The Politics of Desire – Bettina Arndt

Issue 2 | 28 April 2009

As one of Australia’s first sex therapists, Bettina Arndt has focussed her professional life on the changing nature of relationships between men and women. She has spent 20 years researching, writing and advising governments on a wide range of social issues, including family law, child care and ageing. On Tuesday 28 April 2009, Bettina Arndt addressed The Sydney Institute to explain the findings of her latest book, The Sex Diaries, which uses diaries kept by 98 couples to analyse desire and reveal the complexities of managing sex in a relationship.

THE POLITICS OF DESIRE

BETTINA ARNDT

On 20 July 1969, Neil Armstrong, the commander of Apollo 11, became the first person to set foot on the moon. His first words – “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” – became part of history, televised to earth and heard by millions. But just before he re-entered the lunar module, he added an enigmatic comment: “Good Luck, Mr Gorsky”.

Many people at NASA thought it was a casual remark concerning some rival Soviet cosmonaut, but a check revealed there was no Gorsky in either the Russian or American space programs. Over the years, many people questioned Armstrong about what he meant, but he always just smiled. Then, on 5 July 1995 in Tampa, Florida, a reporter again raised the question and this time Armstrong responded; it seemed that Mr Gorsky had died and so Armstrong felt he could finally answer. He explained that, in 1938, when he was a kid in a small Midwest town, he was playing baseball with a friend in his backyard. The ball was hit over the fence and landed in the yard of the neighbours, the Gorskys, by their bedroom windows. As Armstrong bent down to pick up the ball, he heard Mrs Gorsky shouting at Mr Gorsky. “Sex! You want sex?! You’ll get sex when the kid next door walks on the moon!”

It’s a great story but, sadly, only an urban legend – one which regularly does the rounds on the internet. Yet the world is now full of Mrs Gorskys – women who aren’t interested in sex but feel absolutely entitled to shut up shop, denying their partners any sexual contact.  And yes, there are also men who behave similarly. The older man who is concerned about erections may prefer to avoid sex than risk failure, leaving his partner feeling equally rejected and unwanted. But the Mrs Gorsky problem is the one filling the waiting rooms of sex therapists everywhere.

I’ve always known this. From the time I started working as a sex therapist back in the early 1970s, people have been talking to me about their sex lives. What I have heard about most is the business of negotiating the sex supply. How do couples deal with the strain of the man wishing and hoping while all she longs for is the bliss of uninterrupted sleep? It’s a night-time drama being played out in bedrooms across the nation, the source of great tension and unhappiness.

But this drama is usually a silent movie, with couples rarely talking about the subtle negotiation that goes on between them. His calculations: ‘What if I …? Will she then …?’ Her tactics: dropping her book as he appears at the bedroom door and feigning sleep; staying up late in the hope that he’ll doze off. Tensions. Resentment. Guilt.

That’s what my new book, The Sex Diaries, is all about. Through radio interviews and magazine articles, I recruited 98 couples to spend six to nine months keeping diaries for me, writing about their daily negotiations over sex. They were couples of all ages, from 20-year-old students to people in their seventies who have been married over 40 years – young couples at the start of their relationships; pregnant women; couples caught up in the exhaustion of young families; women who want more sex than their husbands and women who’d live happily without it; older couples dealing with health issues like prostate surgery and arthritis. Some wrote every day for months – one man ended up providing over 70 pages of details of his love-life – while others provided only brief weekly summaries.

The diaries revealed some intriguing stories. There was the man who reported making a statement he really regrets. Fed up with always having to initiate sex, he turned to his wife and said “I’ll make no more advances until you ask me.” That was eight years ago and they haven’t had sex since.

Another couple had kept a sex diary for 23 years, tracking not only their sexual frequency but number of orgasms. Yes, there were lusty couples amongst my diaries, who wrote at length about how they maintain their passion over 30 or 40 years. But there was also the Canberra man whose wife has an obsessive compulsive disorder and who likes everything to have its time and place. They make love every Sunday morning at 9.15 am.

But, as I expected, the burning issue which emerged was the sex-starved men. Every day I received page after page of eloquent, often immensely sad diary material, as men grasped the opportunity to talk about what quickly emerged as being a mighty emotional issue for them. Men aren’t happy. Many feel duped, disappointed, in despair at finding themselves spending their lives begging for sex from their loved partners. They are stunned to find their needs so totally ignored. It often poured out in a howl of rage and disappointment. Here’s Andrew from Queanbeyan, (41):

I am totally at a loss as to what to do, I do love her and I think she loves me but I cannot live like a monk. I have deliberately tried not to mention sex much at all but now I am so frustrated I don’t know what to do. I am at breaking point. I cannot and will not continue on like this. I refuse to go through life begging.”

Lack of sexual desire is the number one sexual problem plaguing women today. Over half (55 per cent) of all women experience lack of desire according to The Sex in Australia Survey, a research project involving nearly 20,000 participants, which makes it one of the largest sex studies ever completed.

I’ve combed all available research to attempt to discover why it is that women’s libido should be so much less robust than that of men. There’s every reason to believe the problem is hard-wired. Many believe that women’s low drive is linked to their low level of testosterone; women have ten to twenty times less of this vital hormone than men. Evolutionary psychologists argue mothers aren’t meant to be bonking all the time so their distractible libidos ensure they care for their young. And the reason so many women start off with strong drives and then appear to lose interest seems to be due to the brain chemistry associated with the early “in-love” phase of relationships which, for a few years at best, pours firelighters on what I call the “damp wood” that is normal female libido – easily distracted, hard to light and easily wrapped up in all the garbage of the day. The testosterone-driven male is far more likely to be blessed with an eternal flame.

None of this is particularly controversial but where I knew I would run into trouble with this book was my proposed solutions – which include the notion that the low desire partner should sometimes “just do it”. Now my book makes it clear this is an equal opportunity measure – men too should just do it if they are the ones constantly rejecting their partners. Yes, yes, I realise there are sometimes anatomical constraints in the case of men with failing equipment but they still have hands, for heaven’s sake. And lips, and the capacity to make love to a woman in all manner of ways that still leave her feeling desired and desirable. These days there are also the miracle cures for failing erections, provided a man is willing to face the issue.

I should point out I didn’t invent the “just do it” idea. The proposal and the use of the Nike slogan comes from a well known American sex therapist, Michele Weiner Davis, who writes very sensibly about the problem of mismatched desire. She argues desire is a decision – you can’t just wait for it to come, you have to make it happen. So Weiner Davis poses the revolutionary idea that there’s no point worrying about the reasons why women aren’t interested in sex – there’ll always be plenty of them: squalling infants, stress, tiredness, irritation that he won’t help with the housework. “Knowing why you are not so interested in sex won’t boost your desire one bit. Doing something about it will,” she says.

Critical to this argument is recent research by Professor Rosemary Basson from British Columbia, which has shown that many women do experience arousal and orgasm if they have sex without any prior desire. Basson has found that women in long-term relationships may rarely think of sex or experience a spontaneous hunger for sexual activity. So when they do have sex, they are seeking emotional closeness or intimacy with their partners or responding to his overtures, rather than being prompted by their own desire. But even though they may not be ‘in the mood’ to start off with, once they start making love, these women often feel sexual sensations building, desire may start to click in and then they’ll want to continue. The result is that they experience sexual pleasure and perhaps orgasm. Provided there’s a “willingness to be receptive,” the rest follows, Basson advises.

The suggestion that women – and men too – should sometimes have sex when they are not in the mood runs into a massive ideological roadblock. Women’s right to say “no” has been enshrined in our cultural history for nearly 50 years. It was one of the outstanding achievements of the women’s movement to outlaw rape in marriage and teach women to resist unwanted advances. Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon just at the time when women’s sexual rights were becoming a rallying cry. Women must no longer act as spittoons for men, preached Germaine Greer, calling for an end to women’s sexual subjugation. After all those years of thinking of England, now women could reclaim their bodies for their own pleasure, and that meant only having sex when they felt like it.

The work of sex researchers added force to the argument. Female desire must come first, pronounced New York sex therapist Helen Kaplan, as she adapted sex researchers Masters and Johnson’s famous 1966 model of sexual pleasure to make desire the prerequisite for all that followed. Without desire there was no arousal, no pleasure, the experts pronounced, and feminists applauded. It became a total no-no to ever suggest that women should be pressured into sex. The belief was that sex must wait until women are well and truly in the mood.

But that was where we went wrong. I’m arguing that the assumption that women need to want sex to enjoy it has proved a really damaging sexual idea, one that has wrought havoc in relationships for the past 40 years. The sex diaries show that so very clearly, revealing that many women firmly believe that unless they feel like having sex, they can’t possibly make love. And the men know that all too well. Many work hard to try to kindle the flame of desire in their partners, knowing that without this they will run into a brick wall of rejection. But it rarely works and the couple’s sexual frequency falls hostage to women’s weak libido. The result is that sex becomes a battleground as sad, rejected men rightly complain when physical intimacy and the consequent emotional connection fall by the wayside.

It was obvious that challenging these ideological assumptions about sex was bound to raise hackles. “Fuck you Bettina Arndt!” was the charming beginning to a blog responding to my writing about the “just do it” idea. The blog writer, “blue milk”, felt I was suggesting that we shouldn’t worry about why women aren’t interested in sex anymore, but “just pressure them into it by threatening the future happiness of their families and pretty soon their libido will be bouncing right back”. This chat site quickly filled with the comments of equally angry women. “It sickens me that after so many YEARS of feminism we are still arguing [for] the most basic of rights – the right for a woman to make decisions about her own body,” one hissed.

There’s been plenty of hissing since my book was published. Angry blogs are still appearing. My favourite is entitled “Bettina Arndt – Rape Cheerleader!” Many of my critics clearly haven’t read the book and chose to interpret the “just do it” idea as a return to the bad old days of women suffering through unwanted sex. Virginia Haussegger in The Canberra Times is determined to see my argument as simply lie back and think of England: “The notion of women passively submitting to uninspiring sex is an archaic and unforgivable suggestion that takes us back to some very dark old days indeed … For Arndt to suggest that women should simply put out, in order to keep a marriage alive, is a frightening, but timely, reminder of why we clearly need a sexual revolution,” she wrote.

But while newspaper columnists and bloggists bleat, I’ve been swamped with mail from men and women who understand what I am trying to say and agree with it.

Thank you for lifting the lid on this unspoken, sad fact of life that diminishes many of our marriages. I am a 30 year old wife and mother …It is with great sadness that my husband and I have watched as a trench has grown between us on account of the lack of sex in our relationship…We have finally got to a point where we realise we have been leading parallel lives and that things have to change.  In my own bumbling way, I have come to understand that the onus is on me to instigate change in our relationship.  My husband will never demand sex from me yet I have the choice to just do it and to take the steps that I know will reap huge benefits for our relationship and our marriage.”

I just want to thank you for your new book about men and women’s differing libidos! My husband and I have had mismatched libidos for years and it was a relief to know that we are not alone with this. Funnily enough, just before reading about your book in the paper I had come to the agreement with my husband (completely voluntarily) that I was going to make a greater effort, to break the horrible dynamic of pursuit/resistance we had got stuck in. After reading about your book, I really knew that we were on the right track. Our relationship has improved by a great quantum leap and our home is now a much more relaxed environment.

I was never suggesting women should suffer through unwanted sex – simply that in a loving relationship it is important not to leave a partner feeling constantly unwanted and undesirable. Just do it doesn’t always mean bonking. It is possible to sometimes just give pleasure. And Basson’s research is important in raising the possibility of pleasure in sex without prior desire, a notion well worth exploring. Clearly this is a complex issue – as the “just do it” chapter shows. Many diarists explored this as a “solution” to the problem of mismatched desire, with varying degrees of success – some found it helped, others hated the idea. The whole idea of my diaries was to explore this complexity and encourage couples struggling with these issues to see they are not alone. It has been extremely heartening to learn many people who actually read the book are getting that message, despite the flack I am receiving.

Last week I received this intriguing letter from a man responding to the “just do it” section in the book:

The flow of the first part of the book led me down an orderly path to a solution, Just Do It. Emotionally I was starting to get my bold highlighters out and start making very large placards “Bettina for Nobel Peace Prize” and then you waded in the middle road of understanding both sides – all sides actually. The murky world of reality sunk in as I read on. It is said we – guys – seek to problem solve, “fix things”, so the simple JUST DO IT is such a beautiful solution. But then you bugger it up with other points of view, other experiences, considerations, failures. Why couldn’t it remain a nice fresh crisp answer, without doubt and not open to re-interpretation? Ho-hum. Clear as mud.”

The business of sex is as clear as mud – which is why many of the other attacks on my book are so simplistic. Virginia Haussegger wonders “why Arndt isn’t turning her spotlight instead on the reason some women may have lost interest in sex. In addition to being worn out and over-tired, the real reason might have a lot to do with their uninspiring, unstimulating partners. Where is the focus on how unsexy it is to try snogging a dull, lazy, tenderless man?”

It is true that some of my female diarists complained about their lover’s failure to make any effort to light their fire let alone to provide real pleasure when they did end up in the cot. I have put together a little collection of truly appalling stories from the women about their crude, fumbling lovers. Yet many other women admit their partners make strenuous efforts to get things right and are superb sexual craftsmen – yet the women still don’t want sex. Adding to the complexity is the fact that many women simply aren’t easy to please in bed – as they readily admit. My chapter on love-making techniques is entitled “Blind man in the dark searching for a black cat that isn’t there” – from a frustrated male diarist describing his efforts to stimulate his wife’s clitoris in just the way she likes it.

I also mention the wonderful take on this by British comic Jenny Lecoat: “He, labouring away, pauses to ask, ‘Are you nearly there?’ ‘It’s hard to say,’ says she. He plunges on. ‘If you imagine it as a journey from here to China, where would you be?’ She considers. ‘The kitchen.'”

The other extremely predictable reaction to my book has been the reaction of women like Eva Cox, arguing that if men did more housework they would get more sex. “Don’t men realise that the most erotic call they can make is “Cupcake, don’t walk on the floor. I’ve just washed it,” suggests Helen Elliot, writing in The Age. Of course there is some truth in this argument. In my chapter, “Laundry Gets you laid?” many of my female diarists talk about resentment eroding their desire. It is pretty obvious that men who don’t contribute to household chores will incur female ire. I have a great diarist I call Mary (all names were actually disguised) – who complains bitterly that her husband does so little to help her:

I’m working a full 5-day week, 6.00am to 6.30pm days. I come home, usually have to cook (because he cannot and will not cook, at least, not reliably) … Yes, he does “do the washing” – which consists of putting the washing into our 10kg washer/dryer, and putting the finished dried washing onto a pile on the lounge floor, where the dog promptly lies all over it. Now if he took the clothes out straight away and hung them up or folded them, life would be sweet. BUT he piles them load on top of load on top of load – so by the time I get to them, I’ve got steam-dried, cardboard lumps covered in dog-hair and he wonders why I’m so bloody ungrateful and why that night I’ll knock his block off when he wants “it”.

Mary is absolutely bewildered as to why her man is allowing this issue to sabotage what she sees as an otherwise beautiful marriage. But Peter feels that it is incredibly unfair of her to use sex as a weapon. Mary explains:

He argues that even if I were a lady of leisure with a maid and housekeeper and no need to work with a million dollars in the bank, I still wouldn’t be interested in sex. I deny, deny and deny that but deep inside I have to admit there is a chance he is right.

That’s the crux of the sex-housework issue. Yes, women are understandably resentful when they feel their partners aren’t sharing their second shift. Why should they put out, “just do it”, if their partners aren’t prepared to consider their needs and pull their own weight when it comes to the relentless burden of housework and child care? The resentment these women feel is often a sure-fire passion killer.

But even in the best of circumstances, even with the most considerate, helpful partners, the fact remains that many women still try to avoid sex. Listen to Fran: this 53-year-old Sydney woman is married to a saint, and she knows it: “Julian runs the house, apart from cooking. He does all the washing but I won’t let him do the ironing because he doesn’t do a good enough job.”She knows he works very hard to try to make sure everything is running smoothly, in the hope she may want sex – but he still rarely gets the green light. “Sometimes I think I’m such a bitch,” she confesses with a laugh.

It’s fascinating that the household issue so often gets a run whenever there is any criticism of women’s behaviour. And even here the “truth” regarding men’s participation in household work rarely gets an airing. Only a few weeks ago it was widely reported that the latest ABS social trends survey found that women do almost twice as much housework as men – 33 hours and 45 minutes a week. What the media failed to mention was men spend a lot more time than in paid jobs – an average of 31 hours and 50 minutes a week, compared with women’s 16 hours and 25 minutes. In other words, men and women do about the same amount of work in total – about 50 hours a week each. How is it that we never hear this side of the story?

There are no easy answers to tensions over mismatched desire. Despite the misleading publicity, my book does not promote any quick fixes but the diary idea proved a marvellous means of illustrating the complexities of the issue. Yes there were women reluctantly doling out sexual favours but there were some lusty, sexually-deprived women who just crave more sex, just as there were men indifferent to its delights. There were couples who both preferred to eat chocolate. And there were also passionate couples married for thirty forty years writing about the sexual joy they share together. That was the real fascination – this rich tapestry of experience laid bare through the revelations of the his-and-hers diaries. It was quite a journey.