Hello -- Excellent points. A few more notions in response ...

Comment 1. You're right, the existence and plight of those who don't have strong sex drives (or tastes, or preferences, or interests) is certainly underrecognized, especially these days. No reason everyone should be preoccupied, after all. That said, there are a few new elements around that I think have been added to the trad mix. One is the hyper-presence of sex in popular culture and its effects. People's sex reflexes are being worked on so constantly and expertly these days that I'm not surprised some people feel AFO before they get in the sack together. The other element is the ongoing demonization of men. Judging by what I hear from young friends, and what I see at places like Roissy's, many young guys truly have no idea what it is to be (and feel like, and act like) a trad guy. I think this disconnects them from their own instincts and guts, and leaves them feeling empty and not very sexy. They have no way of hooking up with (getting in synch with, whatever) their own masculinity.

Comment 2. I'll co-sign all that. One additional thing to take into account, though, is that this whole ranking-on- a-linear - scale-of-1-to-10 thing is pretty recent. Guys' concepts of what made a female appealing used to be more multidimensional than it seems to be today. For instance, "Pretty enough in a sweetly quirky way, plus a charming personality" used to be found by many guys to be a GREAT combo. In fact, the guys who fixated on conventional beauty at the expense of all other qualities were often weirdos -- guys you knew enough to be suspicious of. But there's a bigger thing going on here too, which is the more general distinction between reality and fantasy. Sure, it used to come as a shock to guys that real girls, once stripped, didn't look like Playmates. But you got over it quickly, and you soon learned that reality has its own appeal, and you started enjoying fantasy as fantasy, knowing it was fantasy, and looking down on other guys who couldn't let go of the fantasies. Adapting to the reality of women was a big step in becoming a man. These days, porn and pop culture seem to have shaped the brains of young guys in such a way that they really can't get over the fact that they aren't going to wind up with with a porno/pop fantasy as a wife. And they're left unmanned by the process. And some of them show up at Roissy's complaining that women aren't like the videogame babes they adore so much.

Comment 3. "The idea of a sex life that consists of a wife reluctantly seeing to her marital duty is almost as depressing as the woman marrying a man she doesn't love to have a roof over her head." Yeah, but scratch the "reluctantly" and it isn't such a bad fate. A woman entering into marriage needs to know that one big thing she's signing on to is keeping her husband sexually happy (or happy-enough). That really is part of her responsibility in the partnership. It's part of the job description. It may be up to him to initiate most of the sex (as far as I can tell, that's the case in most marriages). And that's OK. But gals considering marriage really need to understand that the woman has to be responsive and show some enthusiasm for sex on a regular basis. If she isn't, she's asking for -- in all honesty, she's *creating* -- serious trouble. Heck, since sex can actually be a lot fun for both participants, one option for a wife is to choose to view the whole servicing-your-man's-sexual-needs thing cheerfully, and not as some awful burden.

Posted by: Michael Blowhard on April 5, 2009 1:55 PM

I dunno what's up with the sexless young guys. They exist, tho.

My first husband was one of them... one imagines compulsive porn users can sometimes become dull to the charms of normal young women, David-Alexander style.

Kind of demoralizing to have your guy repeatedly say, "eh, not now" and then find him looking at naked cheerleaders an hour later.

Bonus points for pontificating on how there is "more to marriage than sex" in the interim!

Uh, what were we talking about, again? Oh, yeah. Frigid bitches. Fuck 'em.

But you can't! Hahahahaha!

Anyway, hello makes a good point. There just isn't a good, respected cultural outlet for these low-sex-drive guys; people are indeed always trying to "fix" them somehow, and they go along with it, even if internally quite conflicted.

My ex was a smart, curious, good-lookin' feller, and maybe the best place for him would have been a monastery, or a university tower, or a later-in-life marriage to one of these women who don't care that much for sex per se.

Posted by: omw on April 5, 2009 5:28 PM

Many people pay lip service to the concept of "working on their marriages".

Making a marriage work means putting effort in, in other words, doing stuff that you normally wouldn't feel like doing for the benefit of the marriage. Hell, I can't even count the number of time I've had to sit through dinners with the other half's irritating and boring,relations, friends, etc, in order to make her happy. I didn't feel like doing it though, I did it out of love for my wife. Sometimes you just have to put in for your partner; it shows how much you care for them. Love means making an effort. Unfortunately many women don't care for their husbands except insofar as they are a means of provision, they're selfish and loveless. Fuck, it's an ugly world.

Posted by: slumlord on April 5, 2009 5:54 PM

Funnily enough I was just reading about sexless marriages yesterday.

Here's Dan Savage and his readers doing a three-page back and forth:

http://tinyurl.com/cdykob
http://tinyurl.com/cncldx
http://tinyurl.com/dmandw

Here's an article on sexless marriages that got 1709 comments:

http://tinyurl.com/dhp8zw

And here's a collection of tales of woe from a group of people who live in sexless marriages, totalling 5355 in all:

http://tinyurl.com/dy2h79

The commonly accepted statistic is that 20% of married couples only screw ten times a year or less.

Might I say yikes?

And it ain't always the dame who slams the lid on things neither, at least according to these stories; seems about half and half at a (very) rough guess.

Posted by: Brian on April 5, 2009 5:56 PM

Hello,

You are a liar.

I didn't say anything about starvation or Jane Austin novels, or claim that was anything near the marital situation for our society that "I'd want". What dishonesty!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This is why arguing with lefties is such an empty procedure.

My POINT was that women can have kids with no man in her life, but a man needs a woman to have a family. Society (through taxation and child support) will give her the ability to just go "get preggers" and will subsidize that choice, even if she can't afford it.

In the future, maybe even within the decade, artificial wombs might make this a possibility for men (look it up), and then men can be fathers WITHOUT women, and traditional marriage will take yet another hit. Most people now ARE NOT married out there, and its just going to be less and less in the future. The kids raised in these environments (only one parent) will be the ones to suffer the most because we have lost the ability to do what our parents and grandparents and great grandparents did so naturally.

Posted by: miles on April 5, 2009 6:22 PM

Miles,
You wrote:
"Women have jobs, can get pregnant and have children with no man (in vivo, go out and just have sex, and nail the chump later with child support), and dont financially just absolutely NEED a man in their lives."

The fact that women have jobs and can support themselves without a man if they so choose is indeed an innovation of feminism and one of it's few useful accomplishments.

"If a man doesn't make himself at least somewhat attractive to her.............pretty women really wont respond to their efforts. Its not as easy to have them as it was in our father's day"

In the hallowed days of yore many women married men they weren't attracted to because they couldn't support themselves otherwise. And a man who wants a pretty wife should make himself attractive for her instead of relying on his paycheck alone to woo her.

"My POINT was that women can have kids with no man in her life, but a man needs a woman to have a family."

If you'd said that I wouldn't have replied the way I did but your argument wasn't very tight. I'm not a lefy, BTW, just an offbeat conservative.

Slummy,
I listened to that hour-long interview hoping to hear some scary misogynists with Aussie accents but you were teasing me! Not nice, mate. Bettina Arndt is a tough old broad and I didn't disagree with anything she said. It's was only about 4 years ago when I noticed around how many women see their husbands and partners as relationship objects and don't really care about making them happy as long as they (the women) don't suffer the horrors of being single. BTW, I noticed that you Aussies use the word "partner" as an all-purpose word for a husband, wife, boyfriend, or girlfriend like the Brits. Gays use the word a lot over here, but straights not so much and I prefer it that way. I suppose it's odd that a radical feminist such as myself wouldn't embrace such gender neutral language but I always break the mold.

OMW,
Sorry about your first husband. There should be a dating service for low-libido folks. There would be more women than men looking for a sexless spouse so the dudes would clean up. But they're not interested in sex so they wouldn't care. Ok, now I'm making myself giggle.

Posted by: hello on April 5, 2009 10:02 PM

If 20 percent of marriages are sexless, I wonder what percent of THOSE are unhappily so?

Surely some of these low-sex-drive guys and low-sex-drive girls find each other and spend the rest of their days basking in domestic contentment.

Hey, Miles, do you think single moms (whether by fecklessness or conscious choice) are outbreeding the more traditional sort of married couples? My initial impression is... no.

Unless artificial wombs and nannies get dirt-cheap in the near future, I'd not put my money on that revolutionizing society, either.

Posted by: omw on April 5, 2009 10:09 PM

Aw, hello, don't be sorry. Divorce means never having to say you're sorry. LOL.

Jokes, jokes. But man, there is a time and a place for no-fault divorce-- finding fault in that divorce would have been a horrid bit of public humiliation.

Hope he's happy out there. Such a sweet guy, really.

He was surprisingly bummed when I left; who was he going to eat lunch with after that? What was he going to tell his Mom?

The idea of a sexless dating service is funny! But yeah, lacking a sex drive, none of them have any motivation to get off their duffs and seek each other out.

"I'll update my profile on PlatonicHarmony,com in a minute... it'd be nice to have someone to go to IKEA with.

But first, to finish re-wiring my XBox!"

Posted by: omw on April 5, 2009 10:44 PM

Anyway, women refuse to put up with low-sex guys because one of the main pleasures of female life is to be the Object of His Desire.

Being the Mother of His Children is a close second, but even that pales in primal comparison to the thrill of being the desired one.

"To be desired is the orgasm."

Never to be desired, and to know that one's desirable years are slipping away unnoticed, faster with each passing month, is unbearable.

At least a guy who isn't getting laid much can hope for better days ahead. A cute intern chats him up in the lunchroom, the cashier flirts with you at the coffeeshop, maybe you'll get that promotion this year, improve your status and your chances.

A woman can never have such a hope. Tomorrow you will be mostly become uglier and less desirable than you were today.

Posted by: omw on April 5, 2009 11:02 PM

Good lord, if I saw that pickup scene in a club I would just think that Mystery is a flaming homosexual. His voice pitch is just painful.

Posted by: Yammy on April 6, 2009 4:04 AM

Q: "I’ve dated several guys who, from what I can tell, have a take it or leave it attitude toward sex, with an emphasis on leaving it. Why, you may ask, did I, someone who writes about sex almost every day, wind up with them?"

A: Because, except when very drunk, sleeping with a slut takes all of the fun out of it, especially when the slut in question writes about it for a living. Sometimes refusing sex can be less emasculating than the obligatory "performance" demanded by the expert whore.

Posted by: lf on April 9, 2009 7:04 PM

hello--

Now since she chooses to marry she still has an obligation to her husband but the idea of a sex life that consists of a wife reluctantly seeing to her marital duty is almost as depressing as the woman marrying a man she doesn't love to have a roof over her head.

In both cases Hello my first reaction is "too damn bad".

I mean sure, I agree that those cases are far from ideal from either marriage partner's point o view.

But we resolve these problems in feminist America by placing really NO obligations on women in marriage, but huge financial one's on men, (as well as all kinds of cultural pressure to support whatever she wants to do in e.g. the balance of her work and family), which become all too apparent as soon as she starts thinking about her alternatives. It's incredibly one sided.

It's the culture but it's also the law. A man should be able to divorce his wife and pay her little if she isn't giving him sex worth squat in marriage, partiuclarly if she did so in a try out period prior to marriage. But can he? Hell no.

Instead a woman can divorce a successful man for any reason whatsoever including her own affairs and clean up in divorce.

All of this greatly effects the dynamics of marriage itself in many cases. Not marrying but if you like, as I do, living together is far better for men in feminist America's current cultural and especially legal climate. Oh and yea, I think it's far past time when we should resume thinking that what's best for men matters too.

Posted by: dougjnn on April 10, 2009 1:01 PM

OMW--

My first husband was one of them... one imagines compulsive porn users can sometimes become dull to the charms of normal young women, David-Alexander style.

Kind of demoralizing to have your guy repeatedly say, "eh, not now" and then find him looking at naked cheerleaders an hour later.

Bonus points for pontificating on how there is "more to marriage than sex" in the interim!

I couldn't agree more that it's really frustrating for a low libido partner to be married to a high libido one, regardless of which gender is low libido.

However, when it's the woman that has low libido, our culture essential counsels men that 1) it's almost certainly their fault; 2) that they need to accept their woman as she is and appreciate all the wonderful things about her, and get their unreasonable expectations under control (i.e. "GROW UP"); 3) regardless, they made a commitment and their wholly obligated to stick with it.

None of these things is true in reverse.

In the example you gave above, substitute the woman reading romance novels for her sexual thrills a little while into marriage and all the things I've said about how our feminist culture regards the situation apply.

Posted by: dougjnn on April 10, 2009 1:08 PM

Let's not lose perspecive about sexless men.

There are far, far more sexless women, at least after they secure marriage security. Which is very secure for women in America indeed, if they marry a man with a good income.

Most of the time when men lose interest in sex it's because their wife has blown up like a whale, and we all know how important physical attractiveness is in exciting men's sex drive. That's probably particularly true in a media culture that parades so many gorgeous women all the time. No the vast majority of men don't expect their own wife to look like that but when she starts looking like a hungry hippo it's something else. Oh and then there's the super shrew nag factor, which American culture so supports wives in adopting for any reason whatsoever.

Posted by: dougjnn on April 10, 2009 2:18 PM

slumlord--

Unfortunately many women don't care for their husbands except insofar as they are a means of provision, they're selfish and loveless. Fuck, it's an ugly world.

I think this is more the product of endless female empowering, and male (especially married male) emasculating feminist laws and culture, than an inborn female thing. There may be some of both though.

Posted by: dougjnn on April 10, 2009 8:28 PM

Um, not sure how I wound up here (following links about Philip Wylie's "The Magic Animal"? Yeah, that must have been it) and I doubt I'll be back but saw the mention of Jeff Jones' art and couldn't help thinking some of y'all would be interested in looking at Jeff, I mean, Catherine's Wikipedia entry...
Toodles.

Posted by: dilford on April 12, 2009 4:28 PM

Whatever happened to getting the woman liquored up enough to at least not dislike having sex? This was a time honored means of loosening up virgins (hence my first bf's mistake in getting himself drunk but not me) & I still think can work on matrons.

Posted by: sexdriveless unmarried on April 12, 2009 6:58 PM

Hello

Also I must note that before feminism, child support and divorce laws most men still didn't marry pretty women. If, say, only 30% of women were notably attractive that left 70% who were average looking, plain or ugly. In a monogamous system that meant that most men, especially if all they had to offer was a paycheck, didn't get a hottie. For all of feminism's excesses, it didn't smash a mating system that gave every man at least a cute 6.5 whatever his looks, charm and character.

Astute observations Hello. As you often make, I've noticed.

Most men don't deserve pretty women.

Now for a moment please accept what I'm about to say is not pleading for myself. I've done well in attracting women. By Roissy's criteria I'm an alpha. (An aging alpha.)

There is no social utility in rewarding achievement less clerks with hotties.

There is a problem when the most economically productive men (who will often come in as higher betas on Roissy's male hotness scale) can't get at least hottish girls to really fall in love with them (i.e. adore them), as opposed to settle for them, and then divorce them.

I could go into much more detail, but that's what the whole real issue is all about.

Posted by: dougjnn on April 20, 2009 12:02 AM






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