This is a dynamic I have seen repeated throughout my own life, and in relationships all around me: women morphing into their partner’s mother and then him wondering why she doesn’t want to have sex anymore.
To be clear, I am talking specifically about heterosexual women in relationships with men, not because sexual minorities don’t experience fluctuations in desire (or in the case of asexuality, little to no desire), but because the trope of a straight woman going off sex is so common it is basically a cultural cliché.
But I am quite convinced that the reasons for this are not because women generally have less interest in sex than men do, but because their libido is crushed under the weight of the emotional labour they are expected to perform in heterosexual relationships. It’s not that straight women don’t enjoy and want sex, but that they don’t enjoy or want the kind of sex being offered to them.
In recent years, discussions around menopause have gone mainstream, and while this is broadly a good thing, it has allowed myriad problems to be blamed on a woman’s changing hormones. Well, what if she’s gone off sex, not because her oestrogen levels are on the wane, but because she has wound up being her partner’s mother? In my experience, this is one of the most common reasons for a woman to stop wanting sex. She has turned from fun loving sex bomb into angry mummy, and angry mummy doesn’t want to have sex with anyone.
This is a place I have found myself on several occasions and it is never, ever sexy. In the beginning of these relationships, the sex was amazing. Incredible, even. But as things deepened and our lives became more intertwined, I found myself being the one taking on the bulk of the caretaking roles. I would remind my partner of chores that needed to be done, I would organise social events as if they were playdates, I’d buy his clothes, and make sure he was taking any medications correctly, not to mention cooking and cleaning up after him. All this in addition to working full time.
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In response, he would absolve himself of more and more adult responsibilities, fully leaning into his “little boy” role, even adopting baby talk or feigning childlike behaviours to appear “cute” and “playful”. Seriously, is there anywhere less erotic to be than this? It’s a Freudian nightmare.
Every time I found myself in this situation, I would assume there was some kind of defect in me. After all, he still wanted sex. It was me who found his attentions irritating and cloying. So I would start to seek out possible treatments. Would acupuncture help? Maybe some St John’s Wort, or Fenugreek? I even had my testosterone levels tested, in the mistaken belief that a gel patch would suddenly make this 6ft toddler sexually desirable. There was nothing wrong with my hormone levels and no amount of magnesium in the world was going to reignite the flame for a man who asked me to buy my own birthday present.
In 2021, a research team from Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, reviewed the existing literature around fluctuating libido in women, and proposed the “Heteronormativity Theory of Low Sexual Desire in Women Partnered with Men”. Here, the team argued that “heteronormative gender inequities are contributing factors” in women experiencing low levels of sexual desire. In other words, it is the gendered roles we adopt within a relationship that acts as a metaphorical cold shower.
Given the rather obvious fact that turning your girlfriend into your mother is a one-way ticket to a dry spell, you have to wonder why so many misogynists equate mothering them with being a “real woman”. I’ve lost count of the number of podcast bro, “alpha male” walking groins that I have seen bleating on about their right to sex and a woman’s “natural” role in the home. Grown men talking about how they need a woman to clean up after them! It’s embarrassing. Not only is this just empirically wrong, but utterly counter-intuitive. No one fancies a grown man who needs his mummy to pick up after him.
Speaking as a straight woman, there is little a man can do to be less sexually attractive than act like a little boy who needs his mother.
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