In another one of those contrarian pieces that crop up from time to time questioning the benefits of sexual equality, psychotherapist and author Lori Gottlieb asked: Does a More Equal Marriage Mean Less Sex? This lengthy New York Times Magazine piece was, surprisingly, a science story in the sense that the premise was built on a scientific study. But as a science story it was problematic.
The study in question, Egalitarianism, Housework and Sexual Frequency in Marriage, appeared in a journal called The American Sociological Review. The result, we’re told, is that among some sample of couples, those in which the man did all of the cooking, laundry, or vacuuming had sex 1.5 fewer times per month than those in which the man did more traditionally masculine chores.
Gottlieb acknowledged that correlation doesn’t establish causation, though she never made clear exactly what chain of cause and effect might be relevant. We get a long sequence of interviews and anecdotes, but it remained hard to sort out whether the author was trying to say that the alleged sex dearth was happening because women weighing their prospects were choosing nicer, more helpful men over physically sexier ones, or whether wielding a vacuum cleaner actually made a man less sexually appealing.
The anecdotes seemed to suggest that the women wanted macho men in the bedroom and equality-minded companions in the rest of the house.
There are of course other, less appealing possibilities. If there’s a severe imbalance of power, sex might be more frequent because it’s dictated by unilateral decision rather than a negotiation. Women who are stuck with all the housework might be having more sex with their husbands than they’d like.
There’s very little information about the one study on which the piece is based. How many couples were studied? How many couples reported that the men did all the vacuuming? It’s hard to know how big a deal it is to have 1.5 fewer sex acts per month. How often do average married couples have sex per month? How often did they want to have sex? The other problem is that in the study, the couples with 1.5 fewer sex acts per month were the ones in which the man did ALL the cooking, laundry or ironing. That doesn’t sound very equal. The egalitarian couples, we learn, just had less sex.
The Times Magazine piece includes a number of interesting interviews with sociologists, counselors and even sex columnist Dan Savage. There are glimpses into the personal lives of the author’s friends and patients. Dan Savage doesn’t directly address housework, though he does say that sex can be both "degrading" and "loving" at the same time.
The story banks off this nugget to segue to anecdotal evidence that what married women really want is for their husbands to iron the clothes, load the dishwasher, vacuum the carpets, feed the kids, walk the dog and then provide sex that’s simultaneously degrading and loving. Some of the husbands are too tired to do all this.
Reversing the sexes in this scenario is not at all amusing, perhaps because it comes closer to the historical and global reality that women have had to please husbands as a matter of survival.
The hypothesis that Gottlieb carries through the piece is that sex drive is fuelled by differences and that these are muted when people share the chores. Opposites attract, in other words. Maybe this explains why human ancestors had sex with Neanderthals.
But there are thousands of other ways couples could be different or similar beyond the amount of time they spend vacuuming. Gottlieb does cite one other scientific study – a famous one in which women preferred the dirty t-shirt odor of men whose genes differed most from their own in an area that controls an immune system complex called MHC. The MHC genes have implications for the health of offspring – the more variety the better. So there’s an evolutionary benefit to sensing and desiring this particular difference in a mate. Mice apparently do the same thing (though without the T-shirts).
And yet, there are plenty of other studies showing that people choose mates with traits similar to their own. (A recent paper showed that cross breeding with Neanderthals led to less healthy offspring, showing here’s some happy medium.)
The MCH/scent study gives the story a more science-y feel, but it has absolutely no bearing on whether sharing housework makes men less sexy. Unless perhaps you consider that men would be sexier if they stopped laundering their t-shirts, but that experiment could backfire.
Gottlieb says women are in a bind because they need help with the housework but housework emasculates their husbands. If housework is causing such a problem in marriages, maybe couples should try a different experiment. Why not take some of the money spent on counseling and hire a maid?
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