Gender Inequities in Household Labor Predict Lower Sexual Desire in Women
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
[x] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/men-who-do-housew...
That's the explanation.
Better sex life for husband and wife, and the wife can be relieved that the maid won't be at all interested in her husband!
(Though if anyone's ever done a paper on it, I bet 'has domestic servants' is also negatively correlated with sexual activity...)
I have a hard time thinking of how to get around all the potential confounders starting with the genetic or psychological traits of the involved women and men, that might cause both: a “traditional” stance on how housework is shared and the strength of sexual desire.
This is why I am quite skeptic that there is an interesting thing to learn here. Sadly I have not found a way to read the whole study.
That shouldn't change desire - desire is instinctive.
All the brain cells in the world aren't going to make you more attracted to someone just because of your definition of feminine/masculine.
IOW, heterosexual women are still going to be attracted to traditionally masculine traits. It's almost a tautology - if they weren't, they wouldn't be heterosexual.
Same goes for heterosexual men.
Contextual desire triggers are at least partially shaped by experience.
If that were even remotely true, then the arguments about sexual orientation being a choice would be valid.
I don't buy either of those arguments, and for pretty much the same reason.
No, they wouldn't.
“Shaped by experience” is not “choice” and “at least partially” does not mean “definitely specifically as to gender orientation”.
I see where you're going with this, but I still respectfully disagree - gender orientation (whatever the hell that is - do you mean trans people?) is not the same thing as sexual orientation, which is specifically "who you are attracted to", not "the gender you identify as". It's about sex, not gender.
And if experience can shape someone's sexual orientation, then the "pray the gay away" type of efforts would have succeeded. A lot of homosexual people in the past did not want to be that way, and yet no experience they had, or sought out, managed to change who they were attracted to.
So yeah, the argument "experience can shape your sexual orientation" is, IMNSHO, complete hogwash and at odds with reality as we've seen in the homosexual demographic.
I am a heterosexual male. I therefore am attracted to humans with female biological sex characteristics. If I am walking down the street and see an individual from behind. Lets say they are slightly overweight (increasing waist diameter) and wearing clothing that somewhat masks their hip size. Process X now lacks inputs about typical secondary sex characteristics that can be identified from behind.
If it's an individual with short hair and wearing baggy pants, then process X decides it is less likely that the individual is a biological female, but if it is an individual with long hair and a skirt, then process X decides it is more likely that the individual is a biological female.
This is an example of contextual desire triggers are at least partially shaped by experience.
It can be seen outside of desire too; consider disgust. Bitter flavors tend to trigger disgust in kids. However, take a random new food and mix an emetic with it; watch them react with disgust to that food in the future.
I think it's because your point is orthogonal to my point which was in response to the someone upthread who implied that masculinity as a definition is changing, and that change means that women are finding the new definition attractive.
My argument is that it doesn't matter what the prescribed definition of masculinity is, women are going to find attractive what they've always found attractive.
Same with men.
If it were at all possible that experiences in ones life can change what that individual feels attracted to, efforts to "cure" homosexuality would have been successful.
Setting aside that "traditional masculinity" is a moving target, plenty of heterosexual women are attracted to non-traditionally masculine traits. Desire isn't merely instinctive. Humans aren't rutting animals hardwired to fuck in the presence of phereomones and sexual display. A person's definition of feminine and masculine absolutely informs, if not defines, who and what they find attractive.
No one made that claim.
> A person's definition of feminine and masculine absolutely informs, if not defines, who and what they find attractive.
Nonsense. If that were at all possible, all the "pray the gay away" processes would have worked. It hasn't.
What humans find sexually attractive is hardwired. If you want to claim it's a choice, you're going to be arguing with more people than me.
Not finding desirable the traits that you think are masculine traits does not mean that they do not find masculine traits desirable. It just means that what you think is the masculine traits, is wrong.
I guess I can't argue with that.
No, my response was to the original poster of this thread who implied that if we prescribe a new norm for what "masculine" traits are, then women would stop finding the old masculine traits attractive.
If it were possible to change what people find sexually attractive all the efforts to "cure" gay people would have worked.
My argument is that just because someone has prescribed what masculinity is, doesn't mean that women are going to stop finding the old definition of masculinity more attractive.
Sexual attractiveness just doesn't work like that; you can tell people (and even get them to agree) what a man or a women should be, but that doesn't mean that they are going to find examples of that definition attractive.
I'd also say that
> If it were possible to change what people find sexually attractive all the efforts to "cure" gay people would have worked.
is a pretty flawed assumption.
Even if we assume sexual attraction is purely based on experience/environment that does not imply that the techniques attempted by the various gay conversion "therapies" would be successful in changing it.
I believe I'm the poster in question and I didn't mean to imply that. What I did mean to imply is that masculine traits that elicit desire are viewed through a cultural lens.
If "reliable" or "competent" or "virile" are attractive to women, the ways of signaling that can change over time.
Another example: facial hair is a secondary sex characteristic for males, and indeed we see that facial hair on women, is relatively universal at reducing attractiveness for heterosexual men. However, the "most masculine" big bushy lumberjack beards are rarely the most attractive, and desirable facial hair across cultures and times has varied greatly.
I don't think it is - I didn't define what I thought were masculine or feminine characteristics. Your counterexamples from your experience (skirts, for example) aren't necessarily feminine characteristics anyway: kilts, long hair and jewellery (earrings and more) have all long been worn by men.
I also didn't say that "more" masculine characteristics are more attractive; all I'm saying is that prescribing a new norm for men or women does not in any way mean that hetersexual men or women are going to stop finding the base masculine/feminine traits less desirable.
Desire is not just instinctive. To continue the example: a skirt, long hair, and jewelry can conform to either masculine or feminine standards of attractiveness, depending on who, where, and when you ask (and on the specific styles of said skirt and jewelry). Desire is rooted in instinct, but "nurture" clearly plays a huge role in shaping it.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to consider the possibility that "women's expectations of masculine behavior have changed in 30 years." The underlying instincts of romantic/sexual desire don't need to change for this to happen.
Note that the data comes entirely from self-report (two surveys of a few hundred women each). Other studies suggest that people's perceptions of how much household labor they do aren't very accurate, so the causality could be: relationship problems -> less sex, more resentment -> more bias in the perception of labor division.
Also, a different study [0], which used self-reported data too, found the opposite conclusion. To be honest, I'm not sure how to reconcile the difference. I look forward to other people's comments on the papers' methodologies.
If a broke husband with a massive beer belly while sitting planted in front of the TV and covered in pretzel crumbs told his wife to clean all of the dishes and vacuum the house and then do laundry, anybody would probably mentally check out of that relationship eventually, and deservedly so.
But if a wealthy, hard-working, and fit husband asked his wife to do 100% of the housework, that's probably not going to dampen sexual desire in the slightest.
The flip side is that 20% or so of women were sexually abused as children and that creates a situation where no matter how many current time causes of resentment you remove and no matter how many positive things you try to add it is like trying to get a fish to fly. There is a reason why they don’t let victims of sexual abuse serve on the juries of people like Danny Masterson because one person’s indulgence can permanently deprive the victim and their partners of what is an important part of life for most people.
I can say it makes people like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lauren_Book
go Batman on people’s asses and lead to situations like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Tuttle_Causeway_sex_offe...
The main issue is that if happens to you it makes a wound that doesn’t ever heal and you are very inclined to want to pass your trauma forward to somebody…. If you knew that person crossing the road in front of you was a molestor you might think about not applying the brake…
Others just figure that a year in prison is not enough to pay for damage that lasts a lifetime, particularly when it affects the people around you in a cryptic way, and look for opportunities to hurt other people.
What country/city/area is this? I find this exceptionally hard to believe.
https://victimsofcrime.org/child-sexual-abuse-statistics/
There are some therapists who see couples who say that when sex is not working for a couple and the simple things don’t work that the cause is almost always past abuse. It is an N=1 experiment but I can say talking about that with my partner led to some revelations 2 days later that were dimly remembered but later confirmed by others who were involved.
Besides, it's often not just about the fact that someone has to do household labor. A lot of women are realizing that said ideal husband somehow expects their partner to clean up after them, essentially taking over the role of his mother. This is despite both parties often having a full-time job.
A lot of men demonstrate a form learned helplessness, and pretend they are unable to do even the most minimal form of household labor - often including things as trivial as putting the dishes they used in the dishwasher, or putting dirty laundry in the hamper. This needlessly complicates what should've been a trivial chore, and breeds resentment.
A commonly-heard sentiment is that women feel like they have to care for their husband as if he is another child. Their husband expects them to act as his mother and a maid in one. I am not really surprised that this is a turn-off.
You might be overthinking a generalized extreme example designed to illustrate my point.
I hear this complaint a lot, but the inverse is also true. Many women expect their male partner to take over the role of her father. Any relationship that has severely asymmetric exchange of value is ultimately doomed.
But it seems reasonable to me that in a healthy relationship, each partner at least partially replaces the role of the other's parent, so long as the exchange is balanced.
Relationships of all kinds are ultimately built on value exchange. Parasitic relationships are those in which the value exchange is severely unbalanced. And these kinds of parasitic relations inevitably end, either because the node getting sucked dry realizes it and cuts the bond, or because the parasite eventually sucks its host dry of all potential value and then cuts the bond to look for a new host.
Having said that, wives often discount the bits that their husbands do for their household. It goes like: Thing A is something only my husband knows how to do, so he would be doing it; whereas we are both capable of doing B so let's share it fairly.
Things A tending to be large, more-spaced-out endeavors such as fixing things.
We just got our house exterior painted. Yesterday she insisted on helping out with some of the "handyman" work, and learned how to wire up some light fixtures.
The wealthy, hard-working and fit wife may be not that happy to do 100% of the housework while the wealthy, hard-working and fit husband sits in front of the TV.
The exact same data in the paper could also be used to argue that sexually satisfied housewives feel less burdened by the household work. That's why those that do feel burdened are those that also have a low sex desire.
Additionally, many men, when left on their own, cultivate a home life just a hare nicer than that found in a horse barn.
It's not surprising to me, then, that women find men who take part in maintaining the household more attractive.
So if you want to be friends, do the dishes. If you want better sex, hit the gym.
If do more house work: not doing it right less sex else if do less house work: not doing enough less sex else less sex