say things like “Saying no is selfish. I never say no because I don’t ever want to disrespect my husband.” Apparently, we crazy feminists really irritate them as well.
According to the comments, our relationships, if we are lucky enough to have any, are corrupted and unhealthy and doomed to end soon. If that’s the case, I’d rather be alone than be an unpaid slave. Honestly, I was horrified to see how many women and men alike were in agreement with such terrifying sentiments.
From personal experience, never saying no simply creates intense resentment, anger and passive aggressiveness in and out of the bedroom. There’s a difference between talking through a relationship’s needs and desires, and assuming that one person’s desire trumps another.
And I don’t want to be the person who complains, but I think it’s so stupid that some people are so cowardly that they have to go online to verbally abuse each other. I can accept that it’s a part of forums and discussion online, but it’s really so annoying. We’re all discussing respect and not making assumptions, and then people start trying to injure each other. It’s really really stupid.
But WOMEN are the ringleaders of the commenters on Townhall. I kid you not. There are many women who agree with Prager wholeheartedly. They say things like “Saying no is selfish. I never say no because I don’t ever want to disrespect my husband.” Apparently, we crazy feminists really irritate them as well.
No. There are posters who claim to be women that say such things, and are really irritated by us crazy feminists.
Of course, some of them are actually telling the truth about those things. There are women who are just as heavily invested in the Patriarchy as any man - women who prefer the special status of “lady” or even “honorary man” (read both as “you’re not like those other bitches") that is bestowed upon them by the men they kiss up to, rather than actual equality.
But you can bet that a lot of those “women” are actually men posing as women, because women supposedly have more credibility when denouncing feminists. Check out this thread to see “Well I’m a woman, and...” in action.
Canada beat Russia in World Junior Hockey Championships, hoorah!!!!
Maybe what Prager is saying is that marriage can feel like a prison to men sometimes and we wish the guards would be nice to us.
Deep6- you mother never called me resentment.
Maybe if you see your marriage as a prison and cast your wife as the prison guard, you should do her the favor of releasing both of you from a miserable situation.
Of course, women never see marriage as a prison, either. Nu-uh. Nor are women’s desires for more sex in marriage ever disregarded by men. Doesn’t happen.
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“What if your husband woke up one day and announced that he was not in the mood to go to work?”
Holy crap, the layers of wrong in that sentence are staggering!! Supplying sex to your husband is your job because obviously as a woman there’s no way you have a career outside of your household.