My husband and I were cuddling in bed when he made a comment about how my hair smelled like smoke after spending the day at my mother’s. I asked,
“Is that why you don’t want to have sex with me?”
He was silent. After a while he answered,
“I am silent because I want to say it is because I have work in the morning but I know that answer will make me a hypocrite because we stay up late all the time to have sex when you have work in the morning.”
My husband and I have talked about this before. When he wants sex we have sex. It doesn’t matter if I am sick or tired or stressed or not really into it. It doesn’t matter if I have work in the morning and would rather go to sleep early. It doesn’t matter how I am feeling I never turn him down.
However, there are times when he says no to me. And he is not the first man to say no to
me.
The biggest lie our society tells us is that men want sex all the time. It is because men are sex crazed animals who can’t control themselves that women are raped. Wrong.
Men can control themselves. Their sex drives are not greater than ours.
My first sexual relationship was with a boy I had met in college. I remember that for the first year or so after we started having sex we had sex quite often. After a while though it became more and more clear to me that he was not as interested in sex as I was. He was happy “doing the deed” once a week while I wanted it every day. I thought for sure that we could find some happy medium if only I was more assertive about my wants and needs.
I thought that maybe my kissing, touching, and sexy outfits were too subtle. It wasn’t until one evening where I was literally on top of him attempting to undress us both while kissing him that I realized the truth. I was not too subtle. I was making myself perfectly clear. He was turning me down.
It was then that I started keeping track of all the times he turned me down. Every time I initiated sex he turned me down. The only time we had sex was when he wanted it. When he initiated it.
And what’s more was I had become so used to the idea that the only time we would ever be having sex was when he wanted it that I never turned him down. If I was sick, if I was tired, if I had to work the next day, if I didn’t feel like it, I still said yes. I wasn’t sure when the next opportunity would arise. I wasn’t sure how long it would be before he wanted it again and if I turned him down now then I would only be even hornier later.
Eventually I pointed this all out to him. And that was when our relationship began to unravel. My sex drive was higher than his and that “made him feel like he wasn’t enough of a man” for me. He felt inadequate. You see, our society doesn’t just lie to women about a man’s sex drive. It lies to men too. A man who doesn’t want sex isn’t a man at all.
This boyfriend dumped me. At this point in time I entered into a friends with benefits situation. For a while this worked. He and I both greatly enjoyed sex. But after a while I realized that yet again he did all of the initiating. If I invited him over for a booty call he declined. If I made the plans for when we would meet up he would cancel. The only time he and I had sex was when he wanted to have sex. Apparently only men can make booty calls and only women can answer them.
Now I am married and I feel lucky that my husband doesn’t always turn me down for sex. He likes when I initiate. He likes when I crawl into his lap and start taking my clothes off. He says that it makes him feel wanted and that when I do that it is very clear to him what it is I want.
But I still find that when he rejects me it hurts. I still find that every rejection brings up old wounds. I lay in bed at night and wonder, “Why doesn’t he want me? Is there something wrong with me? Am I not attractive to him anymore?”
Tonight though I thought about something else. Why don’t I feel I can say no to my husband? Do I like sex more than him? Do I simply feel guilty when I rejected him? Or is it something more than that? Do I subconsciously believe that a good wife should never say no? And why do I always assume that there must be something wrong with me when my husband says no? I am a feminist!
Tonight I have realized that my experience with being rejected and my experiences of never turning sex down have much more to do with our society and its expectations than it does with me. Our society has always perpetrated this idea that men are the initiators of sex because they are always looking for the next opportunity to get laid. So by taking control of my own sexual urges and asking men to satisfy them I have inverted this idea. And this made two former lovers feel inadequate.
At the same time that our society teaches us that men are always on the hunt, it teaches us that women that sometimes we must sacrifice our own wants and needs for others. Currently this is the part that I am trapped in. I am still sacrificing my own wants and needs for my husband’s. Every time I say yes to him when I want to say no I am putting his desires before my own.
I am not saying that women need to stop putting their loved ones first. I am saying that we need to stop doing it all the time. Our partners will live if we say no to them every now and then.
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