Good sex, or she's an ex

wanbet-bc518

SARAH HAMPSON不久前写了一篇文章Sex, or he's your ex，今天又写了一篇Good sex, or she's an ex，两个姊妹篇。

Good sex, or she's an ex

SARAH HAMPSON
From Thursday's Globe and Mail
June 21, 2007 at 8:45 AM EDT

My business in the bedrooms of the country is clearly not over.

I hear moans.

No, not those kind.

Rather, the sound of displeasure.

It is not just the male need for sex that is misunderstood, as I wrote in my previous column (Sex, or he's your ex, June 7). In the interest of sexual reciprocity - hey, what's good for him needs to be good for her, too - I should explain the other half. And that is simple: Women's expectation for sex in marriage has changed.

Make way for the CEO of Pleasure. Female empowerment has reached a climax in the bedroom. She wants what she considers her right: good and frequent sex.

"It's a real role shift," says Betty Stockley, a veteran marriage and sex therapist in Toronto. "Women are calling the shots in the bedroom. Power has shifted."

Several women wrote to me to say they are the ones left dissatisfied and questioning the strength of their marriages. "One of the most common things I hear from my pregnant friends is that their husband has no interest in having sex with her while she's pregnant, despite her huge sexual appetite," a reader explains.

Others complain about poor sexual technique. "I was 18 when I met my first husband," a 40-year-old professional woman tells me. "He was not my first sexual partner. I had had maybe two lovers before him. But I was his first. He didn't know what to do. He really wasn't able to satisfy me, and he wouldn't talk about it."

They remained married for four years. "I tried for about two or three years, but it got to the point that when he expressed interest in sex, I just said, 'No thanks. Unless you're going to help me out and not just roll over, then forget it.' Oral sex was distasteful to him. He wasn't into masturbating me. I could do anything to him. There were no limits there. Finally, I told him, 'You're not good in bed.' It was a huge blow to his ego. I regret saying those words," she offers. "But I don't regret how I felt. It was completely valid."

It may be part of the popular vernacular to refer to John Gray's Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus to explain gender differences, but is he right? We're from the same planet and want the same things: namely, emotional and sexual intimacy.

It's just that men are a continent and women are an ancient civilization. A woman has to explore his topography, which is very exciting, but all rather easily discovered. There are flat plains, some lovely undulating ones, and then there's Mount Vesuvius.

Women, on the other hand, have to be unearthed. In the past 40 years or so, since the Pill liberated women from sex as merely reproduction, much energy has been devoted to this emotional archaeology, with female orgasm as the coveted treasure in the deep, dark womb-tomb place. The number of self-help books devoted to female sexuality is evidence enough, not to mention shows such as Sex and the City and the success of The Vagina Monologues. As a result, women chat about masturbation and porn and vibrators and orgasm and the clitoris as if they're spoons and forks in the kitchen drawer. They want to get proper use out of them.

But should women always be on top, as it were? When is submission to his demands okay? The problem is that while many wives appreciate that, for men, the penis is the pen - an instrument of male expression - they struggle with being the piece of paper, available to be written on at any moment. They want to feel engaged in the inking.

A friend of mine once told me about the difficult sexual tension toward the end of her marriage. Her husband wanted sex every morning - their Life of the Libido had always been robust - but at this point, they had been having trouble in their relationship for some time. For her, his demand was symptomatic of his lack of respect for her feelings. "It was as routine as brushing his teeth," she complained. She felt that to him, she was just a body, not a person. When she did comply, she often wasn't there mentally, which is a skill not unlike our ability to multitask. You can be thinking about the grocery list, and your partner never has to know. But what fun is that?

One day, she mentioned her husband's unsatisfactory sexual requirements to her mother, who has been married for over 50 years. She was horrified. "That's rejection. You can't turn a man down," she recalls her mother advising. "Besides, it only takes five minutes."

But constant compromise rubs against the feminist grain. "It's not like compromising on other things, like when to go out for dinner," says Joan Sewell, author of I'd Rather Eat Chocolate: Learning to Love My Low Libido, published earlier this year. "This is your body. There is nothing more personal. When you don't have desire, it's not merely sexual, it's invasive. Continual compromising like that is going to poison you. Men might be clueless, but the resentment in the woman will eventually pop."

Ms. Sewell asserted her power by defining the limits of her willingness to service his sexual needs. On the brink of divorce, she wanted to save her marriage by satisfying her husband, Kip, in ways that didn't fuel her resentment. He wanted sex five or six times a week, whereas her preference was once or twice a month.

Finally, they reached a sex agreement. Male orgasm became optional. She could take breaks. Plus: "When I know Kip wants sex, and I'm not that keen, we know what sex acts are neutral for me, but there are conditions on those, too. Oral sex, for example. Well, what if it goes on for 15 minutes? If it does, well, I'm out," Ms. Sewell says. "And there are days when I don't care what you're doing down there to me, I am not going to play."

She has been called "anti-feminist and pre-Victorian," she confesses, but she believes that women are fed unrealistic images of abundant female libido. Lack of desire may be the new taboo in today's sexually explicit culture, but Ms. Sewell maintains that a lack of libido is just as important to take power of, if that's what women feel.

Absolute control in the bedroom is never healthy, Ms. Stockley says. The skill, which a therapist can help develop in couples, is how to talk about sexual compatibility without hurting either partner's feelings.

"I do think many women abuse the power in the bedroom," she cautions. "Women have been taken advantage of for so many years, and now they've shifted into the power position. But I tell them that having power should not be about being overpowering."

The flipside of women's equal-orgasm-for-equal-effort drive is that many men are adopting more traditionally feminine attitudes about intimacy, saying they want romance, emotional connection and touching, she says. "Men, on some level, are trying to lay claim to something. There are a lot of negative components to feminism for men, but there are benefits, too. There's a correction in male behaviour and an overcorrection in women's. What's needed is for both to meet somewhere in the middle."

[email protected]