IT’S ONE of the great ironies of modern life. The liberated woman is exhausted. She has very little erotic energy once she’s married and has children. The sexual revolution isn’t all that much fun after all.

—- Comments —-

Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:

The specialist’s advice about sex to young women who are too tired for the sexual activity into which feminism has liberated them is quite amenable to generalization. In its essence it is simply that old basis of Western wisdom – the admonition to adhere to the golden mean in all things and to balance the demands of life. Feminism, the exacerbating cause of this seemingly pervasive problem of female non-responsiveness, is also amenable to generalization: It is a species of the modern imperative to serve nothing but a notion of the self that is entirely socially mediated – that is, to sacrifice an actual Self to an image of professional success and consumerist repletion supplied by a pathologically professionalized and decadently consumerist society. I draw one further conclusion from the article that you post – the sexualization of the social realm (as in the tireless Cosmopolitan campaign to do it every which way and all the time) is at least partly compensatory. As modernity kills off actual sex, which has a necessary spiritual component, it replaces it with a sexual “second reality” of make-believe sex (pornorgaphy) and not-quite-sex (mutual masturbation between partners whose emotional competency is low or non-existent). Quite literally, modernity makes people sick.

Laura writes:

“Pathologically professionalized.” That’s perfect.

Mary writes:

I know life has never been perfect for any age and I don’t want to romanticize sex and marriage in the old days. But I do believe the heavy, constant influx of “information” such as that found in this article has corrupted us; our grandmothers had much more wisdom and common sense about sex, their marriages and their husbands than the average woman today, with all of her education and experience. Because sex didn’t permeate the world they lived in, our grandmothers had healthier views and healthier expectations, and as for their “libidos,” I’m sure they didn’t know they possessed one, and would most certainly not have reordered their lives to improve it at any rate, as this “certified sexuality counselor” suggests. She wrote this piece in ignorance of the fact that her field of expertise is one that has contributed to the situation she is trying to solve. Sexual ennui was born in the petri dish of our obsessive culture.

Many or most modern women today enter marriage with previous sexual experience, if only with the man they will marry. As a result the newly-married don’t look forward to sex as something joyful and new, exclusive and yet-to-be-shared. The couple is not revealed to one another over time in a uniquely intimate and deeply bonding way; they miss out on the beautiful first season of married life, the one that would serve to seal their union and help lock them together for life, come what may. This has changed marital sex, and marriage itself, in significant ways.

I think we lost something irreplaceable when the private nature of sexual relations was destroyed in this country. We can only guess how much happier our grandparents intimate lives were because they lived in a world where human sexuality was veiled, and mysterious, and protected from the scrutiny it is now subject to, conditions under which – who knows? – maybe marital relations were that much more fulfilling; maybe to be loved in the night by your lifelong beloved was a simple, lovely and greatly appreciated act with meaning beyond today’s understanding.

Perfesser Plum writes:

May I suggest an additional variable—too many men are betas.

Here at the Perfesser Plum homestead, all I have to do is show up wearing jeans, cowboy boots, a wide belt, a T shirt showing my rock hard pecs, and a grin, and my WOMAN heads to the bedroom.

Please follow and like us: