Rediscovering Desire
entering my wanting era
Two years ago I wrote my second post to go viral, Sex Is Not Your Duty. It talked about the pressure wives feel to have sex even when they don’t want to as part of marital maintenance. The post now has almost 90k views. It went viral due to misogynists hating it.
It recently had another little spike. One more man reposted it with this comment:
“I’m so glad to not live in this universe, where women have a complete lack of agency, and there’s a strange way that the very fabric of being a woman is somehow downstream of a man. Her sexual desires are not her own and are not aroused by her own biology, but they lie dormant awaiting a man to awaken them.”
It was strange to read that when I have, recently, found my sexual desires are far from dormant. And even more, they are very much my own. Yes, I recognize that I may be in the throes of new relationship energy. But re-entering the dating world has made me realize how much marriage is not the vehicle for many women to want sex. We’ve seen all the studies - the extra work women take on, how wives mother their husbands, how the mental load is unequal, leading to burnout and resentment.
I know I am not the only divorced woman to realize: oh, it wasn’t that I didn’t like sex. I just didn’t like sex under those conditions!
Esther Perel, who I quoted in Sex Is Not Your Duty, recently suggested on the Diary of a CEO podcast that women get tired of monogamy much quicker than men. We’ve been taught that women are the ones who want to lock a man down, but what if men are more satisfied with monogamous sex than women? They get turned on easily, often just by a visual or by the surge of testosterone that comes overnight. While women, as Perel notes, tend to only want sex that is worth having.
So how did I find sex that I actually want to have? Who did I meet, and how?