21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: How a lack of sex is making women ANGRY. “While Corrine’s mood swings may bear some resemblance to the symptoms of pre-menstrual tension or mild anxiety, they are completely unrelated to her hormones or mental state. Her crushingly low spirits are caused by something else altogether: when she last made love. Too long without sex, and she becomes miserable and fractious. . . . Dr Geoff Hackett, a leading expert in sexual medicine and former chairman of the British Society for Sexual Medicine, believes if we carry on like this, sex is in danger of being a lost art. ‘The domestic set-up in the Fifties, for example, seemed to positively encourage sex,’ he says. ‘But nowadays there’s not enough focus on it.'”
Hey, maintenance sex isn’t just for men.
And it reminds me of this from Caitlin Flanagan over a decade ago:
It turns out that the “traditional” marriage, which we’ve all been so happy to annihilate, had some pretty good provisions for many of today’s most stubborn marital problems, such as how to combine work and parenthood, and how to keep the springs of the marriage bed in good working order. . . .
Nowadays, American parents of a certain social class seem squeaky clean, high-achieving, flush with cash, relatively exhausted, obsessed with their children, and somehow—how to pinpoint this?—undersexed.
If I Don’t Know How She Does It, a book about a working woman who discovers deep joy and great sex by quitting her job and devoting herself to family life, had been written by a man, he would be the target of a lynch mob the proportions and fury of which would make Salman Rushdie feel like a lucky, lucky man. But of course it was written by a with-it female journalist, so it’s safe, even admired. Allison Pearson, we have been given to understand, is telling it like it is. And what she’s telling us, essentially, is that in several crucial aspects the women’s movement has been a bust, even for the social class that most ardently championed it.
Indeed. Hey, maintenance sex isn’t just for men.