Sex with Your Husband Isn't Labor

If it feels like labor, something is wrong—and it’s not Society.

Photo by Mathieu Stern on Unsplash

If you’ve been following this Substack for a while, you probably know by now that I get stuck on a few favorite pet topics, and I never run out of sub-ideas under these topic umbrellas. “CHH” pills, if you will (too self-referential? Narcissistic? Never.) Examples of these CHHpills might include the fact that upper class men aren’t turned off by high-earning or high-achieving women, and in fact, they marry them more than any other type of women. Or that lower birth rates are a symptom of prosperity and of rising societal standards for everything.

But another one, which I keep coming back to, is that actually liking men is pretty important if you are a heterosexual woman.

This doesn’t mean you have to like all men (Stephen Miller? I am not a fan). Nor does it mean that liking women is not just as essential if you are a straight man. But with the rise of ideas like “mankeeping” and “heterofatalism,” I feel the need to push back against the new standard that consensually having relationships with men—which you no longer need to survive economically—invariably become a form of oppression, labor or just unpleasantness. Sure, it can be unpleasant, but that’s not the default.

This is just as true of men, but very few people are pushing the narrative that it isn’t. A man who doesn’t enjoy being around women, or who thinks women are inferior, boring, dull, “Syndey Sweeney is a 4,” you name it—will not enjoy his heterosexual relationships. If he’s attractive enough, he may still obtain them, but these relationships will suck for everyone involved. The difference between the male and female versions of this argument, however, is that the media ecosystem seeks to elevate stories of disgruntled, verbose women who clearly just don’t like men very much (or have their own issues to work out) and want to make it a societal thing.

Obviously, these examples are everywhere, but just yesterday I came across a podcast episode asserting that “Marital Intimacy is the Fifth Shift of Women’s Work: As late capitalism converges with sex positivity, keeping the spark alive has become another full-time job for straight married women.” In other words, the other shifts of labor are things like “emotional labor,” middle-of-the-night child wakings, housework, keeping up with a school calendar, and now you can add “fucking my husband” to the list (no, not mine. He’s taken, go away!) Capitalism pushing women to buy sexy subscription boxes and bacon-flavored lube to keep things spicy was also mentioned.

Full disclosure: I did not listen to the full thing because I’m not a paid subscriber. I don’t like to be mean when I disagree with something, so I’m hoping that perhaps even as I disagree, they will get some new listeners (I like the free exchange of ideas! Even if I disagree!) But come on, I had to write something. This podcast episode specifically triggered one of my main CHHpills, okay? This is not meant to be a takedown of them or the episode (please don’t be mean to them) but rather, addressing this as the latest example of a growing trend I frequently cover.

The podcasters in question did not say that having sex with your husband is always unpleasant. But for me, anyway, the whole thing felt very mankeeping-adjacent (they might see this as a compliment) in that it’s positioning things that we should mostly enjoy if we chose willingly (relationships, marriage, sex within marriage) as grueling work being foisted upon us by the forces of the patriarchy and lube-hawking capitalism.