Can Women Separate Love and Sex?

[marmar]

from Sirens Magazine, via AlterNet:


Can Women Separate Love and Sex?

By Jennifer Armstrong, Sirens Magazine. Posted July 11, 2007.



Sex, like eating, is a biological drive, and you will lose your mind if you repress it for too long. But some women stave off the need much longer than others.

Canvas my works in the SirensMag archives, and you will discover a theme: I enjoy the male form, and I have a healthy sex drive. I also live in New York City, which has a notorious-yet-accurate reputation for wringing the romance right out of life. (Normal-people life, not Nora Ephron-scripted life.) Happily, New York also has a lot of people in it, many of whom are attractive and sex-starved. Do the math, and there you have it: I exist in a world where sex is easy, love is hard, and either way, I still crave sex.

So yes, it's true: I have had sex minus the love, or the promise thereof. And here's the kicker: I am absolutely fine with that. Not "fine" like passive-aggressively not-really-fine. Not "fine" like totally-defensive-about-it fine. Just totally okay with the situation. Not over the moon, naturally, more like caught between the moon and New York City, as it were. I mean, who wouldn't prefer to be having mind-blowing sex regularly with their soulmate? (And if all I've done here is make some kind of sense of that lyric, I'm pretty satisfied.)

I'm a crazy hopeless lunatic romantic, I swear to you. I am, no exaggeration, always in some form of love -- coming out of it, going into it, somewhere in the middle of it. I will swear under interrogation that that's not true, of course; I will not tell you, for instance, whom I could currently claim to be in any stage of love with. But I am. Don't let me tell you otherwise. The point being that I loooove love. And despite reams of missteps in the name of romance, I'm willing to go at it again and again, quite like the trusty definition of insanity about trying the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

However, often I'm busy. Other times I'm exhausted. Most of the time there simply aren't any soulmates in the offing. (Which is to say that whomever I claim to love at the moment has a girlfriend or lives in another state or is busy touring the country to promote his smash album "FutureSex/LoveSounds.") So I find myself with a potential partner I like well enough, but do not and will not ever love. Maybe we had an instant connection over our love of books, or maybe he was just too freaking yummy to pass up. A real, live man is just better than a vibrator. I don't care what kind of technological advances are coming out of Toys in Babeland.

Many of my girlfriends gasp in wonder at my apparently superhuman ability to transcend the sex-love connection. "I just can't do it," one single one says. "I don't think I could handle that if I were still out there," the married one says. What I say is I don't see any choice. If we're going to do this putting-off-marriage thing we're now officially doing, according to last year's breathlessly reported census results, and we're going to focus on careers instead of kids, and we're going to wait until we find the Big Love before settling down, well, how is it that we're not going to act like nut jobs in the meantime? How are we going to quell that desperate look in our eyes when we meet a prospect? And how are we going to stop ourselves from being blinded by lush lips or a six pack? Girls, there's only one answer: We have to break the ironclad love-sex bond. It's simply the only way to survive all this without going mad. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/sex/56220/

[bemildred]

1. It isn't called "the oldest profession" for nothing. nt

[TankLV]

3. my first thought to this also...

[Connonym]

10. That women are whores if we like sex?

[redqueen]

12. I thought it meant that at least some women have always been able

to separate love and sex quite easily.

I agree.

[Connonym]

13. Ok, thanks for clarifying that

Obviously this is a touchy subject with me. I immediately assumed it was meant to be a slur.

[redqueen]

18. Yeah that's what I figured...

This should be a touchy subject for EVERY woman, IMHO. Till it's fixed. :D

[bemildred]

14. Yes. I had no intention to disparage honest sex workers.

Or monogamous love-and-sex-go-together women, either. Women ought to make up their own minds about what they like and do not like when it comes to love and sex, whatever that may happen to be. And it is nobody else's business what they choose.

I was merely pointing out that the question posed by the headline is silly on it's face.

[raccoon]

2. What a crock. Did Madison Avenue commission her to write this tripe?

"Girls, there's only one answer: We have to break the ironclad love-sex bond. "

Women are hard-wired to link sex and love, through thousands of years of evolution. Reliable birth control ain't gonna change that in a few generations.

I'm sick of women being told that they need to separate sex and love and there's something wrong with them if they can't.

Madison Avenue has conditioned us to believe we can have instant everything, and they want us to believe we can have instant great sex. The vast majority of the time it doesn't work that way.

[Connonym]

8. I'm tired of being told I'm lying to myself that I CAN separate sex and love

it's condescending bullshit. Nobody makes that assumption about men. My body is hardwired to enjoy pleasure. The drive to procreate is not the same as the desire to nurture. There have been studies that suggest women are attracted to different kinds of men at different parts of their menstrual cycle. It seems to me this suggests that our bodies know the difference between mind blowing sex and a "good provider" To say that we're hardwired to not be able to separate love from sex is sexist beyond belief. It's SOCIETY that tells us we have to combine love and sex. It's patriarchal pressure from men who don't want to waste their resources supporting another man's child. Same bullshit that's behind obsession with women being virgins on their wedding night.

If you can't separate the two then I would suggest it's a conditioned response and not a hard wired one. I don't think there's anything wrong with that but I do get extremely pissed when it's implied that I'm deceiving myself or, worse still, being a whore because I see love and sex as two different things entirely.

What a bunch of crap.

[raccoon]

16. It's possible that SOME women can separate sex and love, but the majority don't.

Not ALL men do either.

"If you can't separate the two then I would suggest it's a conditioned response and not a hard wired one."

We'll just have to agree to disagree on this one.

"I do get extremely pissed when it's implied that I'm deceiving myself"

There again, some women are. Whether you personally are or not, I don't know.

[redqueen]

19. Some women who tell themselves they can't separate love and sex

are also deceiving themselves. Either out of fear, ignorance, or what have you. I'd think that most of it was due to the puritanical mindset the west has had drilled into them for ages now. A few decades of sexual liberation can't undo millennia of indoctrination.

It's really sad, too, because I also blame that conditioning for the fact that most women do not have orgasms during sex. :(

[Prophet 451]

25. Can I just say...

...that doesn't apply to all guys. Some of us are applauding sexually liberated women.

[enki23]

23. i'd say that was "is-ought" bullshit. but the "is" isn't even clear enough for that

evolutionary-psychological handwaving makes for good, but generally pointless, arguments.

[raccoon]

26. Your posting makes no sense. nt

[enki23]

28. "it doesn't make sense" doesn't necessarily follow from "i don't understand"

first "is-ought" refers to the naturalistic fallacy that what is (assuming for the moment that women *are* hardwired for the love/sex thing) means they "ought" to go with it. but more importantly, it is not at all clear that women are indeed "hard wired" for any such thing. the argument about whether they were indeed "hard wired" for such a thing would, at least in part, fall under evolutionary psychology, which is a field mostly populated with extensive handwaving and very little useful information to date.

[Drum]

4. Ms. Armstrong:

Call me!

718.RED.ACTED

[Klukie]

5. Come on now.....

I have seen plenty of men who sleep with a woman and get big ole hearts for eyes. I think biology and emotion are directly related in this argument and therefore can only be seperated by those whose physical need outweighs everything else. That can mean male or female. I think that the issue arises more with females because we are designed to ovulate once a month versus a male who can produce at any time. Personally, the only time I feel an overwelming need to have sex is when I am ovulating. Any other time for me is simply based on emotion. I think those in a relationship tend to mix love and sex more because of an inbalance of desire between the two sexes produces a need to compensate with love and emotion. Afterall, if one has no real desire for sex, what other reason could be given for performing the act. Unfortunatley, love is not the only reason that people have sex. Many negative emotions are wrapped up in this as well, such as low self worth and attention seeking. I have known women with high sex drives and some men with low ones, but I don't think this is the norm. Well that is just my own two cents based strictly on life experience, who knows mabye I am completley off.

[MissMillie]

11. you sound pretty reasonable to me

:hi:

[Warpy]

6. Oh, please, all of us hell raisers in the 60s know this article

is a load of hogwash. Hell, just listen to some of the music that came out of that era.

Sex with love is better, of course, but it's all good, kids.

Not every woman out there is hard wired to demand hearts and flowers and a diamond ring before jumping into bed with a hunk. To suggest that we all are is just another variation on that old maddona/whore dichotomy.

Just protect yourselves. Diseases in the 60s were curable. That's not the case any more.

[redqueen]

7. Hmmmm

Maybe I'm misunderstanding something here... but isn't that what the author saying?

Some of the comments after that article are awful.

[Connonym]

9. thank you!

christ, I can't believe this sexist bullshit is still being perpetuated.

[Demeter]

15. People Who Separate Sex and Love Get What They Deserve

and never what they really want.

[redqueen]

20. Huh?

What makes you think that?

[kimmylavin]

21. What do you even mean by that?

What do they deserve?

[Connonym]

27. lots of good sex!

[panader0]

17. I got horny just reading that.

[polichick]

22. With disease to worry about, some go for f*** buddies

I once had a long chat with a young woman about that arrangement ~ but in the end she admitted that most of the girls were settling for a less-than-wonderful relationship with someone they really wanted more with. It seems to work better for male f*** buddies than their partners.

[Prophet 451]

24. I love sexually liberated women

Honestly, my diary (if I kept a diary) would be an ode to the women who aren't afraid to say they enjoy sex and that's a good enough reason to have it.

I grew up in a small fishing village on England's south-west coast. Basically, we're talking the British equivelant of Hicksville, Kentucky here with the addition of lots of drugs (about a third of teh countries drug supply was smuggled through the town on the fishing trawlers). We didn't have virginity drives with idiotic names or anything like taht because fanatical religion has always been pretty much a background noise here but still, it was understood that nice girls didn't unless they were married or in a steady relationship (which most were in and were sexually active by about fourteen). There was one girl in town who was actually honest about her sex drive and she took all kinds of abuse for that (she actually became a close friend of mine but unfortunatly died some years ago due to a surgical mishap).

Came as a real revelation when I got to college and discovered that some women who were open and honest about sex. I always understood that sex is just sex, it's not a space shuttle launch and doesn't have to be hugely complicated. Some people can't have sex without an emotional attachment, fine. But there's others who don't see anything wrong with two people coming together, making each other feel good and then going their seperate ways (naturally, rubbers are mandatory these days).

Sex is a physical act. It feels good. It doesn't need to be complicated. If you're shagging a dozen guys/girls a day then maybe you have some issues that need looking at but apart from that, where's the problem? Ladies, do you have an emotional attachment to your vibrator? Guys, how do you feel about your hand? The need for sex is part of what makes us human, like defecating and naval lint. If you want to keep it for someone you have an emotional attachment to, no problem (just because you can doesn't mean you have to) but there's no need or excuse to look down your nose at those of us who don't need that attachment. It's just sex.