Let's Talk S*x

Sex is one topic not generally discussed on this blog which is probably the reason that I don't get 100+ comments on my posts:) So I decided to talk about it for a change. 

Of course, being a well-known prude I'm not going into details of my own personal life and neither expect my readers to do it, what I'd like to discuss is something else, namely, the general misconceptions about sex which one can encounter on the internet.

We all know the common feminist trope about women being constant victims of predatory men, and I believe that it did a lot to poison male-female relationships, yet the trope itself predates 1960s and goes all the way back to Victorian times which gave us the concept of a saintly female, an angel in the home, tainted by brutish male passions. The funny thing is that before, a woman was considered to be a carnal creature, created to ruin men and dangerous in her unrestrained sexuality.

Constant feminist attacks on masculinity created a backlash yet, ironically, a lot of men writing on the sexual topics from what they state is a traditional point of view, repeat the old Victorian adage about men basically being horny monsters all the time, only unlike feminists, they decry the supposed frigidity of women.

 I'm informed there is a whole-scale crisis in American families where the majority of women refuse to have sex with their husbands, for instance. Or that every man's dream is to fornicate with as many women as possible. That every time men see a woman in a short skirt they automatically want to bed her and that in general, bedding multiple women is the only thing men talk about among themselves.

How true is it? Well, I don't know. Maybe, it's true about Americans. Maybe they do have a sex crisis. Granted, I'm not a man, but when I asked my husband he told me flat out it was a lot of nonsense. He works with all men and though they do make sexually tinted jokes at times, he says they have other topics to talk about besides it. He told me lots of other things, too, but I don't care to disclose them on my blog:)

Anyway, it amounts to the fact that according to him, though men react to beautiful women and sexy clothes, a man's desire, like a woman's, has another dimension to it than just "she is so hot", at least, as men get older. That is, contrary to what some blogs state, a woman isn't just a sum of breasts+legs+other things, she has also a personality and it matters, too. Especially in a marital relationship, which normally is based on more than sexual attraction alone.

In general, I think the stereotype of any man as an eternal playboy is harmful. Yes, it's true that men have been traditionally held to a lower standard of chastity than women (which isn't all wrong in my opinion) and it's true that since men and women are different their sexuality is different, too. However, in the East, where powerful men traditionally had harems, it wasn't uncommon for them to develop real feelings for their concubines and it was more of a serial monogamy thing than having many women at the same time. Heck, men have been known to get attached to prostitutes they frequented.

We all somehow get an idea that women are a romantic sex, but is it really true? I'd say women are often quite pragmatic. And speaking of pragmatism, here is something else I'd like to mention. This whole idea that we experience a shortage of sex in our society is preposterous. The proponents of the idea like to point out to the past, and somehow draw the conclusion that men in those times had it easier. For instance, they say, women married in their prime time (which for some of these guys is apparently 14). The truth is that they did often marry young but when you look at the family history, you'll notice that the first child came 4 years later.

The reason for this is that many marriages weren't romantic at all. The family wanted to get a girl of their hands, the man needed a housekeeper. They would wait several years before they consummated their marriage. Also some families had 10 children while others had 1. Sometimes it was due to diseases and high child mortality, but it was also often because a decent man was supposed "to leave his wife alone" after a certain age and a certain amount of children. So the idea that they went at it like rabbits in the past is simply ridiculous.

Whatever problems we face nowadays, the lack of sex is not one of it. That is not to say that it's a good thing for a wife to deny her husband or vice versa. However, let's be realistic about this whole topic. I remember some time ago feminists were livid because somewhere in Afghanistan they took the law stating that the wife owes sex to her husband. When the minister was asked how often, he said something like "once in 10 days". I guess some meninists won't like Afghanistan, either:)