So…. my wife and I are childless by choice. Does this mean we’re going to have a dull and boring, kinky-is-leaving-the-lights-on, sort of sex life?Report
That’s a good question.
It might mean that your choice reflects a longing for perpetual adolescence, and we all know teenagers are hot.Report
You clearly have not spent enough time at my house.Report
Perhaps it’s an understanding of the importance and responsibility of being Green. It doesn’t really matter how much carbon dioxide you create if you’re responsible for having 300 great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren now, is it?Report
That’s perfect – you’re sharing the childcare responsibilities exactly evenly!Report
If they want to have more sex with each other, they can babysit my kids anytime.
They should wait on the sex until after I pick the kids back up though.Report
Marcotte’s piece is a great example in the genre of “horrible people being horrible”. Which is all well and good fun for pointing and laughing.
Seriously, I suspect that the result in the first link is tied not only to a reduction in resentment (that of wife toward husband) and fatigue, but that equal childcare responsibility is also a marker for differential attitudes about sex.
In the traditional gender system, women are not really supposed to feel desire. That’s where slut-shaming comes from, after all. Desire is assigned to the male partner. I’ve read research that suggests that while brain scans show that the same thing is happening in the brains of men and women who watch porn, women do not report nearly the level of arousal as men. (Granted that could be because of the orientation of the porn … but remember the brain scans). Women have tended to dissociate their sexual feelings, and that’s going to lead to a sexless relationship after a while, I think. And all of this could be correlated to views on childcare.Report
I thought I read a while back that there was a phase of Anglo-American history in which women were thought to have much higher sex drives than men.
So…. my wife and I are childless by choice. Does this mean we’re going to have a dull and boring, kinky-is-leaving-the-lights-on, sort of sex life?Report
That’s a good question.
It might mean that your choice reflects a longing for perpetual adolescence, and we all know teenagers are hot.Report
You clearly have not spent enough time at my house.Report
Perhaps it’s an understanding of the importance and responsibility of being Green. It doesn’t really matter how much carbon dioxide you create if you’re responsible for having 300 great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren now, is it?Report
That’s perfect – you’re sharing the childcare responsibilities exactly evenly!Report
If they want to have more sex with each other, they can babysit my kids anytime.
They should wait on the sex until after I pick the kids back up though.Report
Marcotte’s piece is a great example in the genre of “horrible people being horrible”. Which is all well and good fun for pointing and laughing.
Seriously, I suspect that the result in the first link is tied not only to a reduction in resentment (that of wife toward husband) and fatigue, but that equal childcare responsibility is also a marker for differential attitudes about sex.
In the traditional gender system, women are not really supposed to feel desire. That’s where slut-shaming comes from, after all. Desire is assigned to the male partner. I’ve read research that suggests that while brain scans show that the same thing is happening in the brains of men and women who watch porn, women do not report nearly the level of arousal as men. (Granted that could be because of the orientation of the porn … but remember the brain scans). Women have tended to dissociate their sexual feelings, and that’s going to lead to a sexless relationship after a while, I think. And all of this could be correlated to views on childcare.Report
I thought I read a while back that there was a phase of Anglo-American history in which women were thought to have much higher sex drives than men.
Of course, as we now know, women and men are pretty much equals in this regard.Report
Could the arrow go the other way? Couples with better sex lives are more likely to share responsibilities?
I’m not sure what it means one way or another… I’m just always curious which way causality runs.Report