I’ve been listening to my happily marries guy friends as we smoke cigars, ride bikes, and attend family picnics. I keep hearing similar things from quite different 40-something year-old married men. It has to do with the role of sex in their marriage. These are men who love their wives. But I keep hearing about the complex calculus of how and when these guys might get some action, when it will be withheld, and the rules of passionate engagement for married men in 2011.
I’m used to guys bemoaning the role of husband, complaining about gender differences, and even the vexing challenge of raising teenagers. But I’ve been struck in the last few weeks how many men are talking quite openly about their desire for more passion. It could be random and is far from a scientific sample. But still. These are not guys—money managers, lawyers, scientists—I would not expect to be so open about their yearning for intimacy.
At the same time have noticed more women who seem content to separate sex from the rest of their lives. I was listening to comedian Sarah Colonna joke about wanting a man across the street she can sleep with when she needs physical pleasure with but she really doesn’t want a husband or a boyfriend.
Part of what my married guy friends seem to be saying, I think, is that their wives focus most of their passion on their female friendships. Husbands are around, at least to some extent, to service various needs. But emotional passion is a female-on-female thing and sexual passion is just not all that interesting anymore.
Finally, we have Erica Jong weighing in today in the NYT piece, “Is Sex Passé?”:
Generalizing about cultural trends is tricky, but everywhere there are signs that sex has lost its frisson of freedom. Is sex less piquant when it is not forbidden? Sex itself may not be dead, but it seems sexual passion is on life support.
Jong goes on to talk specifically about women of the “next generation,” which would be mine:
Sex for women leads to madness in attics, cancer and death by fire. Better to soul cycle and write cookbooks. Better to give up men and sleep with one’s children. Better to wear one’s baby in a man-distancing sling and breast-feed at all hours so your mate knows your breasts don’t belong to him. Our current orgy of multiple maternity does indeed leave little room for sexuality. With children in your bed, is there any space for sexual passion? The question lingers in the air, unanswered.
I really have no way if it is true, but what I would like to believe is that men are actually thirsty for passionate sex, the kind that actually means something. All this porn and sexting and debasing of romance has scared women off. And us guys are left longing for the real thing.
Or as Erica Jong puts it from the perspective of the woman who famously wrote Fear of Flying:
Different though we are, men and women were designed to be allies, to fill out each other’s limitations, to raise children together and give them different models of adulthood. We have often botched attempts to do this, but there is valor in trying to get it right, to heal the world and the rift between the sexes, to pursue the healing of home and by extension the healing of the earth.
Physical pleasure binds two people together and lets them endure the inevitable pains and losses of being human. When sex becomes boring, something deeper is usually the problem — resentment or envy or lack of honesty. So I worry about the sudden craze for Lysistrata’s solution [Aristophanes’ play in which Lysistrata convinces the other women of Greece to withhold all sexual gratification from their men until the men negotiate an end to the Peloponnesian War]. Why reject honey for vinegar? Don’t we all deserve sugar in our bowls?
If my little non-scientific poll is any indication, us guys have noticed what is going on. We miss you and the passion which has been replaced with functional sex, kids in bed, and emotional connections to girlfriends rather than us.
I am with Jong that generalizing about cultural trends is a tricky business, but there are at least a few guys I know who are looking for loving of the most intimate kind.