It's a case about making correct observations about what is happening, but drawing the wrong conclusions about it. I notice that most of her examples are people in their 50's and 60's. That means they were all raised when the gender-role expectations about how Men Want It and Women Don't were in full swing. Even the youngest of them can remember when birth control became easily available, and despite the so-called "sexual revolution" that followed, it takes a lot more than a pill to really change culture.
I bet that the men in those relationships are probably unwittingly giving out mixed signals...that is, they may say they want their wives to want sex, but what they really want is for their wives to say yes when they want sex...an important distinction. The guy who said he'd wait for his wife to ask for sex had the right idea, but probably after thirty years of a different pattern, and then there's the question of his wife being raised to believe that Nice Girls Don't.
Just to play devil's advocate here, the author is a therapist, and her job is to help people improve their relationships. If there's no sex happening, and that's making one partner really unhappy, then that's a pretty easy and obvious thing to address...and this is crucial...within the time frame that insurance will pay for counseling. I think it's kind of lazy and not best practice, but there's more to it than her just being an idiot. I do think that approach is likely to foster more problems in the long run, both in the relationship and in the sense that it reinforces cultural bullshit, but...and here I get really nasty and cynical...that's not really her problem. Less cynically, changing cultural expectations and what not is not really within a therapist's scope. She has to deal with what she's got to work with.
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on 2009-02-28 08:16 pm (UTC)I bet that the men in those relationships are probably unwittingly giving out mixed signals...that is, they may say they want their wives to want sex, but what they really want is for their wives to say yes when they want sex...an important distinction. The guy who said he'd wait for his wife to ask for sex had the right idea, but probably after thirty years of a different pattern, and then there's the question of his wife being raised to believe that Nice Girls Don't.
Just to play devil's advocate here, the author is a therapist, and her job is to help people improve their relationships. If there's no sex happening, and that's making one partner really unhappy, then that's a pretty easy and obvious thing to address...and this is crucial...within the time frame that insurance will pay for counseling. I think it's kind of lazy and not best practice, but there's more to it than her just being an idiot. I do think that approach is likely to foster more problems in the long run, both in the relationship and in the sense that it reinforces cultural bullshit, but...and here I get really nasty and cynical...that's not really her problem. Less cynically, changing cultural expectations and what not is not really within a therapist's scope. She has to deal with what she's got to work with.