Have you ever related so emphatically to a social media post, that you unlike it, just so you can like it again? This was precisely how I felt when I saw a Threads post by pottymouthprofessor that read: “When I was married I thought I was asexual. Turns out, I’m feral when I don’t have to mother a grown man.” Judging by the tidal wave of heterosexual women replying in the comments to share similar stories, I wasn’t the only one who strongly related to the sentiment.
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.
Over the years, I have sat with so many friends while they pour their hearts out, talking about their lack of desire as a major issue in their relationship, only to see them transform into a fire breathing sex maniac once said relationship is finally finished. The issue was never their low libido. It was never going to be fixed with gels, pills, or patches. It was the relationship itself, and her role within it, that was the problem.
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.
I get so angry at the pervasive myth that women don’t enjoy sex as much as men do; that our libidos are weaker; or that it’s perfectly normal for a woman’s desire to drop off a cliff once she’s in a long-term relationship. Having said that, women reporting low levels of sexual desire is so widespread that is it almost the norm. Anywhere between 40 to 70 per cent of women report low libido at some point in their lives.
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.
While there can be many reasons for someone’s libido to change, when it comes to women, the temptation is to view a low-level of desire as a physical problem. It could be her hormones, or maybe she’s tired, or perhaps it’s just her age? Or maybe it’s all three? There can absolutely be physical issues that impact libido, but exclusively viewing low desire as physical neatly avoids the awkward conversion around the health of the relationship itself.
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.
Being a mother to children is both physically and mentally exhausting and can certainly impact anyone’s interest in physical intimacy, but finding yourself acting as a mummy for a full-grown man is a different thing entirely. It’s not that mothers are inherently sexless, but no one wants to shag the person they are mothering.
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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Women aren’t orgasming through penetrative sex – men need to have a long, hard think why
Read MoreIn 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.
The resentment and exhaustion set in and fairly soon there was no one I wanted to have sex with less in the entire world. This was not the relationship as advertised. As Gen Z would say, I got the “ick” and didn’t want this manbaby anywhere near me. In psychological terms, our “ego states” had shifted from adult to adult, to parent and child – and my vagina had never been drier.
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.
The relationship would inevitably end, he’d pack his worldly belongings into a Tesco carrier bag and go back home to his real mother, and then, fairly soon afterwards, my libido would come roaring back, like a sodding freight train.
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.
Crucially, the paper specifically identifies the “blurring of partner and mother roles” as a factor in declining desire. They argue that “women often take on tasks for their husbands or other men partners that were originally performed by the men’s mothers, perhaps an implicitly-held leftover from more historical understandings of marriage”. And, unsurprisingly, that this is a significant turn-off.
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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