This piece was originally published on the Blowfish Blog.

So why is the myth of sexual spontaneity so damaging?

I know. I’ve written about this before. Buy why else?

I’ve written before about the myth of sexual spontaneity: the myth that, for sex to be good and meaningful, the desire has to strike both partners out of the blue and be acted on immediately. I’ve written about how unrealistic the myth is, how poorly it fits into the reality of many people’s sex lives; I’ve written about the narrow and limiting definition of sexual desire it creates.

But I’ve been thinking lately about another — and in many ways more serious — problem with the myth of sexual spontaneity.

And that’s that it contributes to the idea that sex is dirty and bad… and thus makes people feel like sex is only okay if they don’t take responsibility for it.

A lot of other feminists have talked about this: the myth of being “swept away.” It’s the myth that sexual desire should overpower you with blinding passion — and that if it doesn’t, if you plan for it, that’s somehow cold and calculating and missing the point. And it’s a myth that fucks up sex lives from beginning to end. It keeps teenagers from using birth control. It keeps people from talking with their partners about what they like and don’t like in bed. It keeps people from educating themselves about sex, on the grounds that it should be “natural.” It keeps long-term couples from making dates for sex.

And I would argue — as many feminists have argued before me — that the “swept away” myth essentially comes from the idea that sex is bad.

Let’s look at another primal animal desire, one that we don’t have as much negative baggage about. Let’s take the desire to eat. We don’t think that eating a meal is somehow diminished by planning for it; that eating is only true and beautiful if the desire strikes us out of the blue and we act on it at once. Sure, we’ll stop and buy funnel cake if we smell it at a street fair… but we also buy groceries a week in advance, and make reservations for busy restaurants, and think in the morning or afternoon about what we might want for dinner, and make careful plans for special, festive meals.

Why?

Because we basically think that eating is okay. We have some complicated and messed-up feelings about food in our culture, sure; but most of us accept that food is a necessary and valuable part of life. We don’t think there’s anything wrong with planning a meal… because we don’t think there’s anything wrong with eating one.

But that’s patently not the case with sex. Our culture tends to see sex, either as a sin that we must resist, or as a selfish luxury we can do without. We don’t see it as a necessity, and we definitely don’t see it as a central and valuable part of the human experience.

And yet — obviously — we still want it.

Which is where the “swept away” myth comes in. The “swept away” myth lets us have sex, while pretending to ourselves and everybody else that we didn’t really want it, and didn’t consciously choose it, and can’t be blamed for it.

It’s essentially a way of abdicating responsibility for sex. It’s a way of convincing yourself that you didn’t really choose this. You were overwhelmed by passion, by an animal urge or emotional flood that couldn’t be controlled. You couldn’t help it. It wasn’t your fault.

It’s like fantasies about bondage or rape: fantasies that, for many folks, let them enjoy sex, or enjoy thinking about sex, while still feeling like it’s against their will and they’re not responsible for it. Now, there’s not a damn thing wrong with these fantasies. There’s not even anything wrong with acting these fantasies out. But it’s no way to live your entire sex life. (Unless you’re into the 24/7 dom/sub thing… and even that takes a lot of thought and conscious choice, more even than most sex lives.) It’s not grownup. It’s not responsible.

And ultimately, it’s not even that much fun. The “swept away” myth of spontaneity seriously limits your opportunities to learn about sex; to learn more about your partners desires and your own; to expand your sexual repertoire. It limits the kinds of sex you can have: if planning for sex ruins it, that pretty much rules out the acquisition of sex toys. Not to mention sex education materials, or smut, or birth control. And — especially if your life is stressful and overbooked, or you’re getting older and the spontaneous urge to boff is diminishing — it limits your sex life in the most blunt and obvious way… namely, how often you have it.

And maybe more importantly, the “swept away” myth feeds the monster of sex-negativity. It feeds the monster in our culture and in all of us that says that sex is a sin, and that while letting yourself be overcome with lust might be forgivable, consciously choosing to make room for it in your life makes you guilty of first- degree sex. With premeditation and passion aforethought.

I actually have nothing against spontaneous sex. I love spontaneous sex. Being overwhelmed with lust, blowing off your dinner reservations because your lover’s ass has suddenly become way more important… that’s lovely. It’s like an adventure, like riding a rollercoaster. It lets you feel like your entire life isn’t being measured out in coffee spoons; like you still have the capacity to surprise yourself, and to be surprised.

My problem isn’t with spontaneous sex. It’s with the myth of spontaneous sex. It’s with the idea that spontaneous sex is the best sex, the sex we should all be having all the time, the only sex that counts. As one kind of sex among many, spontaneous sex is great. But as The One True Sex, it severely limits your sexual options. And it feeds into the monstrous idea that making sex a priority makes you a bad person.

So buy a vibrator. Make a sex date. Have a conversation with your partner about sexual things you might like to do. Call San Francisco Sex Information, and ask them a question you have about sex. Read a book about a kind of sex you’re curious about. Do something that says, “Sex is a priority for me, and I am making a conscious choice that will shape what my sex life looks like.”

And let’s starve the monster together.

This piece was originally published on the Blowfish Blog.

The fascinating thing is this.

There’s this…. thing on the Internet. A pair of columns by conservative writer/ radio host Dennis Prager, exhorting wives who aren’t in the mood for sex with their husbands to suck it up and do it anyway, pretty much whenever he wants. You really have to read it for yourself (if you have high blood pressure, be sure you’ve taken your medication first), but here’s the gist:

A man know that his wife loves him by “her willingness to give her body to him.” Therefore, she should only rarely refuse to have sex with him when he wants it. And her decision to accept or refuse sex should have nothing to do with whether she’s in the mood for it, or whether she thinks she’s going to enjoy it. A considerate husband will of course recognize that “there are times when a man must simply refrain from initiating sex out of concern for his wife’s physical or emotional condition”… but apart from “those times,” a wife should pretty much never say “No.” And her mood should have nothing to do with that decision. Sex is an obligation that a wife owes to her husband, and for a wife to refuse it simply because she’s not in the mood is just plain selfish. (Oh, and by the way: This isn’t just how nature made us. It’s how God wants it.)

No, really. I’m serious. It’d be laughable if it weren’t so appalling. I could scarcely believe it was written in this decade. It reads like a marriage manual from the ’50s… and not a very modern marriage manual from the ’50s at that. It almost makes me want to call parody on it and invoke a sexual version of Poe’s Law (“it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that can’t be mistaken for the real thing”).

But the fascinating thing is this.

If you take out all the content about gender roles?

If you take out all the sexist, retrograde, “sex is an obligation that women owe to men,” “women’s sexual desires are less important than men’s,” “close your eyes and think of England,” Total Woman dreck? If you leave out the creepy, oft-repeated language about a woman “giving her body”? If you disregard the bizarre assumption that sex is always something men initiate and women either accept or reject? If you ignore the unsubstantiated at best, blatantly wrong at worst assertions about women’s and men’s sexualities… including the assertion that experiencing sex as a sign of love is somehow exclusive to men? If you overlook the idea that sex with a passive, compliant meat puppet will make men feel loved and satisfied? If you pass over the glaring omissions… such as the idea that men have an obligation to pay attention to women’s sexual pleasure, and if women are repeatedly saying “No” to sex, maybe it’s because their men are inconsiderate lovers who treat sex as something women do for them, instead of something they both do for each other?

If you can squint real hard and somehow ignore all that?

What he’s saying is not radically different from stuff I’ve said in this very blog.

I, myself, have argued that you don’t always need to be in the mood when you start sex. You just need to be willing to be in the mood. If you always wait until you’re both in the mood — especially if either or both of you are stressed, getting older, parents, a couple who’s been together for a while, or just insanely busy — you may wait a good long while, and will wind up having a lot less sex than either of you wants. But starting to have sex can get you in the mood, even if you weren’t in the mood to start with. It’s a good idea sometimes to let yourself be seduced, to start having sex before you’re in the mood and let yourself get drawn in it as you go.

I’ve even argued — very controversially — that if a person unilaterally and permanently refuses sex to their partner without being willing to discuss or negotiate it, it is not automatically the worst moral choice for that partner to seek out sex elsewhere. An argument that was based on the idea that sex — not sex on demand whenever and however you want it, but some amount of some kind of sex — is one of the things we have a right to expect in a romantic relationship. (And no, I don’t want to start that argument again. Please, for the sweet love of Loki, let’s not start that argument again.)

And I certainly wouldn’t argue with the proposition that sex is one of the main ways that people in a relationship feel loved. Like, duh.

But what on earth does any of that have to do with gender?

What on earth does it have to do with what men want, and what women should do about it?

If you spend even a cursory amount of time reading sex educators, sex therapists, sex advice columns, etc., a glaringly obvious pattern will jump out and smack you across the face. The pattern is this: A lot of couples have significant differences in how often they like to have sex… differences that can cause serious problems in their relationship.

And that pattern has little or nothing to do with gender.

Lesbian couples can have significant differences in how often they like to have sex. Gay male couples. Couples where one or both partners are trans or unconventionally gendered. People in triads and other non-coupled relationships.

And opposite sex couples can certainly have significant differences in how often they like to have sex… differences that most definitely cut across gender lines. In hetero couples with differing libidos, sometimes it’s the man who wants it more often — and sometimes, it’s the woman. Pretty often, it’s the woman.

It’s certainly possible that, on average, men tend to want sex more often than women. (I haven’t seen any good research on this one way or the other… but it wouldn’t shock me.) But even if that’s true, it’s hardly a universal rule. Plenty of women want sex more often than their male partners. In fact, a disturbing number of these women have had the crummy experience of being insulted, mocked, and rejected by their male partners for their high libidos.

So I ask again: What’s gender got to do with it? Why was this framed as a salvo in the battle of the sexes?

Let’s try an experiment. Let’s take the gender stuff out of this piece of advice, and see what happens.

Here’s what you get when you take the gender stuff out. Sex is one of the important ways that people in a relationship feel good about themselves and know that they’re loved. Sex is an important part of a romantic relationship, and people have a right to expect it. Often, however, people in relationships have differences in how often they want sex. These differences need to be worked out, since they can cause real problems in the relationship, including the problem of one or both partners not feeling accepted and loved. That working-out may involve a reasonably happy-medium compromise, in which one partner winds up having sex somewhat more often than they’d normally be inclined to, and the other winds up having it somewhat less. (It can involve other solutions as well, such as non-monogamy or redefining what you think of as sex… but let’s stay on topic, just this once.) And if you always wait until you’re in the mood to have sex, you may end up having sex a lot less often than either of you wants, and a lot less often than is good for your relationship. You don’t always have to be in the mood; you just have to be willing to get into the mood.

See? That wasn’t so hard, was it?

But when you put all that gender stuff in? When you make this about women’s sexual responsibilities to men, instead of people’s sexual responsibilities to their partners?

It’s not just wrong. It’s not even just sexist. It taps into a toxic mythology that made people miserable and ruined relationships and marriages, for decades and indeed centuries. It is a revival of a sexual system that was demeaning and depressing for both women and men: a system in which women’s sexual pleasure was considered trivial at best and non-existent at worst, in which sex was a service women were expected to provide for men on demand without concern for their own desires, in which women’s bodies were a commodity that men were entitled to and women were obligated to “give.” It is a form of relationship between men and women that our society has largely been rejecting… and with good reason.

And that’s the real tragedy of this sorry piece of writing: It didn’t have to be this way. There was a germ of a good idea buried in the toxic waste: a germ of an idea about how, in sex as much as in the rest of your life, you have to look after your partner’s needs as well as your own; to be willing to be flexible and accommodating; to not let your moods control how you treat each other; to take pains to make sure your partner knows they’re loved.

But the toxic waste was so overpowering that it makes me seriously question whether the germ of a good idea was really what Prager cared about. It makes me seriously question whether his crucial issue was “men need to know that they’re loved”… or whether, instead, it was “women need to know their place.”