This comment was from That Guy, in response to Joanna Schroeder, on the post “Does Masturbation End When You Move in Together?“
There’s something to the idea that women don’t really have as many messages about being sexy once they’re married and have children. If pop culture is any indication, there are very few women in movies or on TV who are married and have children and are having great sex with their husbands. Maybe having sex with other men, but never within a marriage. (Same with men – not a lot of steamy sex scenes between married people either way.) In fact, you are probably more likely to see a love scene between two people who are married to OTHER people than see sweet lovin’ between people married to each other. I do quite a bit of bookstore browsing, and it’s the same with novels, especially romance novels. If there’s hot sex and marriage involved, the book and the sex usually ends with the wedding.
It’s very telling that even when we fantasize about what could be, even when we can make characters do anything we want them to, they still don’t get to have sex once they’re married!
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photo: arhadetruit / flickr
About the Editors
I don’t think this is a commentary on marriage as much as it is about the eroticization of the forbidden, created by shaming sexuality.
I love it when people talk about “shaming sexuality”. Sure there is nothing shameful about sex, just like there is nothing shameful about taking a crap. Either way, though, I don’t want anybody to watch me do it, and I don’t want to see anybody else doing it. Maybe just my opinion, but, while not shameful, definitely still private. Besides, sexuality in our society is far from shameful. Shame would imply something secretive, something to be hidden. I take a look at just about every form of modern entertainment, and people are practically bombarded with sex, from video games to movies and television shows to romance novels to magazines. Once again, just my opinion.
Well, cultures that are the most conservative tend to be the most oversexed in terms of what the media portrays. Look at Japan. We know their culture is one of stoicism, but if you look at their porn market, it can be downright terrifying.
Oh it’s a commentary on Marriage alright. That’s why those parental scenes in Transformers stick out so much. Being single is packaged as youthful, fun, sexy, free and independent where as having a husband….
Shame has little to do with the absence.
Taboo has something to do with it, but that can’t be the full explanation. If it were just the intrigue sparked by “the forbidden,” then you would expect a lot more sexual fantasies involving bigamy, or a man cheating on his wife with another woman who’s also his wife. Or, there would be more married sex out there between characters who are otherwise outlaws. Or more sex between people who thought they were married but really weren’t. The closest we get is a married couple in which one has amnesia, so it’s sort of like cheating but not.
I think his point is that when many of us let our imaginations run wild in terms of sexual fantasy, being married to the person very rarely enters the picture. Even in moments of pure lusting after a good-looking celebrity, I imagine all sorts of scenarios, but never a honeymoon scenario. Theoretically, the “wedding night” has all sorts of fantasy possibilities, but that’s not where the mind goes. (When my wife drools at a David Beckham commercial, I doubt she is imagining him standing at the altar.) It’s easier to imagine two unmarried people thrown together by an extraterrestrial invasion than a married couple re-igniting their love because of an alien invasion. We can imagine living on other planets and slaying dragons more easily than hot married sex.
Do I get to say I’m a GMP contributing author now? If I had known this I would have been more careful about what I wrote. Now I feel guilty about using a fake e-mail address….
I was just thinking about this, and thinking that the lack of marital sex in pop culture could be good news for married couples. At least theoretically. Hear me out. Possibly, there’s no reason for marital sex in our cultural fantasies because married people are already quite sexually fulfilled. Maybe our society doesn’t fantasize much about things that are very common. Maybe the absence of great married sex in our pop culture is a sign that everything is working pretty well, and all those single people are the ones pining for excitement, romance, and a happy ending. I mean happy ending a general sense, not the “How Can I Get More Oral Sex?” article kind of happy ending.
But, you know, I doubt it. Our TV shows and movies and novels show our fantasies, but they also hold a mirror up to the way that we are. In very few of these stories, whether slice-of-life or total fantasy, are there married couples with steamy sexual relationships. This is really surprising when you consider all the pressure than society puts on people to get married. You would think that, with all the other exaggeration about how much more fabulous it is to be partnered up than to be single, with all the pressure to be part of a “committed couple,” that there would be more propaganda about how great sex is in long-term relationships. You would think that this would be part of the sales pitch, but instead the messages in our pop culture are very different.
It’s changing somewhat. In one _Modern Family_ episode, it’s a source of humor that the kids accidentally walk in on their parents having sex, but it’s not treated as some really bizarre aberration that they would have sex (and it’s not even missionary sex!). It’s just a tremendously awkward moment.