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Sun. Feb 09, 2003

The Wifely Duty

The Wifely Duty – (via Dangerousmeta) This entertaining article claims to be about marital sex, and contains the wonderful line, “once you get the canoe out in the water, everybody starts happily paddling,” but it offers more marital insight than just that: “Pearson told an interviewer, ’Until they program men to notice you’re out of toilet paper, a happy domestic life will always be up to women’ – a sentiment almost unanimously held by the working mothers I know. What we’ve learned during this thirty-year grand experiment is that men can be cajoled into doing all sorts of household tasks, but they will not do them the way a woman would. They will bathe the children, but they will not straighten the bath mat and wring out the washcloths; they will drop a toddler off at nursery school, but they won’t spend ten minutes chatting with the teacher and collecting the art projects. They will, in other words, do what men have always done: reduce a job to its simplest essentials and utterly ignore the fillips and niceties that women tend to regard as equally essential. And a lot of women feel cheated and angry and even – bless their hearts – surprised about this.”

Now there you have a quite insightful statement about the differences between men and women. But back to Modern Married Sex, and the Husband’s Dilemma: “He must somehow seduce a woman who is economically independent of him, bone tired, philosophically disinclined to have sex unless she is jolly well in the mood, numbingly familiar with his every sexual maneuver, and still doing a slow burn over his failure to wipe down the countertops and fold the dish towel after cooking the kids’ dinner. He can hardly be blamed for opting instead to check his e-mail, catch a few minutes of SportsCenter, and call it a night.”

And as a closing note, this has nothing to do with my recent marriage, it’s just an interesting article. In fact, since Susan had spinal surgery a mere month into our honeymoon period, and has recently completed her nine weeks of enforced spinal rigidity, we are just picking up where we left off last November.