Get married. Seriously, do. Let me explain.
Why do women not have a fulfilling sex life? Because they try to get something in exchange for sex. This is fulfilling for a very small number of women with a very specific disorder. The rest don’t have the capacity physically to enjoy transactional sex. Unlike men, they have the capacity to engage in sex without desiring it but nobody would call such sex acts fulfilling.
What is transactional sex? It isn’t only sex for money, which is something that most women don’t do. But it also includes having sex to get something other than sexual enjoyment out of it. To be in a relationship, to feel desired, to have something to tell your girlfriends, to get gifts, to have somebody to spend the holidays, to feel pretty, to please, not to feel like a loser, or, like we’ve seen in the recently discussed article about Neil Gaiman, to purchase a fantasy of a secure, comfortable existence. Read the article for very clear, if extreme, examples of women engaging in transactional sex and feeling terrible as a result.
If you are married, though, you already have everything on the above list. You don’t need to offer sex to get this stuff out of dudes. You’ll already have a relationship, the status it confers, and the benefits it offers. Now you can relax and figure out what works sexually. Which – and I know this tends to provoke great anger – for women tends to take time and effort.
While emotional life is easier for women, practical daily life is easier for men. I’m following the artistic journey of a writer who spent several years of his youth backpacking it around the country, riding trains with hobos, dumpster diving for food, sleeping rough, and gaining the kind of experience that now infuses his art. None of this is possible for a woman unless she travels with a man. Forget sleeping rough, only this morning I needed my husband to lug my suitcase downstairs. It’s a suitcase he wouldn’t need to bring on a trip of this duration because he doesn’t need as much stuff as I do. Plus, he got me a free Uber because he has a meeting and can’t drive me to the airport, and free access to a lounge where I can eat diabetic-friendly, and a voucher for a massage at the layover, and a stack of gift cards to use at the hotel to pay for food. Yes, I could have done it for myself. And I wouldn’t engage in transactional sex to get a man to do it for me. But many women would.
So yeah, get married. Totally recommended for women and men alike.
Clarissa's Blog 
The fact that the remarked upon artistic wanderer has just joyfully gotten married, and waxes enthustiastically thereupon, merely reinforces your well taken points.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Ah! Another fan! That’s really cool. We are discovering the future of American literature as we go. It’s exciting.
LikeLike
Who is that?
LikeLike
@shagbark_hick
LikeLiked by 1 person
Trust is a key element here. Seems to be more important to women than to men generally, and on a fundamental level, I don’t understand people who are able to have any kind of a satisfying physical relationship with a person they do not trust.
Obviously there are other ways to have trust in a relationship, but… committing to each other for life is a pretty darn big sign of trust.
LikeLiked by 2 people
methylethyl
Agreed that trust is required by females in physical relationships, while males did tend to presume it. But marriage should require permanent vows, essentially removing no-fault divorce, especially where there are children involved.
Three generations of feminist foolishness have basically undermined my extended family. Now have one married SIL, one married niece, and including myself, two widowers, but: have a niece happily announcing her fourth divorce; one nephew running through girlfriends like he is still a teenager, while his brother says that if he wants a girl, he will rent her; meanwhile, we have had two interventions with one great niece, essentially kidnapping and very serious threats, and none of the other great nieces and nephews seem interested in marriage. I am sorry, but guys measure, that’s what we do, marriage cannot continue with the current legal system.
LikeLiked by 1 person
It’s not so much the legal system but what’s in people’s heads. And both feed into each other. That’s why I study how people think about themselves and the world. That’s where the most important changes happen. And we really register that there’s been a change. Often, these changes are not for the better.
LikeLike
I sort of understand what you’re saying, but…
It’s not the *legal system* that’s preventing me from divorcing my husband. It’s that I actually like him, we have kids together, and we both belong to a religious culture where marriage and its maintenance are very important. And, you know, being married to him is nice.
It does grieve me that so many people seem to be missing out on that. But… it seems to be one of those arenas in which being a weird person seems to be a net benefit.
IMO the problem has far less to do with law, and far more to do with a culture of radical self-indulgence, where if you are at all unhappy, the answer is always to buy stuff and burn relationships. And then buy more stuff because you burned your relationships. Because it’s never *you* that’s the problem (that would be denying your True SelfTM!), the problem is always stuff you don’t have, and other people.
I have no idea how, culturally, we can get out of that. I suspect the answer is brutal attrition.
LikeLike
methylethyl
The legal system is biased, but then even the hated Norman Couverture laws primary concern was to protect women and hence children. As do those in almost every successful legal system in the world, Our species would not exist if men did not protect women and children.
But what happens if one introduces no-fault divorce, what happens when one spouse can file for no reason whatsoever? Prior to that divorce was difficult, that spouse had to prove that the other was an adulter, had physically abused the other, or had abandoned the other. In short, it was considered a personal failure, because it was.
orman Couverature
LikeLike
This greatly oversimplifies the problems and abuse of systems that led to no-fault divorce in the first place. Do you have any idea how difficult it was to prove allegations of adultery? You needed eyewitnesses and proof from two witnesses, both preferably male. Abuse was and still is extremely difficult to prove. Which in a way it should be because it protects those innocent of charges. But at the same time survivors are sometimes SOL because it can’t be proven. Sometimes the only way a survivor is getting away from an abusive spouse is no-fault divorce.
LikeLike
Well, yes, but please forgive me: I’m puzzled how this even came up.
Is it an argument *against* the original post’s premise, that getting married is the way to have good sex?
LikeLiked by 2 people
methylethyl
It is clearly my fault by going off topic and I apologize. What I am saying is that trust is required for both spouses, and that at one time men presumed that trust, but for too many today, that is clearly no longer true.
LikeLike
ah.
I was reaching out to my experience, and discussions I’ve had with various people, male and female, and taking a little leap of logic: men seem more able to have a rewarding (if shallow) sexual experience with someone they don’t know very well, or trust at all. Women… less so. Personally, I have personal-space and personal-trust boundaries like Alcatraz or the Justinian Walls, and the mere idea of even getting snuggly with someone I don’t already know and trust on a very deep level is… totally horrifying. I realize that’s not the standard default setting, but there does seem to be at least a small sex differential on it, out there in the general population of people who are not weird-sensory-processing-issues nerds.
Personally, of course, I don’t think *anybody* should be out there fooling around with people they don’t know and don’t trust. But clearly that is not what people are actually doing 😉
What better way to establish a gigantic well of trust, though, than getting married?
LikeLike
methylethyl
Historically, it doesn’t seem to be much doubt that males, particularly young males, took advantage of all sexual experience that they could, while most young females were typically more cautious. Without effective contraception, the different potential penalties were immense.
The pill and Betty Friedan changed all that while I was still in university. I was on my way to becoming a recluse, still chasing girls, while studiously avoiding meaningful relationships. Then I met my wife ;-D
LikeLike
People get married for transactional reasons, too. I don’t know how to compare that to transactional sex in terms of likelihood/frequency, but transactional marriage is a thing. I’m not opposed to it; it has lots of social benefits. Unhappily married couples probably do less damage to society than unhappy single people. One can cooperate and have some degree of trust on practical matters but that does not necessarily translate to satisfying sex.
LikeLike
Totally get that. Marriage is no guarantee.
But it’s a good start.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Methylethyl, how does your religious community handle/approach/think about challenges to marriage — bad relationships, affairs and various forms of infidelity, abuse, etc? Is there some support structure for couples facing these issues? What are social norms regarding of secrecy/shame/hiding vs seeking help/forgiveness/support ?
Liberal secular culture seems to be all about “boundaries”. I presume functional religious communities have figured out something better and more positive, but don’t know how to find out what it is.
This questions is moving away from the original post/topic of sex and veering into more general question of relationships.
LikeLike
YZ: well, we go to confession.
And from what I understand, that’s generally a lot less perfunctory than typical practice in the RCC, and often more resembles a short counseling session. In addition, if you’ve got bigger problems, you can always make an appointment and go talk to your priest at greater length. There are a surprising number of things where, if you and your spouse are both sincere adherents of the same religion, and there’s a disagreement… it makes things easier to have an outside authority on the matter. Now it’s not him vs. her, it’s oh, well, the church says… then it’s nothing personal.
I can’t really address the secrecy/shame/hiding issue, because that’s not really a thing I can do. Can’t handle the cognitive load of saying one thing and believing another, I think because I already have processing delays that make IRL conversations perpetually awkward, and tacking on another layer of processing just doesn’t work. Breaks everything. My favorite vices are anger, self-righteousness, and sloth– have racked up much more tedious experience in how those are addressed 😉
LikeLike
\ What better way to establish a gigantic well of trust, though, than getting married?
For me, the relationship is exactly reverse. I wouldn’t dream of marrying anyone I already didn’t have trust in and, since the discussion touches on sexual matters, a good sexual relationship with too, prior to marriage.
If things aren’t too great before, marriage isn’t likely to improve them.
I’ve seen quite a few unhappy marriages, and vastly prefer being single than in an unhappy or “merely” transactional marriage. The latter situations kill one’s soul quicker than practically anything else.
// I don’t think *anybody* should be out there fooling around with people they don’t know and don’t trust.
Knowing and trusting can be defined and experienced in different ways.
The choice isn’t between marriage and sleeping with (numerous?) strangers.
Also, somebody mentioned warmly the good old times of no no-fault divorces. This ‘paradise’ partly exists in Israel due to medieval religious laws being the law of the state in matters of personal life. This situation made me 100% not wanting to legally marry ever from the youngest (high school) age. I do not want to be chained, and most Western people don’t want to neither be chained themselves nor to force their spouses stay with them, even if they’re happily married.
LikeLike
I was not suggesting that getting married would establish trust where it did not exist before. Apologies if that was unclear.
But I do think that people who play house for years without getting married are deluding themselves.
LikeLiked by 1 person
el
That “the good old times” about no-fault was no doubt from me. My concern is created by divorces resulting in multi-generational disasters within my extended family. I don’t apology for my assessment, either your vows sworn before your love, both families and friends, and whatever higher force you embrace means something or it doesn’t.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Warning for the faint of heart and/or stomach; you may not want to read further.
To avoid the tedious debate about “consent” and really get to the heart of the matter on kink, it’s helpful to look at the gay male community. Many gay men enthusiastically dive into repulsive and evil sexual subcultures with no other man even encouraging them, let alone coercing them. One well known example is “bug chasers,” who have a fetish for catching HIV. Shockingly, people pursued this fetish even back when HIV was a death sentence.
There are also men who repeatedly inject silicone into their balls until they swell up like basketballs. In addition to simply being disgusting, this is very dangerous. People die from this regularly. There was a prominent case a few years ago where the boyfriend of a minor social media star within this community died (article below.) This particular man was in an abusive man’s harem of sex slaves (a dynamic which happens regularly with heterosexuals), but the same article details another case where the man pursued it entirely of his own volition, even though his boyfriend had major misgivings. No abuse, no coercion, but he still died in a hospital bed at 30 years old while his mother heard his last rites read over the phone.
Even the man in the abusive relationship seems to have pursued the man largely because he has a sexual attraction to artificially huge muscles and balls. Nobody outside of the “silicone balls community” has ever been intrigued and entranced by the idea of dating a “silicone balls community” social media star. Whereas when women enter into a similar situations (ex. William Control, “Pearadise,” etc.), it’s generally for different reasons.
I’m truly sorry to inflict these awful stories on anyone reading, but I think they’re important to talk about. Also, while many issues that I highlight within the gay community are a widespread social disease, this stuff is considered disgusting by 99% of gay men and is confined to small groups of mentally ill perverts. Though, disturbingly, the author of this article tries to defend many of these “kinks.” Hopefully this went without saying but just wanted to make it clear.
https://t.co/oxiaB0oFKy
LikeLike
Absolutely spot-on comments.
The following is tangentially relevant: https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-end-of-the-end-of-men/?ref=compact-newsletter
LikeLiked by 1 person
Having a good sex life with a long-term partner is a different question from having a good sex with someone new. For a young woman in a new relationship, sex hormones plus new-relationship energy do a lion’s share of the work in making sure things get hot and heavy, and frequently so (this holds for anyone in a new relationship, really; the novelty is one hell of an aphrodisiac). But once the honeymoon phase ends, which reportedly takes 1.5-3 years, women’s drive tends to change from spontaneous (you get in the mood before you start fooling around) to responsive (you have to start fooling around to get in the mood) and kids and jobs sap a lot of energy. This is where having a good, loving relationship makes all the difference. With a long-term partner in a solid relationship, there’s really no limit to how deep and satisfying the intimacy can get, especially if you are both open-minded and like to experiment. But people need to prioritize sex as part of the relationship, carve out the time and headspace for it, and take responsibility for figuring out their own bodies (very important for women), what works both for themselves and for their partner. Sexual relationships are like anything else: the more you put in, the more you get out of it. It’s important to prioritize it, be open and honest about your own turn-ons and open-minded about your partners, and maintain a sense of playfulness and experimentation. Also, it’s important to have realistic expectations. Not every encounter is going to be a back-blowing kinkapalooza that you’ll fantasize about on your deathbed. Life happens. Sometimes all you have time for is a quickie in a walk-in closet, hiding from the kids. Sometimes all you want is the slowest imaginable tempo in the most vanilla of all vanilla positions. Sometimes you need to get off hard and fast and furious. And sometimes, it needs to be just you and your favorite toys. So yeah, women, get some toys. Toys are 🔥
LikeLiked by 1 person