i r a bad feminist

On one of the websites I read fairly frequently, there was a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth yesterday about an Australian newspaper article in which the (female) author asked, "Whatever happened to wifely duty?" and suggested that women, even if not exactly in the mood, suck it up and accommodate their amorous husbands, and that "just doing it" usually leads to more and better sex.

As much as I would like to work myself up into a lather about this and suggest it's advocating marital rape, denying a woman ownership of her own body, that it's not 1950 or 1850, and so forth and so on, I cannot. I ::sob:: agree with it. If there's one thing I really wish I had done differently in my former marriage, one lesson I have learned since, it's that saying "no" too much is really bad for your relationship, specifically the intimacy in your relationship, and that, indeed, if you don't say no and just go with it even if you aren't initially feeling it, you almost invariably end up enjoying yourself.

Okay, you say, that's easy for you to say, Andrea. A low sex drive is not one of your (many and varied) problems. In fact, we your blog readers suspect you're kinda a big slut. Ah, blog readers, I counter, that has not been uniformly true throughout the course of my adult life. In fact, I was just telling a friend this very afternoon that during my pregnancy with D, my husband and I might have had sex once. Perhaps. I had no interest. At all. Did I feel guilty about making the father of my child go basically without for about a year? No. Should I have? Well, um, yeah. Damn right. If p-i-v wasn't on the menu, there's a lot of other things that I should have been happily willing to do to for someone that I reputedly loved. Complete self-centeredness is rarely the right choice.

So, yeah, I r a bad feminist.

Except. I think it absolutely goes the other way too. It's not wifely duty, it's spousely duty. And it's not duty, it's a spirit of openness and care and rejection of rejection towards someone you love. Why is that wrong?

xoxo