Another moronic conservative screed whose purpose is: “Piss of the Libs!
Hip-hip-Horray! We annoyed some Liberals! Now life is worth living”

Wow - that dude has issues. I don’t even want to think about what his marriage was like.

Wow. He REALLY wrote that. I didn’t believe it. So, I clicked over and...wow. He REALLY wrote that.

Dear Ex-Ms. Prager: Good move.

Consider my world rocked.

Here are some arguments why a woman who loves her husband might want to rethink this axiom.

I wonder if he was simply writing a long “see you didn’t love me after all” fuck you to his ex-wife, or a romantic screed titillating with the promises of future marital rape awaiting his next blushing bride to be.

Yet another conservative with sex issues pushing a patriarchal set of sexual mores.

PS Should I have spelled out that said sexual mores are fucking evil?

The really scary thing is that Prager says there will be a part two to this column. Because he needs another 3,000 words to say, “Really, ladies, I mean it: if you ever turn your husband down, he’ll have no choice but to cheat on you.”

I’d say unfrickenbelievable except this is all too common, isn’t it?
His being divorced, twice at that, doesn’t seem to have stopped his incredible douchebaggery any.

“but most husbands I know understand their wives’ love for them through other means than the percentage of their penises in their wives’ bodies.”

I like the possibilities between 0% and the 90-something percent during full penetration.

And the fact that GOP virgin/whore complexes really makes intercourse follow this pattern - constantly alternating love and hate.

I eagerly await Part Two: Oogedy-Boogadoo!

I really wonder if he has an editor.  Not a spell-check, but an actual living person editor who decided that this was worth the electrons it was printed on.  And if not that, does he have a self-editor?  As a divorced man, I’ve had many opinions regarding my not getting enough sex in the pre-, during-, and post-marriage life, but I’ve never thought the two things that Mr. Prager thought:

1. That the world cares a lot about my sex life.
2. That the world would respond kindly to my blaming my sex life’s deficiencies on women.

I mean, sure, it would be a better place if more women would put out, but I really am not willing to suggest that it’s some sort of obligation they aren’t fulfilling.  It’s more than some sort of literal reading of the Bible that would compel idiots to suggest that, but the last place I’d ever beg for some pussy is in a syndicated column.

I guess I’ll never be a mildly famous columnist if I’m not willing to risk being publicly rejected and ridiculed by thousands, but I think I’ll get over it.

The grammar...The horrible horrible grammar… it’s making my English teacher self cringe....  Nevermind the hideous logical flaws…

You know, if you have pre-marital sex, you can find out that you have incompatible sex drives before you get married.

well said, dhwhite, well said!

Its called masturbation. Check it out.

I work in Family Law, and I remember that one client, a lawyer himself (!), decided that HE was going to draft his OWN Affidavit for the Trial.

One memorable passage was when he said that (in the context of describing an argument) “It was at this point that i had to remind myself that rape in marriage is now a criminal offence”.

Sheesh!

The jaw, it plummets. At first, I thought it was another one of those self-help-style “when one partner is horny and the other is ‘eh’, sometimes you can both have a really good time” essays, but this whole “gives her body” thing just has to skeeve any sane person right out.

Coming after the Rick Warren self-denial discussion, I’m becoming more and more convinced that women who experience independent sexual desire in marriage scare the balls right off some christianist patriarch-wannabes. They have to have sex --despite their distaste—to please their husbands; if they have sex because they want to for their own pleasure, you can’t tell the virgin from the whore and traditional marriage is doomed.

I also think he’s full of shit for claiming that men always want sex more than women.  Yes, that’s the just-so story of marriage taming that wild-oats-sowing man, but anecdataly, I’ve always wanted sex more than my partner, despite said partner always claiming that he would jump at the chance, any chance, should I suggest it.

Anecdatally, my friends agree.  My MOM agrees (and yes, that was a conversation that verged on TMI, but good on Mom for wanting to be open to conversations about sex)

But that doesn’t fit the meme, which is that whenever men want to have sex, women should immediately acquiesce, and if women want sex, they should sit and wait until their man is ready to suggest it.  It’s all about catering to the man.  What’s so hard to understand?

Women, you are second class sex slaves!  Deal with it!

------
I wish we could get a good frame going that sex isn’t something a man does to a woman and that a woman allows a man to do to her.  Sex is something men and women do together.

That solves so many issues--none of the Nice Guy “Is it rape if I do this?  How about this?  Is it still rape if I’m drunk, too?” Two enthusiatic participants, no questions.

Prager’s whole article falls to shit with that frame.  You know, the one that assumes that the woman is human and an equal, active participant.

What in the Sam Hill?  Womenfolk are obliged to obey their husbands no matter how perverse or creepy their sexual demands are, it’s IN THE BIBLE!  So man up ladies, and be grateful that G*d didn’t make you a man with the heavy responsibility of having this power over you, it’s no picnic, you know?

Jesse,

thanks for sharing a woman’s perspective on sex in marriage. I’m sure your future husband will be lucky....

Presumably, he’s also the type of douchebag that believes women should be pregnant all the time. Does that mean he believes men have a right to cheat on their pregnant wives who often can’t have sex due to pregnancy (whether it’s against doctor’s orders or because they barf 3+ times a day), or that pregnant wives should have sex anyways, at risk of barfing all over their husbands, or worse?

Wow...just, wow.

Dennis freaking Prager.

Reason number 3 from the article:

3. Not my man.

Many women will argue, understandably, My husband knows I love him. He doesnt need me to have sex with him to know that. And this is especially so when Im too tired or just dont want sex. Anyway, my man only enjoys sex with me when Im into it, too.

So, if this a false argument, then I should have sex when I dont want to? Im not allowed to be tired, or not in the mood? Even if I give a lazy,half assed effort, its ok, because we at least had sex? Would that be ok for you guys out there?

I think you people are misunderstanding Prager. He makes alot of sense.

A wife should not consistantly refuse her husband sex, it does not make for a healthy marriage. See Dr. Laura.

“Even if I give a lazy,half assed effort, its ok, because we at least had sex? Would that be ok for you guys out there? “

Yes, it would be, sometimes. You should not go for a long period of time refusing sex to your husband. No longer than 1 week.

Check it out, James, your wife doesn’t want to have sex with you because you’re terrible in bed. Start going down, boy.

I want someone to ask one of these douchebags if it’s okay for their wives to cheat on them if they, the men, ever don’t feel like putting out for their women. Prager seems to think he’s covered that with “that’s different because it’s just different so there,” but that’s leaving me as unsatisfied as sex with him undoubtedly would.

Oh FFS stick rule.

“I want someone to ask one of these douchebags if it’s okay for their wives to cheat on them if they, the men, ever don’t feel like putting out for their women”

No thats not Ok for a women to cheat on their husbands, but the husbands should almost always put out for their wives. I would recommend a good Christian counselor for them.

“Few women know their husband loves them because he gives her his body (the idea sounds almost funny). This is, therefore, usually a revelation to a woman. Many women think mens natures are similar to theirs, and this is so different from a womans nature, that few women know this about men unless told about it.”

Am I reading this wrong, or did he just completely invert the standard “women fuck because they love, men fuck because they’re breathing” assumption for the purpose of this article?

Okay, I was totally reading that wrong.  Dude couldn’t express his way out of a wet paper bag.

Every man who is sexually faithful to his wife already engages in daily heroic self-control.

Of course, because he’s surrounded by horny, willing women who are aching to fuck his brains out, and it’s just his bad luck he’s married to the one woman in the world who isn’t.

Can we permanently retire the phrase “put out”? Thank you.

No thats not Ok for a women to cheat on their husbands, but the husbands should almost always put out for their wives. I would recommend a good Christian counselor for them.

Husband, wife, and good Christian counselor.  Now that’s sure to be a freakalicious scene.

I eagerly await Prager’s part two. Best guess is that the next screed will center on the marital benefits of husbandly sexual satisfaction at the expense of wifely sexual pleasure, not to mention self respect.

Disgusting.

I think you people are misunderstanding Prager.

No. We aren’t.

Jenofiniquity, the phrase “put out” is far too reminiscent of (junior?) high school to be invaluable in today’s world.  Sure, it’s idiotic, sexist, stupid, and redundantly moronic to boot, but it has such heft.  It’s virtually impossible to suggest a moronic viewpoint regarding sex without the use of such a phrase.

Likewise, it’s important to say “boobies” now and then, as nothing else can suggest juvenile sexual thoughts without infringing on the Hooters trademark.  And little can be as demeaning toward a penis as to refer to it as a “weiner”.

Of course, in real conversation with actual adults, “put out” should only be uttered in reference to hor-d’ouvres or whatever those things are with the vaguely-naughty spelling.

Jon, there is a poster on this thread who, I am sure, is using the phrase without a shred of irony.

this guy should… no, i can’t think of anything vile enough.

Jesse is right, if your parter is always saying “no”, you should find out WHY, instead of just continuing to demand sex.

as for this fucker, and all you people say he is right… my best friend is, AS WE SPEAK, hiding from her not-quite-ex-husband at a distant relative’s houses. because he DID NOT CARE ABOUT HER, ONLY ABOUT SEX. he raped her and raped her… it didn’t matter if she was sick, or if she had had surgery (he actually said to her “you didn’t HAVE to have surgery, it’s not my fault you did") - when she was menstrating, he forced anal sex on her, because he felt mentral blood was gross but anal sex wasn’t. its horrifying, and it happened because of men like the guy who wrote this.

james, i expect you are a rape apologist, and that’s the most flattering thing i could muster about you.

jon: “I mean, sure, it would be a better place if more women would put out” aaaaand you just rendered the entire worth of your comment null and void with this piece of shit.

If a wife wants to have sex only 1/10 as often as a husband, the husband should take a damn snapshot during the 1 time and beat off to it the other 9. He gets what he wants, she gets what she wants, and everybody’s faithful.

paul, on the other hand:

“if they have sex because they want to for their own pleasure, you can’t tell the virgin from the whore and traditional marriage is doomed. ‘

this is beautiful. in a lewis black sort of way. hehe.

It is perfectly logical that Prager would think this way, as I would imagine that the only sex he has in marriage (or outside of marriage) is a guilt-fuck or marital rape.

Same goes for James.  Who is either a horrible parody, or another truly sick fuck of the right-wing variety.

oh wait lmao. james, you are such a lazy half-assed troll. take some lessons from RiM.

“You should not go for a long period of time refusing sex to your husband. No longer than 1 week. “

i do not believe for one second that you have ever had sex on that regular a basis. what woman with any self-esteem would want your loser ass? oh, well, you’d never want a woman with self-esteem.

you, if you are for real, are a disturbed individual.

If a wife wants to have sex only 1/10 as often as a husband, the husband should take a damn snapshot during the 1 time and beat off to it the other 9. He gets what he wants, she gets what she wants, and everybody’s faithful.

That or if the situation creates such tensions in the relationship that one or both parties are fed up, they could consider divorcing and finding someone more compatible.  Several college classmates and some co-workers have divorced for exactly such reasons.

Jenofiniquity,

If those who could say “put out” without irony ceased to do so, you might actually have to waste time talking to them for a minute or two longer.

““Even if I give a lazy,half assed effort, its ok, because we at least had sex? Would that be ok for you guys out there? “

Yes, it would be, sometimes.”

Quick, let’s all pretend there’s a surer way to turn a willing and enthusiastic sex partner into a lazy, half-assed sex partner on a permanent basis than by acting like you see them as little more than a fuckhole.  It’ll be like Pictionary, only with 20% more joint misery.

Chibi,

I also think it would be nice sometimes if I could just drop trou and take a dump rather than bother to find a toilet, but there’s no way I’d suggest that that’s a way to live.  Yes, my earlier comment was also related to shit, but it was intentionally so.

A man has needs ...all I’m saying is that a wife should not make a habit out of refusing sex to her husband. If there is something wrong in the relationship, then they need to go to counseling…

I think Prager’s evil plan was to waste your time, Jesse, and maybe a few other librul bloggers of similar stature. I think anything beyond “divorcee Denis Prager is (still) objectively pro-rape” was time you could have spent working on writing erotic limericks and sonnets with which to put the future Mrs. Jesse in the mood.

“ do not believe for one second that you have ever had sex on that regular a basis.”

We’ll sometimes it’s longer than a week for me, maybe 2 weeks sometimes without sex. That’s too long without sex for a younger couple I believe..  and I refuse to wear a condom with my wife. We use natural family planning…

No James, a man has wants. What he needs is to pay attention to his frickin’ wife if she’s truly not willing to have sex. Because a counselor isn’t going to help if it’s a medical problem. Nor does one actually need a counselor if the problem is a new baby and she’s exhausted. Or any of the myriad other possibilities of what might be going on that could likely be sorted out if the husband is actually willing to talk to the wife beyond “So, wanna...?”

I refuse to wear a condom with my wife.

Color me deeply unsurprised.

“A man has needs ...”

Sex is desire. It is not a need. You won’t die without it, you won’t get sick without it, you won’t cease doing other things you enjoy without it…

A man has desires and in Prager’s world, those desires trump everything else.

James, I really hope you are trying to be funny.

True, Jon, and upon reading your first comment a second time, I’m not really convinced that you were being ironic yourself, given that you located the phrase “put out” within a sentence musing about how the world would be a better place if more women did it. So I’m not going to waste another minute with this.

If a person wants more sex than their partner, consistently, all the time, and this causes them suffering… isn’t that one of the reasons we invented divorce?

It is okay to divorce a spouse because, over a long period of time, they consistently were not in sync with your sexual needs, and this created tension and suffering for both of you. It is not okay to demand that on any particular specific occasion your spouse have sex with you. It is not okay to suggest that on a regular basis your spouse should have sex with you that they don’t want. It *is* okay to ask the question, “What loving, pleasant thing can I do for my spouse who doesn’t want sex that might possibly get them in the mood but is not itself sexual?” Such as backrubs. Or letting them take a nap while you watch the kids and cook the dinner, so they won’t be too tired tonight. It is not okay to blackmail your spouse by constantly saying that you will divorce them if they won’t meet your sexual needs. It is okay to try to work toward a compromise where they have a little bit more sex than they genuinely desire and you have less sex than you want, if they’re okay with that and the sex isn’t a painful unpleasant chore for them. It is not okay to belittle your spouse for not wanting as much sex as you.

Prager, and many other conservatives like him, is under the assumption that men are sex-obsessed beings who cannot restrain themselves, and women don’t have natural sexual desires of their own. Their only purpose in marriage is to obey and please their husband. This is a foolish and outdated method of thinking, and is not conducive to healthy sexual relations between men and women.

“James, I really hope you are trying to be funny. “

No, I am not trying to be funny Nicole. I’m serious.

“Sex is desire. It is not a need. You won’t die without it, you won’t get sick without it, you won’t cease doing other things you enjoy without it…”

My wife tells me that too sometimes....but, it’s just not right for a couple to without sex for a long time. It make me very irritable otherwise..

“Nor does one actually need a counselor if the problem is a new baby and she’s exhausted. “

I understand she get exhausted taking care of the kids during the day. But is having sex once per week too much? ...

“but, it’s just not right for a couple to without sex for a long time. It make me very irritable otherwise..

Well then...review, Mr Crankypants...as posters here have already said it in a dozen different ways. Pay particular attention to the Praying Mantis.

“We’ll sometimes it’s longer than a week for me, maybe 2 weeks sometimes without sex. That’s too long without sex for a younger couple I believe..  and I refuse to wear a condom with my wife. We use natural family planning…”

James is a liar. Notice 1st: “I refuse to wear a condom” which in its syntax implies his “wife” would like him to wear a condom and 2nd, “natural family planning” aka not birth control would indicate that he and his wife have gone without sex for at least 8 weeks--two weeks prior and six weeks after birth, considering that if they have been married for at least 1 year, with no birth control (and assuming no abortions) would be the expected outcome.

James is a troll and a liar. Don’t engage him.

Oooops...sorry...that should be “preying mantis.” Or Tapetum...or everyone else here, James.

My wife tells me that too sometimes.

Sadly, I do believe that James has a wife, and I do believe she’s unsatisfied with him because he’s a lousy, demanding, selfish sex partner. He’s already established that he would never consider the obvious solution of making sex more pleasurable for his wife, so the only solution is for his wife to leave him or cheat on him, and with someone hot.

You can do better, Mrs. James, and you deserve better.

jon, you’re not helping your case by comparing women ‘putting out’ to taking a shit. and you didn’t disprove my perception that you think women are just supposed to put out as part of their womanl nature. if a woman is not putting out, i’m pretty sure it’s because she doesn’t WANT to, not because there’s not an available toilet/dick nearby.

Every man who is sexually faithful to his wife already engages in daily heroic self-control.

Heroism ain’t what it used to be.

I mean, the guy actually, unironically called Jesse gay for considering something from a woman’s point of view, as if women were people. Come on. There are Redstate posters who would be a step up from that shit.

“We’ll sometimes it’s longer than a week for me, maybe 2 weeks sometimes without sex. That’s too long without sex for a younger couple I believe..  and I refuse to wear a condom with my wife. We use natural family planning… “

that’s it, i call shenanigans on this troll. well, i told him to try harder, my bad…

james, either you’re good at aping a prehistoric attitude, or you are a sad, pathetic little boy.

“Every man who is sexually faithful to his wife already engages in daily heroic self-control.”

I really wish that “You. Have. No. Idea.” speech from Eyes Wide Shut was still on YouTube.

“Few women know their husband loves them because he gives her his body (the idea sounds almost funny).”

Prager’s asshattery really shines here. Women are told from a young age that to be sexually desirable is one of the best things you can be in this world, so for many straight women - the knowledge that they can get their partner hard is very satisfying and makes them feel good about themselves. A lot of young women freak out and make the situation worse if a guy is having minor sexual problems because they automatically assume it’s because they’re not good enough, when it is usually something else entirely. So yes, in our culture a man a woman loves wanting to have sex with her can and does make some women feel loved in return. And if she has an attentive partner that gives the kind of sex she likes, all the better. 

But Prager obviously can’t fathom that women have any kind of sexual agency or desires of their own. He calls it “almost funny.” God damn, that man is ignorant.

Oh man, that wide-eyed ignorance is so hard to take seriously, James.

Having sex when you don’t want it is always too much. There’s nothing sexier to me than time spent together doing something we both enjoy that isn’t sexual. That gets me in the mood because it increases intimacy. The idea that I “should” ever is off-putting in the extreme.

And just perhaps the most natural family planning is saying no. Because she really doesn’t want more children.

I’m not talking about around births Thealogin.

My wife’s ‘window of fertility’ is only about 7 -8 days per month.

“which in its syntax implies his “wife” would like him to wear a condom”

That was earlier in my marriage ( and sadly I did wear one), she doesn’t request it anymore though..

I hope you’re not a Theologian.

“divorcee Denis Prager”

Divorcé.  The extra e (like fiancé/fiancée) makes it feminine.

“and I refuse to wear a condom with my wife.”

...does she ask you to?

My wife tells me that too sometimes....but, it’s just not right for a couple to without sex for a long time. It make me very irritable otherwise..

Wow, that’s not a veiled threat towards your wife at all.  “If I don’t get my sex I get very angry...why you gotta make me hit you, baby?” Jeez, I haven’t heard THAT one since I left ex/rapist/stalker.  I distinctly remember him blaming me for his temper tantrums and yelling too-because I had stopped “putting out” since I was trying to recover from him raping me.  It was “too hard” to go without sex for more than a week, so he’d yell at me.  Of course, that wasn’t because HE was an abusive, selfish asshole, it had to be my fault, getting all uppity and not wanting to have sex because he had demanded it.  FYI, he called sex a need too. 

Maybe I’m a fool, but I believe James is real.  I’ve met plenty of men like him.  He’s just like my rapist and everyone who defended him.  I hope Mrs. James realizes her partner is abusive (emotionally and sexually at the very least) and leaves him for someone who doesn’t put quotas on sex. 

Sex where one participant isn’t willing is called rape, marriage or no.  There’s no legal status that gives you ownership of another person (people including women) or the right to demand something from them.

To deconstruct his arguments, he argues that

1. Men need women to demonstrate physical love (and often). We know this is true because, and I quote, “But the question that should matter to a woman who loves her man is not whether this proposition speaks poorly or well of male nature. It is whether it is true. And it is true beyond anything she can imagine.”

shorter last sentence: it’s true cause i sez so

2. Men are therefore animals. To quote amanda, then, treat them like animals (as a dude, I am an animal, but not that kind of rapey animal. So there’s no need to “Blame God and nature.") Also, i don’t need to engage in daily heroic self control to remain faithful. My non-getting-laid-fu is among the most powerful I’ve ever seen.

3. Proto niceguy. Nuff said

4. But what about marriages with “talk-ing?” Apparently, 1 is still true. Proof by assertion. Man, if you could do that on math tests . . .

5. I’m right cause i’m right. Also, “At the same time, men need to recognize that complete sexual fulfillment is unattainable in this world.”

Dude has clearly never gotten laid, or gotten laid well. Obviously permanent satisfaction is unreasonable, but complete? Sex: ur doin it wrong

“...does she ask you to? “

No, not anymore.  In fact, I would tell any husbands out there- don’t get fooled into wearing any damn condom...and if she asks you to wear one, ask her “what’s the matter, I’m not good enough for you to give your whole self to me?”

“don’t get fooled into wearing any damn condom...and if she asks you to wear one, ask her “what’s the matter, I’m not good enough for you to give your whole self to me?””

What happens when she says you’re not?

Tokidoki,

I am not a rapist nor would I ever force my wife to have sex. 

Let me ask you- how long do you expect me as a husband to go without sex? 3 months? 6?  a year?

I would tell any husbands out there- don’t get fooled into wearing any damn condom...and if she asks you to wear one, ask her “what’s the matter, I’m not good enough for you to give your whole self to me?”

Wow, okay, now I’m starting to think I’m an idiot and a sucker, because no one could be stupid enough to think even the most selfish, abusive husbands have to be “fooled” into not wanting unlimited children or would willingly talk like James Dobson.

James, did you know that many rapists wear condoms? Do you suppose their victims had to “fool” them into doing so?

“What happens when she says you’re not?”

She doesn’t say ‘I’m not’. My wife loves me.

Top quality trolling from Jms. He clearly does have “needs”.

Wow, you’re a real piece of work.

hey! what do you call a woman practicing “natural family planning”.........pregnant!

*That was in reference to James.

Snerk....

Penis minus sperm equals partial self. Who knew?

maybe ‘fooled’ is the wrong word. When we first got married she didn’t want kids right away but I did. ...

when couples get married, they should be open to having children. At least if you are Catholic like I am..

Let me ask you- how long do you expect me as a husband to go without sex? 3 months? 6?  a year?

Wrong question. Here’s a better one. “Why doesn’t my wife want to have sex with me?”

Other good questions: “Would my wife want to have sex with me if she had an orgasm almost every time? Is my wife attracted to me, or should I start working out and lose some weight? Is my wife cheating on me, and am I too self-centered to know it?”

james, your method of birth control is of no particular interest to me, except for the view it provides of a fairly stunning lack of concern about your wife’s concerns or preferences. “She doesn’t request it anymore though...” implies that she would still like to, but “knows better” than to ask. Your sex talk, again, evidences no interest on your part at all about whether your wife considers your mutual sex life to be satisfactory for her. All that seems to matter to you is that your needs are met - even when they’re not actually needs.

Do I expect a husband to wait around forever while his wife refuses to have sex? No. I expect him to care about his life partner enough to try to find out what’s happening, and to be willing to work to make their sex life mutually satisfying, rather than insisting that she become a living sex toy for him even if she’s miserable about it.

“Let me ask you- how long do you expect me as a husband to go without sex? 3 months? 6?  a year? “

You can wait for your wife to want it, have an affair, or get a divorce. There is no other option. Why is it so hard to understand that “No” means “No.” Two year old children can get it.

should I start working out and lose some weight?

Actually, this isn’t a good question, so don’t ask it, whoever you are. I stand by the rest.

“She doesn’t say ‘I’m not’. My wife loves me.”

Yes, that’s nice.  We’re talking about all those other hypothetical men whose wives demand they use the dreaded cock-scourge, though.  Do they immediately pull up the stakes and move their untameable phallus to greener pastures that are more willing to demonstrate devotion by having no personal preferences when it comes to sex, or do they wait for their wives to decide they don’t want to spend the rest of their lives with a man whose first reaction to a sexual request he doesn’t like is emotional blackmail?  Inquiring minds want to know.

Junk Science,

I don’t know...many times she does have orgasms when we have sex. I am a little overweight but not that much. I believe she may issues from previous relationships, she told me she was date-raped by an old boyfiend.

I guess I expect anyone to go without sex for as long as their partner’s unwilling or unable.  My partner and I are both survivors of sexual assault so we have periods where one or the other is too emotionally distressed to even think about sex, but we get by.  It gets rough, but I see it as basically equivalent to being single while not engaging in casual sex, which lots of people can manage quite easily.  (Yay masturbation :D) It’s hard for me to understand why someone would want to have sex as some sort of robotic need (1/month or else!) rather than spontaneous sexy times.  When sex isn’t frequent enough/good there’s in the relationship or in one (or both) partner’s lives-or they’re just not compatible, which is ok too.  That’s what breakups and divorce are for. 

I understand people have different sex drives (I know mine is much higher than my partner’s) but manipulation and veiled threats should never be acceptable in a relationship.  I’m more concerned about his emotional health and making sure he feels respected than having sex.  The problem isn’t that you want/need sex to have a fulfilling relationship, but that the need becomes of greater concern than her enthusiasm and non-sexual intimacy.

Rape doesn’t necessarily involve physical force and I feel like a woman’s consent is null if there’s any coercion or emotional blackmailing going on-I don’t know how she can really consent if her partner feels sex is “owed” rather than something to be enjoyed between two people.

A wife should not consistantly refuse her husband sex, it does not make for a healthy marriage. See Dr. Laura.

Yes, by all means, see Dr. Laura--if you wish to see an example of an utter disgrace to the profession of Marriage and Family Therapy.

Those of us who actually do marital therapy for a living recognize that unequal sexual desire is a feature of most marriages--a perpetual issue that may never be resolved, but must be addressed nevertheless.  Often, a partner’s lack of desire is a symptom of a troubled marriage rather than a cause.  Other times, the couple has difficulty talking openly about their sexual needs.  Finding a way for the couple to have a dialogue about this issue is usually more productive than blaming one partner for not wanting sex often enough. 

As an added bonus, when both people feel heard and understood, they are usually more willing to be affectionate with each other which, surprise surprise, can lead to more sex.

Or maybe...just maybe James...she is sometimes simply not interested. It happens.

I believe she may issues from previous relationships, she told me she was date-raped by an old boyfiend.

Well, as long as she’s giving you your weekly dose of marital duties.

By the way, I completely agree with the suggestion to do away with the phrase “put out.” It gives me the shivers almost as badly as “coed.”

Ok, thank you for your input...I’ve learned a few thing here....

Thanks
James....

The Prager article is creepy in the extreme. The right wing male brain seems to think that females are another species entirely.
On the whole one partner ones to have sex more then the other partner “problem”: what about staying married but being open to having sex with other people occasionally?
I know it’s not a typical hetero-normative relationship model but I know more then a few happy and successful gay male couples that operate this way. In my 20s I was pretty against this kind of arrangement for myself personally, but now I am opening up to the idea, as it’s pretty common among my other gay male friends here in the Bay area. I don’t think its realistic to get everything you need from one person, but that doesn’t nesc. mean that you don’t love that person or shouldn’t be in a relationship with them.

“Let me ask you- how long do you expect me as a husband to go without sex? 3 months? 6?  a year?”

If your libido is still at the dudely factory default setting, we’d need your age and tax bracket to plug into the algorithm before we could determine the correct number for the Minimum Fucks per Annum.  If not, we’re going to have to fill out Schedule D and, depending on your medical history and cortisol level, maybe Form 5248-A in order to figure it out.  Of course, those guidelines are predicated on the Fucks per Annum coming at regular intervals; realistically the average user can expect some variability, though drastic deviance from the Penile Maintenance Schedule is discouraged because it may void the warranty.  I mean, unless you’ve already voided the warranty by allowing unlicensed or insufficiently certified Penile Operators access to your genitals.  Then the warranty doesn’t really enter into it.

They are often made to feel ashamed of their male sexual nature, and they are humiliated (indeed emasculated) by feeling that they are reduced to having to beg for sex.

Well, sure. But the ones who spend the most time enforcing the “if you can’t get laid, you must be some kind of fag or something” meme are other men, not women. Why bother acknowledging your own cravenness and glaring entitlement issues when you can just call your wife a castrating bitch and have done with it?

Jesse:

In general, if your wife is constantly denying you sex, she either has a personal issue which it probably behooves you to stop being horny long enough to think about, or she has a personal issue with you that it really behooves you to stop being horny long enough to think about.

Fine, but if you’re just going to go around acknowledging that women have valid feelings and are perfectly capable of discussing them like rational adults, what’s the point of being a right-wing authoritarian in the first place? Feelings are for sissies. Once you start treating the people around you like they’re just as human as you are, you might as well go ahead and grow some dreadlocks, shave your chest and walk around in a burlap loincloth and flip-flops.

I would consider Natural Family Planning a form of “birth curtailment” rather than birth control. NFP coupled with strict LAM co-sleeping can prevent a Duggar-load of babies in most cases. Sometimes only three to five kiddos if you don’t start til the woman’s almost 30.

I’m not meaning to defend James here, he’s a troll.

Wasn’t there some old Planned Parenthood comic posted here where the wife really wanted to do it with her sexually frustrated husband, but she held back sometimes because they couldn’t fford another kid? Hubby went to the doc who suggested condoms and maybe a diaphragm for the wife. Hot sex ensued IIRC. This was from the late 50s-early 60s. Maybe James needs to get up to speed with how things were 45 years ago.

“Wasn’t there some old Planned Parenthood comic posted here where the wife really wanted to do it with her sexually frustrated husband, but she held back sometimes because they couldn’t fford another kid?”

Yeah.  She was so frustrated and freaked out that she actually packed her bags and went to her sister’s.  The guy wound up at the doctor’s after he was so busy obsessing about whether or not his wife still loved him, what with having moved out and all, that he wasn’t paying enough attention at work and wound up with his hand caught in the machinery.  I think the moral of the story was that condoms cut down on workman’s comp claims.

Depending on NFP would definitely lead to a nookie shortage around here. If my husband tried to make the decision to switch to NFP unilaterally or with any coercement, it would be permanent.

Every man who is sexually faithful to his wife already engages in daily heroic self-control.

“How’d your heroic self-control go today, darling?”
“Not so great, I boinked the UPS guy.”
“Awwww, that’s too bad, honey. Coffee?”
“Yes please, dear. Still, it’s better than last Friday. *That* was two parking meters, the postal carrier and a potted plant.”

I guess I expect anyone to go without sex for as long as their partner’s unwilling or unable.

Damn straight. I also have a history of sexual abuse and I shied away from sex until I could really trust that Mr. Kristin honestly saw me as more than a moist hole. And whaddaya know, his being willing to keep it in his pants around me—and I mean for a long time—was instrumental in his gaining that trust. Who’d a thunk it?

I shouldn’t have. But I read the comments, and yes, these people think women don’t like sex.

The Big Mick Location: VA
Reply # 65
Date: Dec 23, 2008 - 2:42 PM EST
Subject: Andrea 2:07
Can’t stand the Truth, huh?

Prager needs no more qualifications for this then being married and having been denied sex by his wife.

You got a cogent rebuttal, cough it up, girlfriend.

But you don’t, do you?

You don’t because the REAL UNPALATABLE TRUTH BENEATH what Prager is saying her, is that most women simply DO NOT LIKE OR WANT SEX!

What they WANT is Security, Companionship, Children. They are willing to BARTER sex, and that at as favorable (minimal) an exchange rate as possible. in order to get what they really want. Once they got it, all interest is completely lost.

That’s just the way it is.

Don’t buy it? Of all the women I have known in my life I can accurately say that I have known only 2, that upon close analysis of their statements and behavior, could claim accurately to actually enjoy and WANT sex. Both of those could also accurately be said to have emotional problems.

Now admitting that most of the women I know have never had a conversation in my hearing about sex, but counting what I know about my friends wive’s, that still comes out to something less than 1%.

I challenge any man on this thread to better that percentage, and prove they weren’t lying to you.”

I also call bullshit on James’ (or is it Jasper?) claim to Catholicism.  Over 90% of Catholics use birth control, and that crazy “give yourself totally” bullshit I’ve only read on poor Dawn Eden’s site.

Again, if you think of sex as an activity for two enthusiastic participants, the whole Prager piece (and James’ threadjack) falls apart.  If sex is not a man doing something to a passive woman, but is instead an mutually enjoyable activity with two active participants willingly engaging, then you don’t have any of their issues.

It’s when one partner is simply a sperm recepticle or a baby factory that the problems occur.  Woman are human beings with their own needs and wants--deal with that, and there’ll be lots more sex for everyone.

On the whole one partner ones to have sex more then the other partner “problem”: what about staying married but being open to having sex with other people occasionally?

That can work for married couples who don’t have or could manage the potential jealousy which may come up.  From what I’ve heard and observed, however, most people who enter a married relationship have a serious problem dealing with such issues...especially when they were raised with the idea that entering such a relationship means they forgo other sexual partners until divorce or death separates them.

Exholt:
Yeah, jealousy is of course a problem for most people and I have gotten jealous with older boyfriends before. But more recently I’ve begun to think of potential jealousy as problem for me and not for a relationship, something I would have to work instead of putting that kind of feeling toward a partner. As your comment suggested, so much of jealousy is culturally inherited and I think its worth challenging.
But, yeah, not for everyone I guess.

“Sex is desire. It is not a need. …”
My wife tells me that too sometimes....but, it’s just not right for a couple to without sex for a long time. It make me very irritable otherwise..

Yeah, I’ll bet she does.  I’ll bet she has needs that involve you helping her with the household chores/kids/pretending that you care about how she feels.  It’s just not right for a couple to go for more than a week without the husband doing nice things for his wife.  (No, poking her with your cock when she doesn’t really want it doesn’t count as “nice.")

Seriously dude, she’s not put on the planet to satisfy your “needs”.  If you expect this from her (aside from the fact that it’s emotionally abusive to her), no matter how attentive she is, you will never be satisfied, because there’s always *something* that might be a little bit better. 

The fact that you think it’s cool to have sex with her when she’d rather not tells me that, really, you don’t care much about how *she* feels, as long as she does what you want.  She is, however, an actual person, and doubtless really wishes she had a husband who cared about that.

In summary:  I am creeped out by you.

In my limited experience, one does not enter into an open relationship arrangement because one isn’t getting enough from one’s partner. Rather, it’s done to experience sex with other people. It’s not as if you can come home on a weeknight, discover at 11pm that your partner “just wants to be held”, and so hop out of bed and call up one of your other dates. Well, I suppose you could try, but it’s not going to work. In my experience, people who arrange to have sex outside of their relationship do so for more esoteric reasons than to up their fuck-rate, and if they were doing it to up their fuck-rate they probably have a more serious problem than the open relationship can fix.

I do think though (and I’m sure this has been discussed here before) that in a relationship one does tend to “put out” a little, as it were, and it’s okay. By which I mean, there is a big difference between being into your partner but too tired, and not wanting to have sex. I have certainly had sex when I didn’t really want to, because my partner was up for it and even though I was tired or sick, she is never so unsexy or unloved that I won’t at least consider it. I think a lot of people do this, and further than that I also think people make themselves have sex when they don’t necessarily really want to, for reasons other than lust - e.g. you are going away for a week and want to feel nice with your partner before you go, but you’re dead tired; or you have not seen her properly because its xmas and you’re crazy busy and you want to just crash but you need to remind yourself about your physical relationship; or she came home really drunk and horny and you aren’t that interested in the sex itself but the fact that she’s demanding it so cutely just demands reward. (My partner and I like having sex at different times and sometimes in different ways, and I think part of our method for handling this is just to do it anyway).

I would say that if you really love someone, putting out can be a nice present. If my partner wants something I don’t particularly enjoy, I’m happy to give it to her, provided the giving is within reason and I can trust in her willingness to reciprocate the gesture.

I also think the distinction between sex and other demands in a relationship doesn’t have to be so great. For me sex is never hateful or so intensely emotionally loaded that I need to elevate it to some special position in a relationship, and I think to the best of my knowledge that many of my partners have been the same. I would much rather have sex when I don’t want it than traipse around buying obligatory xmas presents with my partner! And sometimes she really needs to talk when I really need to sleep, so I talk… plus I hang out with her family! For those of us for whom sex is a fraught, complex or super-special phenomenon, this distinction is important and obviously needs to be treated as such. But if sex is just a thing, going down on the woman you love for half an hour when really you’d rather just sleep is no big deal.

Obviously this opinion is just my own, not intended as some kind of principle. But in my view, this kind of give and take keeps a relationship ticking over, and I don’t see why one shouldn’t extend the give and take to include sex and sex-like things if you’re both comfortable with it.

My ex was offended when I didn’t want sex.  He was offended if I wasn’t sufficiently enthusiastic every. goddamn. time.  Even when he’d just nagged me into having sex I didn’t want.  He was offended when I didn’t like certain positions b/c they were painful for me and/or didn’t let me be an active participant.  He was also offended when I suggested he get a blow-up doll and a tape recorder, which would seem to be a perfect match for him.  Just put in a few key phrases: “Oooh...baby, fuck me harder!  I worship your enormous cock!  Ooh...baby, again!”, and all his needs are met.  This is only one part of why he is now my ex.

I wish we could get a good frame going that sex isn’t something a man does to a woman and that a woman allows a man to do to her.  Sex is something men and women do together.

This. The attitude is that sex is a gift from a woman to a man, rather than a fun activity like playing Lego Star Wars together.

I can’t imagine what it would be like if my wife started putting pressure on me to have sex when I didn’t want to. No wait, I can. It would be miserable. It might well be the stress which caused me to snap and start shouting at people on street corners.

Also… “I wanted kids, she didn’t, and she TRICKED me into wearing condoms.” Really? You would get your wife pregnant against her will? You’re a monster, James.

No alimentan los trols

This shit killed my marriage.

Early in the relationship, my ex decreed I would have orgasms from the insertion of his almighty cock alone--no touching, no tongue, I would simply be transformed from being one of the majority of women who don’t come that way to one of the minority who do by the power of his magical dick.  One night when we were both drunk and he didn’t seem to notice I’d gone dry and I wanted his big ass off me, I made the fatal mistake of faking it.  I had no idea I’d end up doing this for...let’s just say lots’n’lotsa years. 

The result was that sex became something he wanted and I didn’t.  We had sex about every two weeks, and his dissatisfaction led to his taking porn seriously.  Careful study of said porn led him to conclude that women have orgasms from intercourse, anal sex, and being choked (they couldn’t call the compilation tape Real Female Orgasms if they weren’t real, right?). Therefore, since I did not want intercourse very often, found anal sex painful, and don’t like being choked, there was something horribly wrong with me.

Of course this was all symptomatic of deeper problems w/in the relationship, and eventually I divorced him.  I took some time off to Work On Me, found a more secure guy, and discovered I LOVE Lego Star Wars.

Wanted to shout it from the rooftops, in fact.  I LOVE LEGO STAR WARS 5 TIMES A DAY!!  Putting out--not so much.

They say that even a blind pig occasionally finds an acorn.  Even though I radically disagree with the overall approach urged by Prager and James, they occasionally hit on a point that I recognize some degree of connection to, though not necessarily in the context they invoke it in.

So, e.g., Bitter Scribe @9:37:

Every man who is sexually faithful to his wife already engages in daily heroic self-control.

Of course, because he’s surrounded by horny, willing women who are aching to fuck his brains out, and it’s just his bad luck he’s married to the one woman in the world who isn’t.

I disagree with Prager’s “Every man,” but I do think that the degree of self-control required doesn’t especially depend on the immediate availability of willing partners.  You don’t get points for fidelity if you are asking other women to sleep with you, even if they all turn you down.  The self-control required centers around the effort to avoid situations that could develop into affairs, even if there is a part of you that longs for just that.  To note the obvious, that part is more likely to be there if you are dealing with long-term sexual compatibility issues than if you are blissfully happy with your current sex life.

dhwhite @8:08:
You know, if you have pre-marital sex, you can find out that you have incompatible sex drives before you get married.

While I’m all for pre-marital sex, this doesn’t always hold.  People change over time, and sometimes in ways that are incompatible with their partner’s desires.

Many women think mens natures are similar to theirs, and this is so different from a womans nature, that few women know this about men unless told about it.

Compared to most womens sexual nature, mens sexual nature is far closer to that of animals. So what? That is the way he is made.

This probably the strangest thing to me. I’ve never been convinced that men’s and women’s natures are really that separate. It does seem to me that the emotional profiles men and women, taken in the aggregate, are a bit different. But to Prager, it’s such a vast gulf that your partner’s nature cannot be understood at all and can only be accepted. (The woman is the one who needs to muster the uncomprehending acceptance, naturally.) This attitude sounds a bit reminiscent of the “Men’s Movement” of the 1980s & 90s, to me, though I think that the men’s movement tended to be a bit more conscious than this.

I’m much more of the opinion that women and men can usually understand each other if they try. When I observe women acting, and I look into my male self and examine how I might act in the same situation, I can usually find the set of emotions within myself which explains how this woman is motivated. I think that what can prevent a man from doing this is usually less a man’s lack of imagination than a refusal to admit that he can think like a woman, if he tries.

Looking back, I find it interesting that my offhand comment using the phrase “put out” got more attention than the use of “beg for some pussy”.  I still think the world would be a better place if it had more consensual sex in it, and the people (men and women, gay and straight) who think in terms of “putting out” are the ones that need to change the most for that better world to come to be.  Some people will forever think of sex as an obligation or currency, and those sad people are stupid.  And you can’t cure stupid, as only the host can allow for that to happen.  So yeah, I’m a monster for wishing that more people would have better sex.

And I sometimes wish I didn’t have to find a place to take a crap.  Is that so wrong?  It’s not as if it’s the most convenient thing in life.  But until I actually start laying turds on the sidewalk, I’m not Public Enemy Number Two for thinking that, am I? 

I’ve learned one thing: the next time I mock Dennis Prager for publishing blindly without an editor, I’ll be sure not to provide any examples of things I wouldn’t actually suggest publicly.  I’ll be pulling the splinter out of my eye as soon as I find those damn tweezers.

Public Enemy Number Two

Good one

James is a troll--too inconsistent (and though he claims to be a Catholic, his freeper references take him back to Evangelical Protestant sources).

But, he is a troll who seems to have a fantasy about raping a “wife” who already experienced sexual trauma/rape. That’s pretty fucked up. His Real Doll has probably had at least one orifice replaced already. Gross.

Of course, on the off chance he is somewhat reality based, I’d be happy to speak to his Priest (AS A THEOLOGIAN) regarding how he fails to see his wife as a full human being.

From the Prager comments:

“Of all the women I have known in my life I can accurately say that I have known only 2, that upon close analysis of their statements and behavior, could claim accurately to actually enjoy and WANT sex.”

The lack of self examination. It hurts.

I have to wonder if the reason James’ wife tolerates his assholishness is because the fact that she was raped leaves her vulnerable.I can’t imagine James is good for her in any way, shape, or form.

wow, for a frum yid, Prager shows an exceptional lack of understanding of his own religion.  maybe in his days as lapdog for the rethuglicans, he’s accidentally incorporated their religious dogma and forgotten it’s inconsistent with judaism.

This is some appallingly sick shit.  And I think it’s hilarious that James read that and immediately thought Jesse was a woman.

What these guys fear more than anything else is having men and women mix together and finding that there’s no rape, no harassment, no shit.  These conservobot guys don’t want to understand or like women; if they do, then they’d just be assholes if they keep pulling this shit despite knowing that women are human beings.

In the military you often sleep in the same tents as the guys.  Fear of sexual harassment is often the expressed reason for segregation of the genders. The real problem is that you get to know the opposite gender and they’re not mysterious at all.

Prager sure likes to trot out the ‘aren’t women different?’ excuse.

YOu know, this is a really minor point compared to all the rest but it bugs the everliving fuck out of me.

<blockquoteFew women know their husband loves them because he gives her his body (the idea sounds almost funny). This is, therefore, usually a revelation to a woman. Many women think mens natures are similar to theirs, and this is so different from a womans nature, that few women know this about men unless told about it.

...this is true beyond anything she can imagine…
</blockquote>

How the hell is this guy an expert on what it’s like to be a woman? But no woman can possibly know what goes on inside a guy’s head? Nobody can possibly know what it’s like to be a (straight, white) male in America today! Except for everybody. Because being male is the default experience. All women know what it’s like to be a guy because they live in a culture that never fucking stops telling them. But yet this asshole is assuming that the imbalance in empathy and knowledge goes the other way. No woman can truly understand the tremendous torture of his aching balls! But he can understand their inability to understand because… he’s a guy and therefore knows everything?

GAH I CANNOT EXPLAIN WHY THIS ANNOYS ME SO MUCH. I need someone to intelligently analyze this for me please; I’ve the feeling it is the tip of a massive and pernicious iceberg but I can’t figure out the rest of it.

Sorry about messing up the quotes! I’ve forgotten how to do them properly. It’s easy to tell what the quoted bit is anyway, yeah?

And I think it’s hilarious that James read that and immediately thought Jesse was a woman.

I’ve encountered that before, but normally only on sites like Youtube. You defend, say, reproductive rights, and people immediately assume you are a woman - apparently in their world, only women say such things. I normally just go with it. “That’s right, I want your laws off my body! I don’t want to get pregnant until I’m good and ready… do you have a problem with that?”

And I think it’s hilarious that James read that and immediately thought Jesse was a woman.

I’m pretty sure he didn’t think that, and was just calling Jesse a woman and/or gay for being so unmanly as to consider something from a woman’s point of view. Real men are self-centered, stubborn, deeply unhappy losers, and it’s not sporting for a guy to be anything else.

Gad, James, you have so many issues it’s hard to know where to start. How in hell did you find someone who loathes themselves enough to marry a self-centered uncaring, misogynistic prick like you? I don’t blame your wife for not wanting to have sex with a pig like you. Maybe you and Prager can do a little Christian brotherhood act and satisfy each other’s desperate “needs.”

Umami, it’s the smug self-assurance that he knows everything about women despite fucking up two marriages. Women are but intellectual insects compared to the mighty male font of all knowledge! In his penis, I guess.  Women are fit but silly subjects of study, because they’re lightweights, suitable only for fucking, and then they won’t even do that! He’s such a prince in the face of female rebellion.

What this guy needs is a gay marriage. That way he can find somebody who can sympathize with his damned blue balls.

I’m pretty sure he didn’t think that

I’m less sure. I’ve encountered right wingers who appear to think in exactly that way.

It’s even penetrated James’ bulletproof skull that Mrs. James was raped, so that might have something to do with why she chooses men who have no interest in her sexual pleasure and treat her as an inanimate fuckhole. She probably doesn’t think she deserves better, like so many millions of women putting up with this unimaginable bullshit.

Unami -

Simple. It’s because you are an intelligent and reasonable person who tries to look at the world through something other than the distorted lens of your own experience. People like James can’t see any farther than the end of their own dick, and live their lives as if they have some kind of ultimate truth. As a guy, I see this shit every day and wonder how assholes like that ever manage to find wives or girlfriends. Must be far more self-hatred among women than even I imagined…

Seriously, guys: tongue + alphabet + clitoris = instant wifely sex drive.

Considering I get mistaken for a woman online the second I talk about anything but my cock, I think James was serious.  On the other hand, I’m kind of hoping he’s a fake caricature type troll, as I refuse to believe that anyone so insanely self-centered and lacking in empathy could possibly exist.  It’s difficult in light of the existence of Jonah Goldberg, but one has to try.

Gavel -

Come down to Dallas some time. You can’t swing a dead cat tin this town without hitting someone as clueless and misogynistic as James…

Must be far more self-hatred among women than even I imagined…

My wife explained it once.  As teenagers, you really don’t encounter any other type of guy, and if you’re straight, it’s either fuck assholes or remain frustrated and horny.  Post-teenagerdom, there are a few more guys who are decent, but unless you totally luck out, you still only encounter assholes, and think that’s all that exists, leading to a general disappointed lowering of expectations or a hopeful collegiate lesbian fling.  I really don’t blame women for hating men.

GAH I CANNOT EXPLAIN WHY THIS ANNOYS ME SO MUCH. I need someone to intelligently analyze this for me please; I’ve the feeling it is the tip of a massive and pernicious iceberg but I can’t figure out the rest of it.

umami

I don’t really get it either. I would suspect a lot of it simply has to do with Prager’s arrogant attitude. I would also like to note that the whole idea of a vast gulf between men and women’s points-of-view is pretty mainstream.

Differential sex drives in relationships CAN be difficult.

My partner and I both liked to go at it like bunnies .... we played Star Wars Legos all day and all night .... until I had two babies 18 months apart.

Then, I discovered that sleep deprivation KILLS my sex drive (but not his).  Now, given the choice between Star Wars Legos and a nap, I almost always choose the nap.  It’s not that I don’t WANT to play Star Wars Legos ... just that I am always too tired.

It’s been rough, and I understand his frustration, especially since this isn’t what either of us expected.

But we cope.

On weekends, he gets up early with the babies so I can sleep in, and he makes a nice breakfast. I take a mid-afternoon nap when the babies sleep, and then we spend a relaxing evening cooking dinner together/playing with the kiddos.  Amazingly enough, that usually makes me want to stay awake for several hours playing Lego Star Wars.

Off-topic, I’d like to Officially Announce that I will be using “play Legos Star Wars” as a euphemism for sex in ALL contexts in the future.

And the Lord said unto she : He will rocketh your world.
And the world was rocketh. 
And woe was brought to the land to those who didn’t heed to the rhythm of the beat.
And all was well.

EDguy gets it:

“While I’m all for pre-marital sex, this doesn’t always hold.  People change over time, and sometimes in ways that are incompatible with their partner’s desires.”

My wife & I had tons of premarital sex and even tons after we first married, but that was a LONG time ago. Both of us have seen our sex drive diminish with age and also we’ve just developed other interests that occupy our minds as we’ve “grown old” together. We still get to have our fun pretty often (as compared to some of my friends who I’ll assume are telling the truth).

So this guy essentially thinks that men are mindless animals incapable of communicating with their partner and learning and understanding that sex is not the only way to measure their partner’s love.  That men don’t have to change or adapt to their partner, only women.  And this whole sex=giving your body nonsense really reveals what he thinks about women and sex.

Anyway, I have a low sex drive, which by definition means that I am regularly accused of being the worst wife ever, not only by conservatives like Prager, but by a whole host of people writing relationship books and articles that basically say that the key to a “happy” relationship is a woman having sex when she doesn’t want to.  What I find really interesting about these publications, is that the excuse given is not that men like sex because it feels good, but that for men, sex is a stand in for love/emotional connection and they certainly can’t be expected to learn to accept their partner’s love in any other way.  As if any kind of emotional connection is forged by a woman laying there in pain being used as a masturbatory aid??  I guess this makes the argument more digestible, rather than saying, men like feeling good and a warm wet hole feels better than their hand so therefore you should be willing to supply one at all times OR ELSE.  I guess this makes men sound too much like selfish pricks so instead a stand in argument is used--men can’t help it, they just can’t learn to express/accept love any other way!  This argument just makes them sound dumb but blameless. 

I have sworn off bad sex.  You see, my vagina is a delicate place.  When I am not sufficiently aroused, being penetrated hurts.  I have suffered through this a few times, but the memory of painful sex only became a hurdle preventing me from wanting to have sex again.  So, we only have sex when we both want to, which is significantly less than he wants to.  At the same time, all the sex we have is good for both parties.  So, according to Prager, we have a terrible relationship and my husband secretly hates me.  But, shockingly enough, my husband is an intelligent human being capable of communicating, learning, and absorbing new concepts.  Such as: when your wife doesn’t want sex, it doesn’t mean that she does not love you, is not attracted to you, or that you have done something wrong.  Sex is not a reward for good behavior.  It is an expression of mutual desire, and only one of many ways to express love for another person.  So, while he would like to have sex more, he understands that asking me to suffer so he can have a somewhat more pleasurable orgasm is wrong and, actually not desirable since he loves me.

Masturbation--the great equalizer.

This thread makes me so glad I’m not married. Not that regular sex is the sole purpose of marriage by any means, but it looks like I get laid just as often as, if not more than, your typical married guy—and with a lot less begging and rape-y behviour of the sort James has to engage in ("Just lie back and think of Jeebus, honey").

And while I know and understand why women feel differently, I’m also thankful for all the clueless guys who view sex as an economic transaction wherein the woman reluctantly “barters” sex in exchange for other things. They make a schmo like me look like Casanova in comparison.

I have no idea as to what’s going on with Prager—either a lack of an editor or one of those undiagnosed brain tumours that makes a person spout insane statements.

This thread makes me so glad I’m not married.

Don’t be.  With the right person, marriage can be like an awesome sleepover-type party with your best friend. FOREVER.  And with sex.

“Give the body” was the phrase that kept ooging me out.  Prager would be happy if his partner would just say, “Here’s my body.  Try not to be too rough.  I am going to disassociate my mind for awhile to think about a difficult work problem. Say ‘abracadbra’ when you’re done.”

Someone mentioned the blind pig finding acorns.  Prager has a couple of them if he would just stop insisting the male is always the high drive partner in an imbalanced relationship. 

A [high drive person] whose [partner] frequently denies [him/her] sex will first be hurt, then sad, then angry, then quiet. And most [higher drive people] will never tell their [partners] why they have become quiet and distant. They are afraid to tell their [partners]. They are often made to feel ashamed of their ["abnormally" or “unreasonably” high drives], and they are humiliated [drop “emasculated"] by feeling that they are reduced to having to beg for sex.

Prager is right that the lower drive partner often has no clue how much emotional pain long term sexual denial causes the higher drive partner. 

And this from Prager [with my edits]

A kind [person] who is not sexual with [his or] her spouse is [ . . . } a kind roommate.
Furthermore, a [lifemate] who denies the [partner he or] she loves sex is not kind.

This last point was a damned awkward sentence but the point was made by Amanda when the topic last came up, although the phrase should be intentionally withholding sex, I think.  She accurately called it abusive.

You know, if you have pre-marital sex, you can find out that you have incompatible sex drives before you get married.
dwhite10701 on 12/23 at 08:08 PM

Spectacularly and tragically WRONG.  As EDGuy pointed out in reply to this, “People change over time, and sometimes in ways that are incompatible with their partner’s desires. “

Seriously, guys: tongue + alphabet + clitoris = instant wifely sex drive.
junk science on 12/24 at 09:48 AM

“instant wife annoyance” Damn I hate it when I screw up a joke.

Truth be told I’m not sure what is more hilariously unfortunate: Dennis Prager thinking he can save every marriage in America with the stunning revelation that - wait for it - men want to have sex(!); or the spectacular denial of the reality of relationships that is occurring in this thread.

F*ck!  “instant wifely annoyance”

“Seriously, guys: tongue + alphabet + clitoris = instant wifely sex drive.”

No, it doesn’t.

“tongue + alphabet + clitoris = instantly wifely annoyance.” Fixed that for you.  Good oral is a learned ability but doing the alphabet is a sure sign of the beginner

Or a Sam Kinison fan. Women really owe Kinison a debt of gratitude: before he did that comedy routine, I doubt most of the male lummoxes out there even knew there was a clitoris to stimulate.

Don’t be.  With the right person, marriage can be like an awesome sleepover-type party with your best friend. FOREVER.  And with sex.

Well, the “with the right person” part is the rub, of course—especially since that person is bound to change over the course of “forever.” In any case, I’m not a “forever” kinda guy. Actually, I’m not a 1-night-stand kinda guy, either. I’ve found a happy medium for all concerned.

But if marriage is working for you, I’m very glad to hear it. We need more happy and healthy marriages, heterosexual and otherwise.

Good oral is a learned ability but doing the alphabet is a sure sign of the beginner

Heartily seconded.

“This thread makes me so glad I’m not married.”

Like anything else, it’s a wash.  A bad marriage is an exercise in joint and mutual misery from which it can be difficult to extricate anything of value.  A good marriage is awesomepants.  So if your options are “bad marriage or no marriage,” you’re way better off going with no marriage, but if your options are “good marriage or no marriage,” you’re better off going with good marriage.

wow. It couldnt be that he treated his wife so bad she doesnt want to be in the same zip code? And if he has been divorced twice then I think someone needs a few trips to the head doctors couch. But since that is an evil profession it will never happen. Its much easier when the little wifey is just a convenient indentured servant.

Prager probably says stupid, fucked up shit like this because one day his jerking hand left him a note telling him it only wanted to be friends from now on.

WHY would anyone want to have sex with anyone not enthusiastically into it at the moment?

WHY would anyone want to have sex with anyone not enthusiastically into it at the moment?

Dennis is secretly a necrophiliac, and his lover’s grudging dead-eyed limpness as she stares at the ceiling and wonders how god could be so cruel is the only thing that gets him erect.

No, I am not trying to be funny Nicole. I’m serious.

And you are so cracked in the head as to be indistinguishable from a parody.  Think about that.

No, not anymore.  In fact, I would tell any husbands out there- don’t get fooled into wearing any damn condom...and if she asks you to wear one, ask her “what’s the matter, I’m not good enough for you to give your whole self to me?”

Mrs. James, you need to divorce him and find a real man who doesn’t need a woman to put herself at risk to feel like a man.  Low self-esteem is ugly in anyone, but in a sexist man, it’s particularly bad, because they need to hurt and abuse women to feel better.  Suggesting that men rape women on this board is unwelcome.  Bullying a woman into sex to get her pregnant against her will is rape.

Bullying a woman into sex to get her pregnant against her will is rape.

And (because i’m betting our James is a Christian) is a pretty horrific deadly sin.  “Love thy neighbor as thyself, that is the whole of the law.” Emotionally abusing your wife for sex?  Jesus wept.

Aaaghh. It’s bad enough he THINKS that way, but to actually put it out there? Jeebus.

My partner and I had lots of Lego Star Wars (hereafter abreviated LSW) until her mother was suddenly gravely ill for six months, followed by a decade of declining health, skilled nursing, and finally death.  I was very insensitive and couldn’t suppress the hormonal reaction I got as we snuggled in bed.  This resulted in extreme hurt feelings on both our parts due to MY lack of understanding.  The main thing that saved our relationship was my realization I was being completely selfish, I love her, and want her around forever.  Prozac helps me with the hormonal gap which widened when she got a hysterectomy.

My big excuse was that I told her when we met that sex was VERY imortant to me.

She used to tell me I “think like a man” (as an insult) but I am very much a woman.

Women who say they don’t like sex likely have had horrible experiences with insensitive, sexist men.  Doesn’t that seem patently obvious?  And the percentage of women the man commenting at townhallcom says don’t like sex seems to point to another disturbing conclusion........I wonder if he’s from Dallas?

Troll James:

If my husband refused to wear a condom, he and I would NEVER play LSW.  I’ll bet you have no idea that women can ovulate three times in a cycle, not always correlating with temperature.  The body is not a machine.  Take note… NOT a machine!

I guess I expect anyone to go without sex for as long as their partner’s unwilling or unable.

I think that’s unreasonable.  You only get one life, and if you find yourself saddled with a partner who has decided for you that your life is going to be dull and colorless and sexless, you really should move on.  You only get one.  Only one.  Let me repeat: Only one.  Wasting your precious time in unhappy, sexless relationships because it’s “just sex” sounds horrifying to me.  Life is for living.  If someone really was going to put me on a no-sex diet, I would have to say, “We’re friends, not lovers, and that was YOUR choice.”

YMMV.  And it’s not about threatening or blackmailing.  But guilt-tripping someone into staying with you even though you’ve single-handedly decided THEY can’t have partner sex any more is as blackmail, using the threat of calling them shallow or perverted because they want to have sex as a normal part of their lives.  The way that we guilt-trip people who want to have sex in their lives blows my mind.  I fail to see how it’s different than guilt-tripping homosexuals for wanting to have sex in their lives.

It’s wrong to cajole someone into bed.  But it’s not wrong to leave someone because they won’t fuck you.  It’s wrong to guilt trip someone into a relationship by making them feel like they’re bad for having sexual desire, i.e. for being a human being.

The secret is women don’t really like sex at all, the just use it to get what they want from men. Prager is better off with another dude, unless he has a small dick, and if that’s the case then no one wants him for anything.

Good to know that a wife is a whore dedicated to the man she marries. I will have to write up a suitable set of vows to include, on the woman’s part of course, “To be a willing receptacle for his sperm whenever his needs arise.”

“I’d say unfrickenbelievable except this is all too common, isn’t it?
His being divorced, twice at that, doesn’t seem to have stopped his incredible douchebaggery any.”

Prager reminds me of a story I once heard about a male college kid who, having seen his first set of girls-gone-wild/sex-on-the-bus videos, wondered aloud (voice trembling with hurt puzzlement): “B-but, but, I don’t understand.  Why don’t we have women like that at Amherst?” Prager is a middle-aged marshmallowy version of that.  In a way he’s admirable: here’s a 60-year-old pundit with an 18-year-old’s naïveté and with an 18-year-old’s lack of instructedness about the fact that the women he encounters in the magazines and movies are unlikely to look or act a whole heck of a lot like the women he runs into in RL.  It’s rare to see such freshness preserved so long.

I almost hope the scales never fall from Prager’s eyes.  You hear the phrase “arrested development” all the time, but it’s rare that you run into an adult man who has spent decades frozen in the Prager kind of glacier.  It’s like witnessing some kind of marvel of science, or of pseudo-science.  (“Believe It Or Not: The Human Owl!!  He spent 40 years playing hooky in a cave!!”) But Prager’s distress is real: you can overhear that in the strained comparisons and in the stombling grammar.  I can’t say I look forward to the day of Prager’s enlightenment.  (Disenchantment?) He’s so distraught at the thought that the chick-on-the-bus might not exist that you can’t help but wonder what he’d do with the knowledge that she does not exist. 

Why, the poor fella might even stop believing in Santa Claus…

Seriously, guys: tongue + alphabet + clitoris = instant wifely sex drive.

“tongue + alphabet + clitoris = instantl wifely annoyance.”

junk science, MiddleagedLiberal, whinger:  Replace “alphabet” with any chapter of “Paradise Lost”.

Seriously, guys: tongue + alphabet + clitoris = instant wifely sex drive/annoyance

I think it depends on the wife’s mood, your attitude, the amount foreplay you’ve done, etc. etc. Overall I think that encouraging men to go down on women more is a good thing.

I think bears repeating for a third time “I wish we could get a good frame going that sex isn’t something a man does to a woman and that a woman allows a man to do to her.  Sex is something men and women do together.”

Or more generally, sex is something people do together.  One way to keep this frame is to refrain from using I and you and make your sentences with we.  We fucked 3 times today.  We had great nap-time sex.  We are having a hard time syncing our urges. We, we, we.  If there is no ‘we’ than it is masturbation.

Speaking of masturbation; isn’t that how many, perhaps most partnered people help resolve the sex-drive difference?  It is what Spouse and I do (as well as occasionally rallying when you’d rather sleep).  Give the partner the time and space to get themselves off when needed.

“In my limited experience, one does not enter into an open relationship arrangement because one isn’t getting enough from one’s partner.”
Actually, according to some of my friends who are doing this, that is precisely why they are in open relationships.  For instance, one partner didn’t want to have sex that much anymore, the other did, so they decided to be open so that the one partner could be more satisfied sexually but still maintain a relationship with each other. I’m talking about other gay male couple friends of mine here in SF and I understand that this kind of thing is not a hetero-normative relationship model but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist or isn’t healthy.
Again, its not for everybody, possibly including myself…

“Speaking of masturbation; isn’t that how many, perhaps most partnered people help resolve the sex-drive difference?”

It seems that the general recommendation is masturbation or non-demanding, non-penetrative assistance in getting off from the low-drive partner when the high-drive partner is horny and the low-drive partner isn’t.  That way there is participation, the high-drive partner isn’t flying solo all the time, and the low-drive partner isn’t treated as a sex-dispenser or an obstacle to fun.

It’s very funny to me: Amanda (yes, I know Jesse wrote this, but the subject matter is something Amanda has covered) has posited for a while now that many conservative men think the way Prager does, *and* the way that doozy of a commenter Elizabeth cited does: they think women are another species, they think married women are prostitutes who mostly hate sex but that the ones who like sex are insane, they think men are literally entitled to sex, even going so far as to say that it’s the woman “giving her body,” and they happily buy into the idea that men can’t be expected to control themselves (well, only in certain matters; in other matters, such as careers, money, and politics, men are of course the best for the job); and yet, when Amanda points out that there really are men out there who think this way, the same way Prager and the commenter have seriously advocated as the truth, those same men get all pissed off at her. This is just very funny to me.

“In my limited experience, one does not enter into an open relationship arrangement because one isn’t getting enough from one’s partner.”

In fact my marriage was intended to be an open relationship.  After we married, my wife both largely lost interest in sex and changed her mind about the open relationship.

A fairly large number of posters in this thread suggest that if your wife loses interest in sex, it’s likely the husband’s fault for being bad in bed.  Okay, I’m bad in bed—it seems like the most likely explanation to me too.  What’s not clear to me is what to do about that.

It’s wrong to cajole someone into bed.  But it’s not wrong to leave someone because they won’t fuck you.  It’s wrong to guilt trip someone into a relationship by making them feel like they’re bad for having sexual desire, i.e. for being a human being.

Amanda, I believe this gets to the crux of Prager’s cryptic comment about why a disparity in sex drives is “different” if it’s the woman who wants it more.  The continuation of the social order demands that sexual desire in women must always shameful.  Dennis doesn’t want to leave the impression that women should get these fancy newfangled ideas about sex being for them too.

“What’s not clear to me is what to do about that.”

Well, what did your wife say when you asked her about the sudden drop in libido?

Good oral is a learned ability but doing the alphabet is a sure sign of the beginner

Eh. It works for me, but I guess it’s wrong to say it would for everyone.

“Well, what did your wife say when you asked her about the sudden drop in libido?”

Oh, all sorts of stuff.  Was that all I cared about, she was too busy, she was sure she’d be interested again soon, she didn’t like it in the morning, she was too tired at night. 

Let’s put it this way: conversations we’ve had as recently as this afternoon have made it clear that her preferred solution is for me to stop wanting to.

A fairly large number of posters in this thread suggest that if your wife loses interest in sex, it’s likely the husband’s fault for being bad in bed.

I don’t think this is the case for someone who isn’t an emotionally-stunted right-wing asshole. It doesn’t even occur to a scary number of men that a deep dicking isn’t always the best way to sexually stimulate most women. Even if they do hear that, they’re too stubborn, immature, and angry to consider even their own self-interest if it means admitting they were wrong.

For a reasonable human being, like you seem to be, that probably isn’t the case.

I don’t know.  I’d like to think that just being a basically okay human being means being good in bed, but, well, I don’t.

As I said, as an explanation it has a lot of power.  I’m not under the illusion that women in general aren’t into sex, I’m aware that women can enjoy sex, my wife doesn’t enjoy sex with me, or so I must assume given that she doesn’t seek it out.

Hey Jesse! Prager referred to your post on his radio show this morning in a segment he calls “The Male/Female Hour.” He described Pandagon as belonging to the “cesspool of the internet” lumping it in with porn sites. He had choicer words for you personally. He suggested that he might want to have you on the air for an interview. I say you take him up on it!

I assume you will eventually be able to hear the segment here: http://prager-male-female-hour.blogspot.com/

when Amanda points out that there really are men out there who think this way, the same way Prager and the commenter have seriously advocated as the truth, those same men get all pissed off at her. This is just very funny to me.

It’s the “you say that like it’s a bad thing” argument, also known as “well, when you put it that way, sure it sounds bad.”

For these men to continue to be entitled to so-called uncontrollable animal behavior, women have to actually believe the men can’t help themselves. If a woman figures out the ruse, the convention is to act like she’s insane and hysterical and not actually repeating what you just said verbatim. 

I’d like to think that just being a basically okay human being means being good in bed, but, well, I don’t.

Well, I agree. But being a right-wing asshole almost guarantees you won’t, that’s all I’m saying, and that’s where right-wing assholes should be looking first.

Then whinger, as Amanda said earlier in the thread, it may be time to GTFO of the relationship and cut your losses.  You have the right to a fulfilling sex life, she has the right to say no.  If you’ve talked about it and she doesn’t want to change things, then perhaps you’re no longer compatible.

Whinger -

That doesn’t sound so good.  I mean, if she was okay with the idea of the two of you having other sexual partners, and now she doesn’t like that idea, and furthermore, does not have interest in having sex with you, it sounds like there’s something else going on other than just that you would be bad in bed.  That bad in bed thing can be overcome with communication and willingness to find out what pleases your partner.  As for the too tired/busy thing, there are ways around that (making time to have sex, rearranging household duties, etc.).  But this sounds a little more serious than that, especially since, as you state, “her preferred solution is for me to stop wanting to”.  That’s bit unfair to ask of someone for long term.  “I’ve got this huge two week project at work, so not now” is different than “not ever”.

It sounds like you care about your partner.  The people that are mocked here wouldn’t think to actually care about the person they married.

And what Gavel Down said.  If there’s no way to resolve it, then yeah, you should probably end the relationship.

Ok, I need help. I still have Christmas baking to do but...GAH!

Mountain Rose Location: CA
Reply # 172
Date: Dec 24, 2008 - 1:26 PM EST
I spend a lot of time at the local Zoo,
and find the courtship of animals to be very instructive.

The Giraffes at my local Zoo are very prolific, and the females have calves frequently. The one male is constantly courting the females, and will cut one from the herd, and follow her around for hours, while she waits until she is in the mood to hold still long enough for him to have his way with her.

Because humans of both sexes have been brainwashed into thinking that there is no difference between the genders, both men and women are disappointed in the natural behavior of the other.

I think it would help marriages a lot if men knew that a little persistance would go a long way in getting what they want. Women like being pursued, and like females of other species, get mor out of the attention from their mate than they get out of the act of mating.

Men are disappointed that woment don’t act like men, and woment get disappointed, because they have been brainwashed into thinking they have to chase the “Big O.”

Both need to learn to enjoy the courtship that is naturally built into our instincts by God, and I think that frequent trips to the Zoo in the Spring might save many a marriage.

I wanted to say that both the man and the woman should agree to give the other what they need.

Women, whether they admit it or not, would rather have the courtship part and forget the sex, while men would rather go straight for the finish and skip the courtship.

When a relationship is new, men seem to enjoy courting the woman, but after a while, he wearies of it, and feels like he just courted her yesterday. Likewise, women seem eager to go all the way to completion when the relationship is new.

It is only after time goes by, he wearies of the time it takes to keep courting the same woman, while she wearies of coitus without having the earth-shaking “Big O” that was promised her in Cosmopolitan.

It seems to me that they should make a verbal contract that he gets what he wants sometimes, and she gets what she wants sometimes.

But it goes beyond this, because the so-called liberated woman must get over the brainwashing that she has received, and start to know herself, the way God made her. If she is no longer disappointed that her “O"s are not going to be the peak experiences she has been taught to seek, she will start to enjoy the courtship from her man more, and be willing to give him sex in return for his attentions.

And if he stops thinking that his wife should have the same responses that he does, he will stop being disappointed in her natural responses.

A Zoo trip-- that is what’s needed.

“Other good questions: ‘Would my wife want to have sex with me if she had an orgasm almost every time? Is my wife attracted to me, or should I start working out and lose some weight? Is my wife cheating on me, and am I too self-centered to know it?’”

Wow, some idiot didn’t really type this did they?

So, if I understand you correctly: Wives have a right to deny sex if: A) The husband is overweight, B) If the husband does not make his wife orgasm, and finally C) If she having an affair because it’s the man’s fault and he’s too self centered.

Does this apply in reverse? If the wife gains too much weight, we have every right to cease physical contact? (After all, her body is all we care about) Or if she refuses to make sex pleasurable enough? (Well, if she’s not giving me head, I don’t want to touch her) And if the man is having an affair, it’s because his wife is 20 pounds overweight and won’t stick a cock in her mouth, and it’s also her own little self-centered fault.

If a guy is impotent, he has every right to tell his wife, “Just go masturbate or something. You’re a real pig for wanting sex.” Is that what I’m hearing?

And for all of you who gave the answer of “Go down on her"… F--- you. Would you tell a woman who feels her husband doesn’t love her that she’s a fat, frigid, self-centered sex maniac who should learn some self control and give more BJ’s? How pathetically crude this conversation has gotten.

As amusingly erroneous as James and his POV may be, I find that he has succeeded in pushing a good many of you into parrying his extreme assertions with extreme assertions of his own. By escalating the debate, he has led you down a primrose path where apparently you think all men are apparent rapists and there is absolutely NO expectations of a sexual relationship in marriage.

First of all, I had a 12 year marriage in which the sex was the only thing that worked. Towards the end, I was the one refusing sex. (I am male) Part emotional blackmail, part not feeling sexy when my kitchen looks like a science experiment. In short, this was simply not someone I loved anymore, and my desire towards them became non-existent.

I also work next to a guy who had a good marriage… Except for the sex. His wife had “issues” she didn’t want to talk about, didn’t care to fix… Once she was done giving him enough sex to snare him into marriage, she shut down. Any attempt to discuss this meant he didn’t care. Asking her to see a therapist to work through her issues was insensitive and showed he didn’t care. I believe that they were working on 2 1/2 years of marriage without sex by the time they divorced.

In both of these cases, the sex ceased for reasons unrelated to performance, looks, etc… And in both cases, long after the love and passion had faded, resentment and frustration grew. But sex, or the lack thereof, was a symptom of a larger problem. It was an effect, not a cause.

“Seriously, guys: tongue + alphabet + clitoris = instant wifely sex drive.”
No, Seriously: Internet + half=brain = douchebag

And finally, the article itself. “At the same time, men need to recognize that complete sexual fulfillment is unattainable in this world"… Oh, you poor man. Now I understand why you’re so angry. “Permanent” fulfillment is unattainable in this world. But “complete for the moment” is the goal of having sex in the first place. I feel like I just read a passage from an Ethiopian saying that it was impossible to eat enough to be full. I may be hungry again later in the day, but I walk away from most meals “full”. And likewise, I may be horny in a few days, but I leave most sexual encounters with my partner quite fulfilled. My partner and I, now going on two years, communicate and talk about sex, our fantasies and desires, and are both uninhibited and open-minded enough to meet each other on those desires. (And luckily enough we both imprinted normally in a Freudian sense, so neither one demands anything too out there.)

Mr Prager, I cannot suggest strongly enough that you try Tantra. Once you learn to truly connect with your partner, you might A) finally get some fulfilling sex, and B) be able to provide some. You know, people who suck at playing basketball generally don’t enjoy going out to play at the park. People who suck at sex…

Yeah Whinger, you and your wife have a problem that needs to be worked on.  Whatever you do, don’t sit around and feel sorry for yourself.  Then you’ll just get (even more?) bitter about it.  Try to work on whatever issues you and your wife have together and if you can’t come to a suitable resolution, then it’s time to go.  You and your wife are people, and you deserve to be happy.  You deserve to be with someone who will have sex with you.  She deserves to be with someone who meets her needs.  You’re not doing anyone any favors by resigning yourself to a sexless life.  You’ll be unhappy, and she will be unhappy because she will know she is hurting you.

I recently left a long term boyfriend who I just was no longer in to anymore.  He was a fine person, a good friend, attentive, great in bed.  I just didn’t want it anymore.  And I felt horrible about it while we were still together because I knew I was hurting him even though he was very kind and patient with me and never, ever gave me a hard time about the dearth of sex in our relationship.  I knew that the longer I let it go on that way the more unhappy we both would become.  And neither of us deserve that.

“Let’s put it this way: conversations we’ve had as recently as this afternoon have made it clear that her preferred solution is for me to stop wanting to.”

Assuming she’s been to the doctor to make sure there are no physical problems or medication side-effects at the root of her vanished libido, and assuming you’ve either done the therapy thing or she’s unwilling to do the therapy thing, then as others have said, it may be time to look at ending the relationship.  Even assuming for the moment that you’re bad in bed and the sex isn’t good for her and that’s why she doesn’t want it with you, a persistent refusal on her part to give direction or ask for more of what she does like or accept even no-strings-attached orgasms means that it isn’t going to improve.  You’re at an impasse that is unlikely to be resolved, given the current parameters of the situation.

Internet + half=brain = douchebag

Agreed. What happens is that I get agitated at reading too many of these articles about how women don’t want to have sex with the authors because women just hate sex in general. Just because women hear constantly that they’re too fat and ugly and frigid for their husbands to want to fuck them doesn’t mean anyone would benefit if men started hearing those things too. I do think people like Prager and James need to be shaken out of their stupidity, but I don’t think mine was the best way of going about trying to do that.

Does this apply in reverse? If the wife gains too much weight, we have every right to cease physical contact? (After all, her body is all we care about) Or if she refuses to make sex pleasurable enough? (Well, if she’s not giving me head, I don’t want to touch her) And if the man is having an affair, it’s because his wife is 20 pounds overweight and won’t stick a cock in her mouth, and it’s also her own little self-centered fault

Frankly, yes.  You have every right to refuse sex in a relationship, for ANY reason.  And your partner has every right to leave you if those reasons are inadequate or insulting, or if you can’t work out your differences.  What is it about “not owing your partner sex” do you not understand?

If a guy is impotent, he has every right to tell his wife, “Just go masturbate or something. You’re a real pig for wanting sex.” Is that what I’m hearing?

Nope, pretty much everyone in here has shown great sympathy for the deprived partner, double if they’re made to feel bad about having a sex drive.

First of all, I had a 12 year marriage in which the sex was the only thing that worked. Towards the end, I was the one refusing sex. (I am male) Part emotional blackmail, part not feeling sexy when my kitchen looks like a science experiment. In short, this was simply not someone I loved anymore, and my desire towards them became non-existent.

So you stopped fucking your wife because she didn’t do the dishes enough?  Wow.  But ignoring that (really obnoxious) bit about your kitchen, sounds like you had a bad experience.  An experience, I may add, that many women have shared with you.

My partner and I, now going on two years, communicate and talk about sex, our fantasies and desires, and are both uninhibited and open-minded enough to meet each other on those desires. (And luckily enough we both imprinted normally in a Freudian sense, so neither one demands anything too out there.)

And if she did want something “out there” you make your disgust clear enough that she’d never ask for it, cause she knows you’d stick her on your therapist’s couch.  Yeah, sounds great dude.

Yeah, I see your complaint, but if you’d done more than skim the comments you’d know that the point of the “must be bad in bed” thing is that Prager and his ilk treat women as if they are utterly inhuman receptacles, and that being insensitive and bad at sex is an inevitable outgrowth of that attitude.

So to sum up: they’re not saying all men who experience bed death in marriage are the ones at fault, just men who hold attitudes like the one in the article.

Capiche?

So, if I understand you correctly: Wives have a right to deny sex if: A) The husband is overweight, B) If the husband does not make his wife orgasm, and finally C) If she having an affair because it’s the man’s fault and he’s too self centered.

Anyone ALWAYS has the right to deny sex. Period. It might benefit this husband to find out why his wife doesn’t want to have sex with him, but it’s not about right.

James, I’ve got the solution for ya right here, buddy!:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article5375573.ece

Okay, the comment mentioning the zoo in spring has caused “First of May” to get stuck in my head.

I am *looks down* female and I like sex! Fortunately my partner and I have similar sex drives, sometimes one of us wants it when the other doesn’t. Sometimes we both want it and life gets in the way.

Every time my partner has wanted sex and I haven’t he’s accepted it. Every time I’ve wanted sex and my partner hasn’t (or just needed a bit more time to recharge) I’ve accepted it. When one of us really wants to get off and the other wasn’t interested we simply take matters into our own hands.

I appreciate that my partner likes me sexually, and that he’s a good lover. But if that’s all there was? If the only reason he stayed with me was so that there was a woman he could conveniently use to get his rocks off? Or if the only thing he had going for him was the ability to stimulate me to orgasm? I wouldn’t stay. If all one of us was after was sex we’d have no trouble finding someone. (I can easily think of two people who would gladly sleep with my man and I’m sure there are others.)

Do I always have a mind blowing orgasm? I only wish!! I know better than to expect one, and even though I’m sometimes unable to achieve orgasm no matter what anyone does I still consider sex with my Love to be fulfilling.

“I do think people like Prager and James need to be shaken out of their stupidity, but I don’t think mine was the best way of going about trying to do that. “

Junkscience:  I am glad to hear you say that.  I wasn’t looking to criticize you, but I hear comments along those lines every time there’s one of these threads on Pandagon and for guys like me it’s incredibly painful.

for guys like me it’s incredibly painful.

Right. The only reason I was kind of skipping over your general request for advice before is I’m the last person on earth you want to ask for advice on how to fix a straight marriage. But you do have my sympathy, for what it’s worth.

how to fix a straight marriage
Or a gay marriage, for that matter.

Was it Prager or Mike Adams that wrote that awful “If a woman is over 25, she’s completely unfuckable, being that she’s past her expiration date” article?  Or am I thinking of someone entirely different?

That was John Derbyshire, except I think he said it was over 12.

Ah, yes, now I remember.  It’s really hard to keep them straight.

I do think people like Prager and James need to be shaken out of their stupidity, but I don’t think mine was the best way of going about trying to do that.

Huh, maybe I read that post more charitably than it had been intended.  Well, criticism withdrawn for the most part then, Ham.

Let me clarify… You always have the right to refuse, and if you don’t care about the person or the relationship, then go for it. However, if someone who “loved me” said that they’re not going to have sex with me unless I lose 20 pounds, I would have to wonder if they even understood what “love” is. Prager even made that distinction.

“And if she did want something “out there” you make your disgust clear enough that she’d never ask for it, cause she knows you’d stick her on your therapist’s couch.  Yeah, sounds great dude. “

Do you jump to conclusions professionally, or is it just a hobby? There are certain things I refuse to do, mostly because they make sex unpleasant for me. If one of us wanted something that made the other uncomfortable, and we loved each other and wanted to make it work, we’d have to work around it. I won’t play out your rape fantasy, I won’t humiliate/degrade you in bed, I won’t do S&M;. Not because I think they’re overly dirty… But because pretending to be a rapist and/or degrading/hurting women is not pleasurable sex for me. Luckily that is not the case.

Finally, I had a housewife who didn’t do anything around the house. It wasn’t just the Kitchen. I came home from work at 5:00 to find she had slept all day. Did I consciously think “Hmmm, dishes are dirty, withhold sex.”? No. I just wasn’t feeling tender or loving to someone who was not contributing as a team member. It’s not that much different than women who are not turned on by their unemployed husband who doesn’t even go out looking for a job. Unless I cleaned house, things like dishes could go for months. On top of that, when I got home, I was the one expected to help the kids with their homework, get meals, etc… My ex did not work, didn’t do anything around the house, and wasn’t even much of a mother to our two children. I rarely felt the need/desire to express my love for her verbally or physically.

If Partner 1 withholds something from Partner 2 in a relationship, Partner 2 will eventually start withholding something from Partner 1. Usually that then escalates into Partner 1 withholding something else, and Partner 2 retaliating, and a few years later you have a broken marriage on your hands. It’s not pretty, but it is often the reality.

I also did far more than skim the comments, maybe you should re-read. Indeed, even the implication that guys aren’t getting sex from their wives because they refuse to eat out at the little pink taco bell is simply another way of saying that if guys aren’t getting any it must be because they don’t know how to please a woman.

Huh, maybe I read that post more charitably than it had been intended.

Probably not, because I agree pretty much entirely with what you said in your post to Ham. I have no sympathy for Prager and his ilk, who honestly don’t care if their wives are enjoying sex as long as they themselves get off once a week, but I don’t want to hurt the feelings of well-meaning guys whose wives happen to not want sex with them. The existing assumptions that women don’t like sex anyway, that women owe their husbands sex whether they like it or not, and so on, are getting in the way of addressing the real concerns of men and women whose partners’ sex drives don’t match their own. If we didn’t have to deal with guys like Prager, we could talk about the problems of people like whinger more fairly.

Do you jump to conclusions professionally, or is it just a hobby?

I play the semi-professional circuit.

If one of us wanted something that made the other uncomfortable, and we loved each other and wanted to make it work, we’d have to work around it.

Because you love them, freudian-stage-of-development retarded though they must be.

If Partner 1 withholds something from Partner 2 in a relationship, Partner 2 will eventually start withholding something from Partner 1. Usually that then escalates into Partner 1 withholding something else, and Partner 2 retaliating, and a few years later you have a broken marriage on your hands. It’s not pretty, but it is often the reality.

I also did far more than skim the comments, maybe you should re-read. Indeed, even the implication that guys aren’t getting sex from their wives because they refuse to eat out at the little pink taco bell is simply another way of saying that if guys aren’t getting any it must be because they don’t know how to please a woman.

Chill the fuck out- I mostly agree with everything you said.  I was just nitpicking, including the implications in your comment that may not be clear to everyone else.  “Housewife” isn’t really the assumption anymore, for a lot of people, and just saying “my wife didn’t clean the kitchen” sounds pretty appalling at first thought.

if guys aren’t getting any it must be because they don’t know how to please a woman

I don’t think Prager thinks women are capable of pleasure, only the warm glow of satisfaction at a job well done.

Gavel, was posting at the same time as you. No hard feelings. Like I say, I needed to clarify.

So, if I understand you correctly: Wives have a right to deny sex if: A) The husband is overweight, B) If the husband does not make his wife orgasm, and finally C) If she having an affair because it’s the man’s fault and he’s too self centered.So, if I understand you correctly: Wives have a right to deny sex if: A) The husband is overweight, B) If the husband does not make his wife orgasm, and finally C) If she having an affair because it’s the man’s fault and he’s too self centered.

Or if she decided she hates sex.  Or if she thinks you smell funny.  Or if she’s toying with you.  She can say no FOR WHATEVER REASON SHE WANTS.

You are not obligated to be in a relationship with someone who doesn’t want you.  Now, you suck, so that means that you probably won’t ever get a relationship without using coercion, guilt, or religion.  But if you were moral, you’d try to get laid the way the rest of us do---by being cute or charming enough to get it.  It’s doable, but you have to quit sucking first.

whinger, if someone unilaterally deprives you, and refuses to talk to you about it, I suggest you start planning your way out.  I’m serious.  It’s not just the lack of sex, but also the lack of communication.

Towards the end, I was the one refusing sex. (I am male) Part emotional blackmail, part

Wait a second, I just read this again...are you seriously saying you were withholding sex from your wife as emotional blackmail??

I take back everything conciliatory I said to you, ever.  You are a first rate wanker, and should be spat on by orphans.
However, to be fair, I think everyone should be spat on by orphans, because I haven’t been imprinted normally in a Freudian sense, you see.

“Because you love them, freudian-stage-of-development retarded though they must be. “

Ummm, not what I intended. We all imprint sexually at a young age. Some people imprint sexually on their mother’s shoes, the smell of pipe tobacco....

“Sexual imprinting is a concept that has been known to indigenous peoples for thousands of years but was first written about by a famous psychologist John Money. It explains why people like what they enjoy sexually and erotically and how that is guided by a template buried somewhere in our subconscious.”

By imprinting normally I just mean that neither of us developed a foot fetish, a need to be peed upon to enjoy sex… Normal being a social construct that may be right or wrong. If one partner has a foot fetish, and the other thinks having their toes licked is gross, there’s going to be problems. I have had partners in the past that had fantasies and/or desires that I didn’t enjoy. Willing to try? Yes. Willing to do twice a week for the rest of my life? I’ll pass.

In the same vein, there are things I’ve tried that I know I won’t enjoy, like playing out rape fantasies, so I’m not going to try them again. I found that experience deeply disturbing, and felt uncomfortable around that partner for quite a while after.

And for the record, if you like to role-play rape, do S&M;, have people take a crap on you… That’s your business, and it’s all great dude. I’m not a prude. I just know that I’m not going to enjoy those activities with you. Go suck horse cock if that’s your thing, just don’t expect that I’ll get turned on by it.

The whiff of bullshit is getting really, really strong.  There’s something about men speaking bullshit about sex that means they are 100% guaranteed to be sexist and annoying.

Towards the end, I was the one refusing sex. (I am male) Part emotional blackmail, part

Wait a second, I just read this again...are you seriously saying you were withholding sex from your wife as emotional blackmail??

Ummm, yes, I didn’t feel loved so I didn’t give her sex. I didn’t realize that was such a horrible crime. I guess I should have played the role of dutiful husband and submitted lest I be spit on by the poor orphans? Are you sure you disagree with the article you’re railing against?

I really think you could go pro, you have the skills.

Ummm, yes, I didn’t feel loved so I didn’t give her sex. I didn’t realize that was such a horrible crime. I guess I should have played the role of dutiful husband and submitted lest I be spit on by the poor orphans?

No you shitbag, you should have told her what the problem was instead of being a passive aggressive little fuck.

And for the record, if you like to role-play rape, do S&M;, have people take a crap on you… That’s your business, and it’s all great dude. I’m not a prude. I just know that I’m not going to enjoy those activities with you. Go suck horse cock if that’s your thing, just don’t expect that I’ll get turned on by it.

Er, one of these things is not like the other…

I’ve always enjoyed having a partner suspend antique over my left leg during sex while wearing ice skates and doing dramatic readings of Edward Albee plays.

This is the oversharing storyteller’s circle, isn’t it?

Oops, that’s antique furniture. Can’t get that part wrong.

James, perhaps you should stop getting relationship advice from a dentist and talk to your wife.  There is nothing wrong with not having sex.  If she doesn’t want to have sex with you grab a sock and some lotion and take care of yourself.  When my fiance doesn’t want to have sex I use my vibrator.  I have no problem with him not being in the mood and he doesn’t have any problem with me not being in the mood.

First of all, I had a 12 year marriage in which the sex was the only thing that worked.

So, are you saying that you only stayed for the sex?  Or is it a case where you didn’t realize that you were missing something else until waaay later?

I’d be more sympathetic if your choice of words did not leave something to be desired.  “I had a housewife”?  Really?  Factory direct or did you purchase her at the mall?  You have to be careful with that, and make sure you purchase the one that comes with the “does windows and dishes” option.  They’re pricey, but well worth it.

You also leave out any mention of trying to work it out, as well as any concern that she may have had a problem, like depression, or health problems.  Are we to believe that she just magically stopped doing these things without any reason whatsoever?  I mean, if she never did these things early in the marriage, why would you assume that she would later magically do dishes or vacuum?  And if it annoyed you then, why did you not only stay, but then had children with her?  Or did she do all of these things (homework with the children, stay-at-home mom, cleaning and cooking) and then suddenly stop doing them?  Perhaps maybe there was a reason for that?  Did you even discuss it with her?

The more you tell us, the more it’s starting to sound like you’re asshole.  Maybe you should just quit while you’re ahead.

Gavel, I have been very patient, but nothing I said has brought this conversation to the level where “shitbag” is really necessary.

Take care.

Gavel, I’m beginning to wonder if you’ve ever been in a relationship with another human being in your life.

Quid pro quo happens. And it’s not always “come to dinner with my in-laws and we’ll go see ‘The Spirit’ next week.” Sometimes it’s a negative quid pro quo, like “pick up your damn socks or you can forget bowling night.” “If you don’t clean this kitchen there’s no way I’ll cook tonight.” And, yes, sometimes “get off your lazy ass and pull your weight around here or you can forget getting laid tonight.”

It’s not people being their best to each other, but it happens. And quite frankly sleeping in bed all day while your partner pays the rent isn’t being your best either, unless there’s a good reason. Sex is great but it happens in the same universe where the dishes have to be done and the trash need to go out, bills need to be paid and kids dropped off somewhere, and there’s no reason to expect people to act like all the bullshit stops at the bedroom door.

I’m in a great marriage where my wife is every bit as enthusiastic about it as I am, but I can still have some sympathy for people like Ham. How in the world would you expect someone to go through a failing relationship acting like a complete saint in every way?

And, yes, sometimes “get off your lazy ass and pull your weight around here or you can forget getting laid tonight.”

It’s not people being their best to each other, but it happens. And quite frankly sleeping in bed all day while your partner pays the rent isn’t being your best either, unless there’s a good reason.

I have totally been in relationships where the other party used sex as a bargaining chip, and it was similarly shitbaggerly of them.  Just because it’s common doesn’t make it ok. If you’re honest about the reason “hon, i’m too upset over the fights we’ve been having about money to really be in the mood, i’m sorry” then it’s not emotional blackmail, now is it?

James, perhaps you should stop getting relationship advice from a dentist and talk to your wife.  There is nothing wrong with not having sex.  If she doesn’t want to have sex with you grab a sock and some lotion and take care of yourself.  When my fiance doesn’t want to have sex I use my vibrator.  I have no problem with him not being in the mood and he doesn’t have any problem with me not being in the mood.

You’re being kind of a dick, too, even if it’s to someone who deserves it.  Ham had a definite point about trivializing someone’s sex drive as wrong and too much to ask.  There’s nothing wrong with wanting sex from your partner, and you can and should leave if they won’t gratify it.

The problem with using sex as emotional blackmail or a bargaining chip is:

1) You’re only depriving yourself when you withhold
2)Sex is too fun to be weighed down with your damn baggage.

Fighting honestly is more fun, anyway.

I’m in a great marriage where my wife is every bit as enthusiastic about it as I am, but I can still have some sympathy for people like Ham. How in the world would you expect someone to go through a failing relationship acting like a complete saint in every way?

Chet - I actually have a great deal of sympathy for Ham, it sounds like he’s been in a very bad situation.  That doesn’t mean I have to refrain from calling out B.S.  I should add that I have also been the emotional manipulator and it was similarly shitbaggerly of me, as well. 

Gavel, I have been very patient, but nothing I said has brought this conversation to the level where “shitbag” is really necessary.

Take care.

Plz to take all your dignity with you when you go, kthx.

You also leave out any mention of trying to work it out, as well as any concern that she may have had a problem, like depression, or health problems.  Are we to believe that she just magically stopped doing these things without any reason whatsoever?  I mean, if she never did these things early in the marriage, why would you assume that she would later magically do dishes or vacuum?  And if it annoyed you then, why did you not only stay, but then had children with her?  Or did she do all of these things (homework with the children, stay-at-home mom, cleaning and cooking) and then suddenly stop doing them?  Perhaps maybe there was a reason for that?  Did you even discuss it with her?

It’s also really not okay to baselessly speculate about all the things he might theoretically have done wrong, either.

“You’re being kind of a dick, too, even if it’s to someone who deserves it.  Ham had a definite point about trivializing someone’s sex drive as wrong and too much to ask.  There’s nothing wrong with wanting sex from your partner, and you can and should leave if they won’t gratify it. “

I’m being a dick because I don’t demand my future husband give me sex anytime I want it?  If sex is the only thing in the relationship keeping you together than you should leave regardless of whether your getting it or not.  I have been with my fiance for three years and we haven’t had sex nearly as much as I would like but I don’t plan on leaving him.  We love each other on more than just a physical level.  There is nothing wrong with wanting sex form your partner, that’s true, but there is a problem with forcing your partner to have sex with you.

If someone really was going to put me on a no-sex diet, I would have to say, “We’re friends, not lovers, and that was YOUR choice.”

Happened to me.  After more than a year of being turned down, I just slowly lost my attraction.  That’s what happens.  And yeah, it’s very difficult for me (straight and female FTR) to separate sex from love in EITHER direction; they’re both very important to me.

Frankly, Prager’s article pisses me off partly because it ONCE AGAIN hints that women with high sex drives are fake or, at best, freaks, which frequently leads to us getting slut-shamed or otherwise treated like crap by the men we’re with.  It’s hard to take this Prager crap remotely seriously when you’ve gotten so much grief for being what men supposedly want.

I have totally been in relationships where the other party used sex as a bargaining chip, and it was similarly shitbaggerly of them.

I just want to be clear, Gavel. Is sex the only thing that shouldn’t EVER be a bargaining chip in a relationship, or is literally any person who engages in bargaining behavior within a relationship an irredeemable shitbag?

Or is just, you know, men?

If you’re honest about the reason “hon, i’m too upset over the fights we’ve been having about money to really be in the mood, i’m sorry” then it’s not emotional blackmail, now is it?

And how on Earth do you think you could deliver that line and not have it perceived, at least on some level, as “if you ever want to get laid again, you’ll come around to my position on the finances”? Of course its blackmail. I mean, you must be the one person credulous enough to hear the mobster’s line “awful nice store you got here; shame if it was to burn down” as nothing more sinister than advice to be careful with matches.

2)Sex is too fun to be weighed down with your damn baggage.

Amanda you must have considerably more faith in the human species than I do if you think there’s anything too fun to weight down with baggage.

There is nothing wrong with wanting sex form your partner, that’s true, but there is a problem with forcing your partner to have sex with you.

You treat it so binary-ly.  There’s nothing wrong with being upset with your partner if they’re constantly not in the mood and you’re feeling deprived.

I have been with my fiance for three years and we haven’t had sex nearly as much as I would like but I don’t plan on leaving him.

If you guys have talked it out and you’ve decided you can live with it, great, but you shouldn’t chide other people for not being able to do that.  As whinger has shown us, it’s an awful situation to be in when you really can’t handle it, and it’s not ok to imply that he and others like him are somehow at fault.

I just want to be clear, Gavel. Is sex the only thing that shouldn’t EVER be a bargaining chip in a relationship, or is literally any person who engages in bargaining behavior within a relationship an irredeemable shitbag?

Or is just, you know, men?

No - in that bit from me you quoted, my partner, a woman, was being a total shitbag.  I think you mistake “acting/behaving very badly” with “roast in hell forever” and they’re not really, you know, equivalent.

And how on Earth do you think you could deliver that line and not have it perceived, at least on some level, as “if you ever want to get laid again, you’ll come around to my position on the finances”? Of course its blackmail. I mean, you must be the one person credulous enough to hear the mobster’s line “awful nice store you got here; shame if it was to burn down” as nothing more sinister than advice to be careful with matches.

Good line, but manslaughter isn’t the same as murder, is it?  If you don’t mean it as emotional blackmail but that’s how it sounds to the other person, that’s not at all the same thing as admitting you were purposefully withholding sex as a punishment.

Straight women with high sex drives, I should say.

And yes, the idea that women don’t feel more loved and secure when we know we’re desired is crap, crap, craaaaaaaap.

Amanda you must have considerably more faith in the human species than I do if you think there’s anything too fun to weight down with baggage.

It’s possible, but a bad idea.  Baggage is for your journal, not your sex life.  Or, you know, people could talk about their issues, and remember, if you always have a way out, you’re much less likely to make poor choices because you feel hopeless.

If you’re honest about the reason “hon, i’m too upset over the fights we’ve been having about money to really be in the mood, i’m sorry” then it’s not emotional blackmail, now is it?

And how on Earth do you think you could deliver that line and not have it perceived, at least on some level, as “if you ever want to get laid again, you’ll come around to my position on the finances”?

That doesn’t work either. Are you just supposed to suck it up, hand over the sex, and stop trying to “blackmail” your partner by telling them how you feel? What if they don’t mean to say they’ll fuck you again if you give in to them about finances just because you want to get laid?

A lot of people don’t want to have sex when they’re angry or feel used or unloved by their partner. Are they supposed to say why, lie about the problem, or do what their partner wants anyway?

If you don’t mean it as emotional blackmail but that’s how it sounds to the other person, that’s not at all the same thing as admitting you were purposefully withholding sex as a punishment.

I dunno, sounds like a difference without a difference to me. Or rather, the difference seems to be nothing more than a lack of self-awareness.

But I can appreciate that you might see it differently. Good thing we’re not married to each other, I guess.

That doesn’t work either. Are you just supposed to suck it up, hand over the sex, and stop trying to “blackmail” your partner by telling them how you feel?

No, you’re supposed to get over your fear of engaging in bargaining inside your relationship and stop calling it “blackmail”. If you don’t want sex as much as you want the dishes done, and your partner feels the reverse, both of you are going to do something you don’t like to get something you do.

Or, you know, you can pretend that bargaining is “blackmail” and basically be at loggerheads forever.

Are they supposed to say why, lie about the problem, or do what their partner wants anyway?

Whatever gets them what they do want. Sure, nobody should be forced to have sex when they don’t feel like it. Intelligent people, though, perceive circumstances where they might choose to, anyway, instead of standing on principle and being a dick to someone they care about. (I’ve done it, for sure.)

Or is just, you know, men?

By the way, if this indicates that Chet thinks i’m female, that would be just about the awesomest thing ever.

No, you’re supposed to get over your fear of engaging in bargaining inside your relationship and stop calling it “blackmail”. If you don’t want sex as much as you want the dishes done, and your partner feels the reverse, both of you are going to do something you don’t like to get something you do.

Or, you know, you can pretend that bargaining is “blackmail” and basically be at loggerheads forever.

How many housecleaning and/or argument acquiescence points does sex get you?

Yeah, i’m pretty glad we’re not married too.

Whatever gets them what they do want.

How about if what they want is honesty?

Related point. I don’t do makeup sex.  I get that there are people who can just drop it and go at it like frenzied bunnies after a big blowup, but my own mind and body just does not work that way. I’ve tried a time or ten, simply to make the BH feel better, but thirty years later, I don’t play that game. Talk to me, or leave me alone.

It is not alright with me to use sex as an apology when the satisfaction is one-sided and verbal mea culpas are not forthcoming. I don’t feel good, I don’t feel close...I just feel used and resentful.

Annnnd...neither do I accept that a day of pissy manliness can be made up by that same one-sided sex. Make nice and communicate...or make tracks.

I dunno, sounds like a difference without a difference to me. Or rather, the difference seems to be nothing more than a lack of self-awareness.

The guy says in so many words that he was withholding sex from his wife as emotional blackmail, and there’s a calculating self-awareness there that I wouldn’t apply to people who are trying to negotiate a heated situation where neither of them are going to be entirely happy with the result.

There seem to be a few people in this thread who are missing the point. I made this little chart to help them:

X1--R-------------------------------------------------------------X2

Where X1 = “reasonable commentary about difference in sex drive between partners, with possible suggestions of compromise that takes into account the feelings of all parties,” R = “the divide between reasonable and unreasonable,” and X2 = “Dennis Prager.” I hope that clears things up.

Hear hear sir! Just as you say!

(pounding beer stein on table)

Amanda wrote:

You only get one life, and if you find yourself saddled with a partner who has decided for you that your life is going to be dull and colorless and sexless, you really should move on.  You only get one.  Only one.  Let me repeat: Only one.  Wasting your precious time in unhappy, sexless relationships because it’s “just sex” sounds horrifying to me.  Life is for living.  If someone really was going to put me on a no-sex diet, I would have to say, “We’re friends, not lovers, and that was YOUR choice.”

Hope you’d make an exception for illness here.  While it fortunately isn’t my situation, I know a couple of couples where cancer has led to some pretty long-term sexless lives.

I don’t know...many times she does have orgasms when we have sex. I am a little overweight but not that much. I believe she may issues from previous relationships, she told me she was date-raped by an old boyfiend. (emphasis added)

If James is too fucking stupid to make the connection between his demand for forced marital sex/rape and the fact that his wife was previously date-rated, he is too stupid to breed and I hope she cuts his dick off.  Harsh, but seriously.

“No, you’re supposed to get over your fear of engaging in bargaining inside your relationship and stop calling it “blackmail”. If you don’t want sex as much as you want the dishes done, and your partner feels the reverse, both of you are going to do something you don’t like to get something you do.”

If we stop calling it blackmail, can we start calling it prostitution?

Well, obviously you make an exception for this or for that, Dana.  I think the problem is when someone literally just shuts down, there’s no hope in sight, and communication is at in impasse.  Illness, a bad mood, tired, just not in the mood---regular rejection is part of monogamy.  But there comes a point where one person is pursuing fruitlessly and receiving nothing but rejection, and there’s an impasse where someone just isn’t your lover anymore.  If someone is willfully never having sex with you---or only do it because they “have” to---they aren’t your lover.  Life is too short not to at least TRY to have a real partner who you can have a fun, sexy relationship with, if that’s what you want.

But there comes a point where one person is pursuing fruitlessly and receiving nothing but rejection, and there’s an impasse where someone just isn’t your lover anymore.  If someone is willfully never having sex with you---or only do it because they “have” to---they aren’t your lover.  Life is too short not to at least TRY to have a real partner who you can have a fun, sexy relationship with, if that’s what you want.

I would add that in such a relationship this dynamic is probably playing out in areas other than sex--i.e., intimacy, emotional connection, communication, etc.  Relationship problems often express themselves as sexual problems because sex is an area where it is hard to deny that a problem exists--you’re either getting it or your not, it’s either satisfying or it isn’t.  Unfortunately, by the time a relationship becomes sufficiently distressed that a couple’s sex life is seriously affected, it is often rather late to begin couple’s therapy; enough bad feelings and resentments have accumulated that the relationship may be difficult to salvage.  As with medicine, there is a point in relationship therapy where the patient (i.e., the relationship) simply cannot be saved, and the best the therapist can do is guide the couple through an amicable divorce.

Having said that, issues of genuine sexual incompatibility do exist, and may exist independently of the quality of the emotional relationship.  In these cases, a professional who specialized in sex therapy is probably the couple’s best bet.  It is entirely possible that an otherwise happy relationship could fail due sexual incompatibility or dysfunction.  In my experience as a marital therapist, however, sexual problems are usually the result, not the initial cause, of problems in the relationship as whole.

Of course, my experience is hardly exhaustive.  As always, YMMV.

And then there’s the opposite, when a woman works hard, is the sole support of the family due to a bad economy, and does everything she can to keep a happy home, and her husband refuses to have sex, either with or without a condom.

I recall recently reading about a study that found that married men who do more housework get more sex.  Seems to be a reasonable example of basic human nature to me. A successful long-term relationship requires a lot of little compromises. I doubt the bargain is explicit, or even implicit, in most cases. More like a healthy spiral of self-re-enforcing behavior.

Prager is clearly an intellectual and emotional mess (whiny little sissy boy) and the dreck quoted above is embarrassing. The real answer is just so simple. Be nice and care about the needs of those you love. Best if you expect nothing in return. If that doesn’t work, then at least it’s not your problem and, as Amanda suggests, it might be time to move on.

I love how for so many feminists, comparing someone to a prostitute is such a huge insult.

It’s so… polite.

whiny little sissy boy

Hey now, what the fuck? I also have issues with the way he’s behaved, but was that really fucking necessary? Calling someone a sissy is an insult because you’re calling them a woman. And clearly, being a woman is a fate worse than death. Or something.

but was that really fucking necessary?

Yes. Yes it was. 

The projection… jeez.

...because you called him a girl? Please explain. He engaged in behavior that was emotionally manipulative. Again, in what way does that make him a woman?

Ah, shouldn’t we have something better to do on Xmas morn? The problem, you see, is that I did not call him a girl. I called him a boy. Not the same thing at all.

whiny little sissy boy

The fuck you did.

“Because of its origins in a feminine nickname, sissy is also a pejorative for a boy or man to indicate or imply that he is like a sister, that is, effeminate and fails to behave according to the traditional male gender role. Generally, it implies a lack of the courage and stoicism which are thought important to the male role. It might also imply interests seen as strikingly un-masculine.” - Wikipedia

Asshole.

Amanda wrote:

Well, obviously you make an exception for this or for that, Dana.

I’m glad someone here realizes this.  As I was reading through this thread, it seemed to me that there were a lot of assumptions being taken, by a lot of people, when there are so many different ways in which people structure their marriages.  I’m only 55, my wife is just 49, and our daughters are just can’t conceive of the notion that their parents might have had sex more than the two times necessary for their existence. (Pun intended) And it’s not like we have separate bedrooms or anything like that.

One point that may have been made earlier, but if so, I missed it: a lot of times one person will try to get the ball rolling when sex wasn’t really on the other’s mind, but in the process the non-initiating partner starts to get more interested.  Obviously if the second person doesn’t get more interested, things just don’t work out.

“I love how for so many feminists, comparing someone to a prostitute is such a huge insult.

It’s so… polite.”

Assuming that you’re talking to me, say what, now? 

Chet’s in something of a snit that someone called out explicit transactional behavior with regards to sex within a relationship as emotional blackmail when the person describing the behavior in which they engaged actually called it emotional blackmail.  He is, in fact, encouraging exchanging access to one’s genitals for services and/or goods within a relationship as just The Way Things Are.  The debate over whether or not sex work is healthy or feminist or can ever be a completely uncoerced choice is a very different one than the question of whether or not swapping sex for things you want within an established, presumably non-barter-based sexual relationship is an unhealthy and destructive behavior.  Hopefully we can all agree that working out a payment system for sex within a relationship that is not otherwise based on sexual contact for pay/support is not conducive to that relationship remaining healthy, and that describing the behavior as “bargaining” instead of “emotional blackmail” or “prostitution” is not going to make it so.  I don’t think anyone would even bother trying to pretend it was totes ok if the partners in question were coming up with price lists for less- or non-sexual positive behavior, such as hugging, compliments, or saying “I love you.”

For the cheap seats: I was not saying “Zomg, Chet/Chet’s partner is a whore!” Sex worker is a job description, not an insult.

Don’t rag on knitting!  I knit!  It’s not at all as lame as Bibling!

As much as I love open and intelligent discussions on the use of language and related issues such as precision and the appropriateness, or not, of gender references, I will respectfully defer that discussion. At this time, I’ll just note that I use a better dictionary and leave it at that.

Otherwise, no offense intended.  The regular commenters here are some of my favorite imaginary internet friends. I wish happy holidays on you all…

I don’t know if it’s an insult to point out that sex-for-payment is in fact called prostitution.  I think it’s *good* for sex workers if we point that women’s sexuality is constructed in a patriarchy as a form of prostitution no matter what.  The problem is that some forms of sex work are legitimized in our culture by slapping a ring on the woman and calling her a “wife”.  But for patriarchs like Prager, who believe that women don’t have sex for pleasure, all sex acts are a form of prostitution.  He made it clear---women don’t have sex, they “give their bodies”, usually in exchange for some kind of payment or as a gift, which is also a kind of economic transaction.  Women “give their bodies” in exchange for love, security, status, or money.  Sex isn’t a communal activity in a patriarchy---it’s transactional.

But as many sex workers will tell you, that ain’t always so.  Many sex workers have a work life and a sex life that it separate from it, a place where sex is something they engage for fun and not for work.  Clearly, sex can be something women engage in with *full* consent, not purchased consent. 

The second you see that wifehood is constructed as a form of glorified prostitution in our society, you are able to question both wifehood and prostitution, and in doing so, you have to ask why are prostitutes debased.  And the reason is so that wives don’t see that they are also debased by this system, because wives can compare themselves to prostitutes.  What we all need to do is compare ourselves to *men*, and then we can see that prostitutes, wives, girlfriends (not that these are mutually exclusive categories)---we’re all in this together.

I agree with you Amanda, although I do want to point out that prostitution is a kind of rental, while the traditional wifely role (particularly as envisaged by Prager) is a type of sale. But I think in this case the intention of comparing the use of sex as a bargaining tool with prostitution was to insult/degrade/belittle the practice by comparing it with prostitution. While in a sense this achieves the good purpose of making the comparison you suggest, it also continually restates the frame that prostitutes are bad people and real women aren’t like prostitutes. I don’t like that frame, I think it is demeaning for everyone who uses it.

(In fact for this reason I also don’t like comparing right-wing thinktank staff to prostitutes because they sell their ideas to the highest bidder. It maintains the common framework of prostitutes as bad people. I think “mercenary” would be a better insult).

But it’s an aside. let’s all get back to the business of insulting each others’ relationships!

Some people feel that marriage is about a woman giving herself (or her father giving her) to a man for his needs and pleasure. It is possible for a relationship like this to be healthy, although I doubt very much it can happen when one person is so arrogant as to think that it is their right to be “the boss” rather than seeing it as a gift that the submissive gives of her (or his) free will.

I don’t view prostitution as wrong, the trouble is that very few sex workers are in it because they decided it was a good way to make money but rather feel, rightly or wrongly, that they have no choice.

Comparing marriage to prostitution is, at best, an oversimplification. A “Good wife” is expected to do a lot more than merely have sex with her husband. She is expected to see to the running of the household and raising of the children. When a woman enters into this type of marriage she is contracting out more than her sexual services.

Like prostitution a lot of women enter into this type of marriage not because it is something they want but because they perceive, rightly or wrongly, that they don’t have a choice.

I don’t think the article is really about sex, but rather about a woman’s place being beneath her husband’s.

Because I’m a terrific MIL, and no longer Alpha Mom, we will not be celebrating Xmas with our boys and their brides until tomorrow. (spares everyone, trust me) I went ahead and listened to Prager’s response to Jesse’s outrage. Or as much of it as I could stomach.

Ladies, you will be happy to know that “mood” is irrelevant when it comes to marital sex.  (News to me) It is the nature of men to own a perpetual erection, regardless of mood...and if your husband is not in the “mood” to make the sex good for you...oh well.

Prager equates marital sex with duties like going to work, to school, and optional choices like taking a shower and brushing your teeth, and waking up with the baby, getting married, and yes, prayer....because, you know, intimate sexual relations has nothing to do with mutual enjoyment. Duty will out. Clearly...sex is something men do to women...not something men and women participate in together. Duty, Ladies!

Prager insists that men are sexually primitive compared to women...and Prager denies that he is insisting that women submit to the primitive male sexual drive while simultaneously insisting that if you love your primitive man...you will do precisely that...no matter the cost to you.

There is additional crap...the noxious fawning of his callers was more than I could take.

By the way, if this indicates that Chet thinks i’m female

Huh? I don’t think you’re female. I just think you’re a moron.

Sex worker is a job description, not an insult.

If the definition of “sex worker” is now “someone who has sex in exchange for something they want”, then yes, everyone is a sex worker.

Which, of course, means no one is. Which, I suppose, is why I have basically no problem with prostitution. By a sufficiently expansive definition, I’ve been one, and so has everybody else.

And the reason is so that wives don’t see that they are also debased by this system, because wives can compare themselves to prostitutes.  What we all need to do is compare ourselves to *men*

This I agree with 100%.

For real, I’m with Amanduh! What’s with the teasing about knitting, AND stew-making, for that matter? Me and my wool socks and my African groundnut stew take exception to that.

This Prager article is horseshit. See Dan Savage for good advice on marriages with incompatible sex schedules.

People like these are the reason marriages won’t exist in 50 years at all.

Prager also was outraged at the comments over at Jezebel’s place. (He sneered at the website name, as if uppity womanhood is an insult)

“Lies, lies,” Prager cries....apparently ignoring the comment that thirty seconds of titty twisting and clit fumbling is far too often the TRUE experience of women who are frequently not in the “mood.’

If the definition of “sex worker” is now “someone who has sex in exchange for something they want”, then yes, everyone is a sex worker.

what? i’ve never exchanged sex for anything. i’ve only had sex when i wanted sex, thank you very much

It is amazing how you idiot leftist take written words out of context, go read the entire article and take note of the conditions Prager puts on the therory of his article......

Which ones, John? I note that:

...nothing Prager says applies if I do not truly love my husband or if my husband is not a good man. Those conditions?

how on Earth do you think you could deliver that line and not have it perceived, at least on some level, as “if you ever want to get laid again, you’ll come around to my position on the finances”?

By not being the kind of person who does passive-aggressive shit like disguising an ultimatum as a description of your feelings?

I mean trust me, if that’s the kind of thing you do, your partner(s) will know, and yup, they’ll receive it exactly as it deserves to be received.

And if it’s not the kind of thing you do—if “We’ve been arguing a lot and I feel upset and not very sexy right now” can be taken at face value to mean exactly that—well, then, your partner will know that too.

*gag* I think I just threw up a bit reading that article.

One measure of whether it’s a description of your feelings or a disguised ultimatum is how willing you are to entertain alternate solutions that address your expressed concern.  If you say “I don’t feel romantic tonight because of all the dirty dishes you left,” would you accept your partner suggesting that next time you eat out so there are no dirty dishes to deal with, or are you determined to have your partner do the dishes, dammit?  If the latter, then either it’s emotional blackmail or the real concern goes deeper.  It’s possible in that case that the real concern is how much you each are contributing to the relationship, but then you should recognize and try to talk about that.

EDGuy, another test is sequential concerns.  Pretty much every low-to-no sex couple I’ve come across had that problem of “reasons that weren’t the real reasons” for the No: on Monday it was the dishes, on Wednesday it was an argument over nothing, on Friday it was a pressing need to talk about little Johnny’s school or music, on Sunday it was a concern about some component of the requesting partner’s personality or actions that needed discussion, on Tuesday it was a scheduled-at-the-last minute other obligation..... (and you get the idea) ... for weeks or months on end.

This isn’t necessarily intentional behaviour on the part of the refusing spouse.  As noted in another thread, I often saw the that refuser was genuinely unaware that there was always an excuse or avoidance lined up until doomsie-day.  They genuinely thought that once problem A or obstacle B was dealt with then there’d be no problem, and were frequently oblivious to the fact that they weren’t on A or B, but Z.947 and counting.

In the cases where there was no real substantive problem or genuine grievance with the refused spouse therapy generally didn’t help, at least in any of the files that I saw: the refuser spouse was genuinely convinced that either the other spouse or external things out of their control were responsible; the denial levels—whether deliberate or just clueless—were quite startling.

This blog really attracts the freaks doesn’t it?

I was sorta gobsmacked by James, and then...it’s just too much, y’all.  I really hate to think what would happen if there wasn’t moderation.

Don’t worry, Shah8, James was a troll.  If you follow the pattern, his written speech changes from time to time as he tries to ape the pattern of “Red Neckerson” versus “Jeebus Freek,” though ultimately he’s probably got a whole bag of different issues.

T