The recessionary position?

Ok, so I’ve read both sides of this story. The bigger the recession, the less sex that’s happening. And, recessions have no impact on the amount of sex that’s happening. I don’t know which is true. And, quite frankly I’m not sure anyone ever tells the truth about their sex life (except those people who write books detailing their exploits over a period of say 101 days…). But, it is interesting to think about the impact that outside social forces have on our unions of two. I know for myself that the more stressed I get about my job or lack of job as is the current state of affairs, the less interested I am in any kind of pleasures of the flesh.

And, yet last night…I was a bundle of tension. Daughter number one was on the third day of the flu, my hours as a contractor have dwindled from 40 per week to a measly 5, and in the past week I have mysteriously developed tennis elbow. I was bathing in my own glow of self-pity with a dash of depression and physical pain. But what did that magnificent husband of mine do? He gave me a long, deep-tissue massage. It was so intense that I felt I had become one with the bed. My worries faded as he worked my muscles like a piece of dough. The relaxation and bliss I felt had not be experienced for several weeks. And, of course, there was a happy ending for all…

Here’s an article that was posted last week about sex and the recession from Consumer Reports:

CR poll: Economy isn’t hurting Americans’ sex lives

But insomnia and poor health could be taking a toll

Nearly 60 percent of the men in our survey said they thought about sex at least once a day, compared with only 19 percent of the women.

At least the economic crisis hasn’t affected one leading indicator: Our sex lives. That’s one finding from a nationally representative sample of 1,000 adults ages 18 to 75 conducted by the Consumer Reports National Research Center in January.

Seventy-nine percent of the sexually active respondents said that the financial downturn hadn’t had the same effect on how often they had sex. And while they said they planned to spend less this year on Valentine’s Day, nearly half thought President Obama should take time out during the holiday to show the first lady a little love.

But if the economy hasn’t hurt our sex lives overall, our health could be putting a crimp in it. For example, 81 percent of the respondents said they avoided or delayed sex with their partner in the past year. The two most common reasons given were “too tired” (53 percent) and “too sick” (49 percent). For advice on how to deal with insomnia and the other health problems that can sap your mojo, see 6 top reasons for not having sex as well as our table, Drugs and diseases that can hurt your sex life.

Perhaps even harder to overcome is the apparent disconnect between men and women when it comes to sex. For example, nearly 60 percent of the men in our survey said they thought about sex at least once a day, compared with only 19 percent of the women. Men are also far more likely than women to say that sex is highly important to them (64 percent vs. 47 percent). Interestingly, though, an equal percentage of men and women—about two-thirds—said they were highly satisfied with their sex lives.

Those findings jibe with the results of recent medical research that suggests that while roughly the same percentage of men and women report “sexual dysfunction,” far fewer women are bothered or distressed by the problem. Yet the pharmaceutical industry seems to see any decline in sexual interest or performance as a medical problem that requires treatment, preferably with drugs. For example, some doctors are prescribing Viagra for women and supplemental testosterone for both men and women. For advice on when medical therapies are called for and when they’re not, see Healthy sex: His and hers.

 

A notch on the bedpost

Every few weeks I get a email from a company that tracks new business ideas. Sometimes they are really good, like the KidsKonserve lunchboxes that are so green you feel guilty putting Goldfish in them. And then some of the ideas are ones you think, “well, why not?”

Bedposted.com was one of those ideas. It’s a site where you post information about your sex life. You can record the date, time it lasted, who it was with (even if it was a solo encounter)  and then give the “session” a rating.

 

What Do Women Want?

If you didn’t read it, here’s the first part of an article that was published in the NYT Magazine a few weeks ago. It’s insanely long, but worth a read… There have been well over 350 comments, so it’s obviously generating some conversations out there!

January 25, 2009

By DANIEL BERGNER

Meredith Chivers is a creator of bonobo pornography. She is a 36-year-old psychology professor at Queen’s University in the small city of Kingston, Ontario, a highly regarded scientist and a member of the editorial board of the world’s leading journal of sexual research, Archives of Sexual Behavior. The bonobo film was part of a series of related experiments she has carried out over the past several years. She found footage of bonobos, a species of ape, as they mated, and then, because the accompanying sounds were dull — “bonobos don’t seem to make much noise in sex,” she told me, “though the females give a kind of pleasure grin and make chirpy sounds” — she dubbed in some animated chimpanzee hooting and screeching. She showed the short movie to men and women, straight and gay. To the same subjects, she also showed clips of heterosexual sex, male and female homosexual sex, a man masturbating, a woman masturbating, a chiseled man walking naked on a beach and a well-toned woman doing calisthenics in the nude.

While the subjects watched on a computer screen, Chivers, who favors high boots and fashionable rectangular glasses, measured their arousal in two ways, objectively and subjectively. The participants sat in a brown leatherette La-Z-Boy chair in her small lab at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health, a prestigious psychiatric teaching hospital affiliated with the University of Toronto, where Chivers was a postdoctoral fellow and where I first talked with her about her research a few years ago. The genitals of the volunteers were connected to plethysmographs — for the men, an apparatus that fits over the penis and gauges its swelling; for the women, a little plastic probe that sits in the vagina and, by bouncing light off the vaginal walls, measures genital blood flow. An engorgement of blood spurs a lubricating process called vaginal transudation: the seeping of moisture through the walls. The participants were also given a keypad so that they could rate how aroused they felt.

The men, on average, responded genitally in what Chivers terms “category specific” ways. Males who identified themselves as straight swelled while gazing at heterosexual or lesbian sex and while watching the masturbating and exercising women. They were mostly unmoved when the screen displayed only men. Gay males were aroused in the opposite categorical pattern. Any expectation that the animal sex would speak to something primitive within the men seemed to be mistaken; neither straights nor gays were stirred by the bonobos. And for the male participants, the subjective ratings on the keypad matched the readings of the plethysmograph. The men’s minds and genitals were in agreement.

All was different with the women. No matter what their self-proclaimed sexual orientation, they showed, on the whole, strong and swift genital arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women and women with men. They responded objectively much more to the exercising woman than to the strolling man, and their blood flow rose quickly — and markedly, though to a lesser degree than during all the human scenes except the footage of the ambling, strapping man — as they watched the apes. And with the women, especially the straight women, mind and genitals seemed scarcely to belong to the same person. The readings from the plethysmograph and the keypad weren’t in much accord. During shots of lesbian coupling, heterosexual women reported less excitement than their vaginas indicated; watching gay men, they reported a great deal less; and viewing heterosexual intercourse, they reported much more. Among the lesbian volunteers, the two readings converged when women appeared on the screen. But when the films featured only men, the lesbians reported less engagement than the plethysmograph recorded. Whether straight or gay, the women claimed almost no arousal whatsoever while staring at the bonobos.

“I feel like a pioneer at the edge of a giant forest,” Chivers said, describing her ambition to understand the workings of women’s arousal and desire. “There’s a path leading in, but it isn’t much.” She sees herself, she explained, as part of an emerging “critical mass” of female sexologists starting to make their way into those woods. These researchers and clinicians are consumed by the sexual problem Sigmund Freud posed to one of his female disciples almost a century ago: “The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is, What does a woman want?”

Full of scientific exuberance, Chivers has struggled to make sense of her data. She struggled when we first spoke in Toronto, and she struggled, unflagging, as we sat last October in her university office in Kingston, a room she keeps spare to help her mind stay clear to contemplate the intricacies of the erotic. The cinder-block walls are unadorned except for three photographs she took of a temple in India featuring carvings of an entwined couple, an orgy and a man copulating with a horse. She has been pondering sexuality, she recalled, since the age of 5 or 6, when she ruminated over a particular kiss, one she still remembers vividly, between her parents. And she has been discussing sex without much restraint, she said, laughing, at least since the age of 15 or 16, when, for a few male classmates who hoped to please their girlfriends, she drew a picture and clarified the location of the clitoris.

In 1996, when she worked as an assistant to a sexologist at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health, then called the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry, she found herself the only woman on a floor of researchers investigating male sexual preferences and what are known as paraphilias — erotic desires that fall far outside the norm. She told me that when she asked Kurt Freund, a scientist on that floor who had developed a type of penile plethysmograph and who had been studying male homosexuality and pedophilia since the 1950s, why he never turned his attention to women, he replied: “How am I to know what it is to be a woman? Who am I to study women, when I am a man?”

Freund’s words helped to focus her investigations, work that has made her a central figure among the small force of female sexologists devoted to comprehending female desire. John Bancroft, a former director of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, traces sexological studies by women at least as far back as 1929, to a survey of the sexual experiences of 2,200 women carried out by Katharine Bement Davis, a prison reformer who once served as New York City’s first female commissioner of corrections. But the discipline remains male-dominated. In the International Academy of Sex Research, the 35-year-old institution that publishes Archives of Sexual Behavior and that can claim, Bancroft said, most of the field’s leading researchers among its 300 or so members, women make up just over a quarter of the organization. Yet in recent years, he continued, in the long wake of the surveys of Alfred Kinsey, the studies of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the sexual liberation movement and the rise of feminism, there has been a surge of scientific attention, paid by women, to illuminating the realm of women’s desire.

For more, here’s the link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/magazine/25desire-t.html?_r=1&em=&pagewanted=print

 

In today’s New York Times….Till Children Do Us Part

I thought this was particularly insightful. I find the more we get wrapped up in our children’s world, the less time we have to focus on us and keeping US together. And, if we aint happy, the entire unit aint gonna be happy.

This has been the number one story circulated in the NYT today:

Op-Ed Contributor

By STEPHANIE COONTZ

Till Children Do Us Part

HALF a century ago, the conventional wisdom was that having a child was the surest way to build a happy marriage. Women’s magazines of that era promised that almost any marital problem could be resolved by embarking on parenthood. Once a child arrives, “we don’t worry about this couple any more,” an editor at Better Homes and Gardens enthused in 1944. “There are three in that family now. … Perhaps there is not much more needed in a recipe for happiness.”

Over the past two decades, however, many researchers have concluded that three’s a crowd when it comes to marital satisfaction. More than 25 separate studies have established that marital quality drops, often quite steeply, after the transition to parenthood. And forget the “empty nest” syndrome: when the children leave home, couples report an increase in marital happiness.

But does the arrival of children doom couples to a less satisfying marriage? Not necessarily. Two researchers at the University of California at Berkeley, Philip and Carolyn Cowan, report in a forthcoming briefing paper for the Council on Contemporary Families that most studies finding a large drop in marital quality after childbirth do not consider the very different routes that couples travel toward parenthood.

Some couples plan the conception and discuss how they want to conduct their relationship after the baby is born. Others disagree about whether or when to conceive, with one partner giving in for the sake of the relationship. And sometimes, both partners are ambivalent.

The Cowans found that the average drop in marital satisfaction was almost entirely accounted for by the couples who slid into being parents, disagreed over it or were ambivalent about it. Couples who planned or equally welcomed the conception were likely to maintain or even increase their marital satisfaction after the child was born.

Marital quality also tends to decline when parents backslide into more traditional gender roles. Once a child arrives, lack of paid parental leave often leads the wife to quit her job and the husband to work more. This produces discontent on both sides. The wife resents her husband’s lack of involvement in child care and housework. The husband resents his wife’s ingratitude for the long hours he works to support the family.

When the Cowans designed programs to help couples resolve these differences, they had fewer conflicts and higher marital quality. And the children did better socially and academically because their parents were happier.

But keeping a marriage vibrant is a never-ending job. Deciding together to have a child and sharing in child-rearing do not immunize a marriage. Indeed, collaborative couples can face other problems. They often embark on such an intense style of parenting that they end up paying less attention to each other.

Parents today spend much more time with their children than they did 40 years ago. The sociologists Suzanne Bianchi, John Robinson and Melissa Milkie report that married mothers in 2000 spent 20 percent more time with their children than in 1965. Married fathers spent more than twice as much time.

A study by John Sandberg and Sandra Hofferth at the University of Michigan showed that by 1997 children in two-parent families were getting six more hours a week with Mom and four more hours with Dad than in 1981. And these increases occurred even as more mothers entered the labor force.

Couples found some of these extra hours by cutting back on time spent in activities where children were not present — when they were alone as a couple, visiting with friends and kin, or involved in clubs. But in the long run, shortchanging such adult-oriented activities for the sake of the children is not good for a marriage. Indeed, the researcher Ellen Galinsky has found that most children don’t want to spend as much time with their parents as parents assume; they just want their parents to be more relaxed when they are together.

Couples need time alone to renew their relationship. They also need to sustain supportive networks of friends and family. Couples who don’t, investing too much in their children and not enough in their marriage, may find that when the demands of child-rearing cease to organize their lives, they cannot recover the relationship that made them want to have children together in the first place.

As the psychologist Joshua Coleman suggests, the airline warning to put on your own oxygen mask before you place one on your child also holds true for marriage.

Stephanie Coontz, a professor of history at Evergreen State College and the director of research at the Council on Contemporary Families, is the author of “Marriage: A History.”