As mentioned before, there’s much wrong as it relates to the current portrayals of men and women in society, especially when it has to do with marriage. The portrayal of men is especially problematic, since it not only serves to create the atmosphere for Marriage 2.0 to prosper, but it serves to dehumanize men. In other words, in the mind of women (and some men), it changes the perception of men as thinking, feeling humans with thoughts, hopes, dreams, a valid will of their own, and so on (just like the women), fully entitled to all of it, into something entirely different.
Now in Marriage 2.0, the husband submits to the wife. This is not an easy transition to make for many, since it’s unnatural, but the culture, such as school, church, and even to a certain extent his own parents conspire to remove the natural and God-given masculinity out of men from a very young age. The future wife herself also contributes to this pattern through their courtship, by using societal conditioning in her favor to bring about his compliance through the desire to be with a woman that society and everyone else has laid out before him. She has two tools available to her to bring about this compliance, the carrot and stick. In the case of marriage, her carrot is sexual access provided on compliance, and her stick is the ever-present threat of divorce in non-compliance.
Now this attitude of sub-humanity that women hold towards men comes out in various ways. You get women talking about having to “train their boyfriends” (ultra-feminist site Jezebel even gets that it’s wrong), or having a “well-trained husband”, and I know it’s common enough because I’ve been referred to in this way in the past by old girlfriends. You even see it in Laura Schlessinger’s book entitled “The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands”. While the advice might be better than other sources, what the title implies is patently offensive. The fact that there’s not an equivalently titled book for wives, along with the obvious marketing value as it relates to women’s attitudes, should say something.
I won’t speak of the stick given the Marriage 2.0 wife within this post, but I will address the carrot in the form of the perceptions of comparative human sexuality that Sheila Gregoire has posted on her site. She hasn’t come out on her site in direct support of this model as much as her colleagues have, but her view of sexuality seems to fit it more than not.
It can be easily said that she believes that men lust and women love, given her comments. This means a man’s desire for sex comes from a raw animal instinct, while a woman only has sex as a sacrifice to placate her feelings for the man and keep him around. While she writes many things that can be laudable in this area if there was a true sense of mutuality, this is the common thread in most of her blog posts (for example) that address men in some way. As she writes:
And if we give this message that men “need” sex, and women therefore must perform, it’s all too easy to start seeing sex as something distasteful, and men as animals.
If this result happens, it’s not from the message, but from the distaste of women who are not in touch with their own “animal urges” who see sex as a chore with nothing in it for them. The mutuality pendulum is swung almost completely in the direction of women – they don’t have to do anything for men except bring themselves if they even want to do that at all, while men have to do everything to please and placate them so the cookie will come:
The young wife . . . explained how over a few years, the frequency of sex in their marriage had dropped to less than ten times per year. Amazingly, this fact alone had not cued her in that there was a problem until one day, . . ., he told her that it was really a problem for him that they rarely had sex. She told him that she hadn’t seen it as a big problem.
Almost everything I’ve read on Gregoire’s site regarding sexuality seems to have this undercurrent of sex being perceived for men as a physical treat that the woman hands out for good behavior, with nothing more behind it. For example, the Magic Mike post (third separate topic for that page!):
But there’s one stubborn thing that is preventing the wholesale rejection of marriage, and that’s women’s stubborn need to see sex as something more than physical.
So we have to ignore this side of women, and promote instead the idea that women’s sex drives are the same as men’s are.
So if we look to see a sum total of what is going on with women through the lens on Sheila’s outlook on sexuality, it seems that women are not in touch with their physical desires, and in fact discount them as Sheila has:
When a woman takes her shirt off at the end of the day, her husband immediately starts thinking sexy thoughts. When a man takes his shirt off, a woman tends to think, “Is he going to put that in the laundry hamper?” We don’t tend to think, to the same extent, “Oh, come get me, hubba hubba.” It’s not that we NEVER want to be taken; it’s just that our sex drive is far more caught up in feeling safe, and feeling cherished, and feeling loved, than it is in pure visual stimuli.
If there’s no “come get me” physical sexual mood from a woman, it isn’t normal. In fact, something is very off with the sex lives of women involved if they don’t exhibit a strong physical desire towards sex. In fact, all the Magic Mike ticket sales and all the Fifty Shades of Grey book sales provide abundant proof that the whole quote is absolute utter nonsense.
So how is Sheila wrong in her perception of the sex drive that men and women have? That can be encapsulated in the closing statement of her Magic Mike post:
The more we dabble in things like this, the more we create problems for ourselves responding sexually within marriage. The more we turn sex into something that is purely physical, and not emotionally or spiritually intimate.
Men and women both have both physical and emotional intimacy when it comes to these things, and crave both if they are in a healthy marriage. While both men and women are capable of setting emotions aside when it comes to sex, generally men and women want BOTH an emotional and physical connection when it comes to marriage. Unfortunately, Sheila seems to have polarized things when it comes to comparing the sex drives of men and women (men crave the physical ONLY, women crave the emotional ONLY). Perhaps it can best be described as seeking emotional connection through physical actions. If men and women differ, it is only by the means things are primarily expressed, and Sheila seems to be more accurate than not in this regard, yet wholly wrong in the implications of such things. But women and men are exactly equal in the benefits gained by healthy sexual interaction within marriage.
If you really desire true intimacy in your marriage, both parties should learn give and take. That’s the mark of the Christian life. It isn’t getting every physical need met; it’s learning to love and learning to experience intimacy. Isn’t that what we should aim for?
Unfortunately, there’s a whole lot of taking going on from the woman’s side and a whole lot of giving going on from the man’s in most of the advice that is posted. Wouldn’t it be better for both parties to acknowledge the physical and emotional needs of themselves and the other party, and then seek to help one another fulfill them? This is truly learning to love and learning to experience intimacy.
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