That's all very well, but there are times, however much you love your husband, when you genuinely don't feel up to having sex. If you have a real headache, for instance, or period pains, or if you've been looking after homicidal young children all day and you're so tired you think it would be nice to be dead just to get a rest. You can't be on fire with enthusiasm ALL the time. Occasionaly,very occasionaly, you just can't face it. Any reasonable man can surely understand when his wife has a genuine reason to not feel like sex. I daresay things are different in Hungary, but in England at any rate there is an assumption that a civilised man does not force his wife to have sex if she doesn't feel like it. Of course, if she isn't feeling like it ALL the time, or very frequently, then obviously there's a problem, but assuming it's only an occasional thing surely any rational man should be able to understand it? If you want a woman who is available ALL the time, regardless, then I suggest you should get yourself one of those inflatable rubber dolls.

The right to refuse sex is the downfall of so many marriages. I think most women completely fail to understand how destructive it is to the relationship. A man will think: “I love my wife, and I will go very far to make her happy. Now she refuses to let me make love to her. How bad can it be to make love to the one you love?”

I watched my father's wife 'whip' him by shrinking from his touch for the duration of their marriage. The way she recoiled when he so much as put a hand on her shoulder said way more than their quiet bedroom did. If I hadn't of known them I might have thought you were spinning an old cliche here. But I know you're not.

But blaming it on feminism? Isn't that drawing a long bow?

In my father's case I am guessing that he didn't get laid much past their honeymoon. She was an old-fashioned kind of woman who would not sleep with him before he put that ring on her finger. A smarter man might have figured out that her desires were simply weak enough to resist (to paraphrase um ...uh.. - Blake?)

Theirs was a pre-feminisn marriage. The F word had nothing to do with what my father put up with. Those were his choices. And hers. Pre feminism women were not meant to enjoy sex. It was about procreation and wifely duties.

My husband likes me to respond to him because of who he is, not because of some dreary code for dutiful wives. He likes a hot blooded partner who understands the difference between love-making and obligatory sex. And I am delighted - 99.9% of the time - to be that woman. Of course we have out-of-sync moments. We sure aren't perfect but we don't beat each other up with it. We know there'll be another moment very soon - and more than likely it'll be a great one.

As to feminism being the problem well I once worked with a young woman (in a post feminist marriage) whose husband was a sexual predator. He used to ring her at work at tell her how many times he wanted to make love that night, that weekend - whatever the next immediate time period of her life that they were going to share. Once, when she foolishly refused him, he filled the bathtub with scalding water and threw her in it. He told her it would warm her up a bit.

She got out of that marriage when his cruelty escalated. She was lucky that the post feminism divorce laws allowed her to divorce him for this type of abuse.

In time she found a man she adored who loved but more importantly respected her back. Sexual compatibility followed. Sex was not the problem in her first marriage. It was her relationship with her 'practice' husband that turned her cold.

Feminism didn't create sexual compatibility. For a lot of women it let them know they were allowed to be sexual.

If you're a 'once a month, please turn off all the lights and in the bedroom only' kind of gal then I don't like your chances of working it out with 'Mr. Five-Times-A-Week-At-Least and wherever and whenever it suits me.'

OTOH if he's a 'only-on Friday nights and don't move around too much' kind of bloke and you're a multiple-orgasmic kind of creature who wants to be touched and caressed for your own enjoyment, you may have issues as well.

Like most things in male-female relationships there are two sides to the coin. Well actually there are probably more sides than all the possible combinations of a Rubick's cube but if we are looking at these issue so simplistically then I'd have to suggest that's it's not just women who destroy marriages with a poor or selfish attitude towards sex.

Maddy

Although it's true that there was a notion around that women didn't enjoy sex, it wasn't an idea that had been around for very long before feminism. If you go back to ancient times, for instance, you find that the Greeks and Romans assumed that women were all sex-mad, and this idea continued in the Middle Ages, all the authorites agreed that women were sexually insatiable. If you look at medieval literature, Chaucer, Boccacio, etc you find that they are full of stories about wives cheating on their husbands with younger, more attractive men, and getting up to all sorts of sexual adventures. I think the notion that women don't enjoy sex is something that only started in the 19th century, scientists assuming that women were 'coy and monogamous' an idea that is still kicking around nowadays in sociobiology circles.

I didn't actually suppose that you were talking about the Middle Ages when you talked about women not being supposed to enjoy sex, I was just observing that it is a fairly recent notion in the history of mankind. As for knowing sexually active women born between 1910-1935, well yes, there was my mother for a start. she was born in 1917, and met my father in 1937. I don't know whether he was her first lover or not, she was certainly madly in love with him, but he wasn't interested in settling down, it took her 12 years before she finally got him to marry her, and in the meantime she certainly had other lovers. She had a married lover when she was in the Wrens, he was a Commander, and used to have her piped on board when she went to see him on his ship, very exciting. She got pregnant and he wanted her to have the baby, but she wouldn't and made him give her the money for an abortion. Then in 1944 she married her first husband, since she was pregnant, and had my half-sister. Two years later my father came back into her life and she left husband no.1 and went off with him. I know that my father slept with a lot of young women during the same era, so there must have been other sexually active women of the same age group (he knew one who used to carry a condom around with her in her handbag just in case). Also, if you read 'Love Lessons' and 'Love is Blue' by Joan Wyndham-Lewis, these are very entertaining accounts of her youth during WW2, and you will find that she was pretty sexually active, as were other girls of her set.

'Love Lessons' and 'Love is Blue' by Joan Wyndham-Lewis

Not at Amazon. Not on e-Bay. No matches in any of my regular book finder sites.

Added to the list of books I look for in used bookstores.

Maddy

They even have it on audio, which I love. But we are going on a mini holiday next week to one of my favourite mountain towns that has wonderful cafes and terrific used bookshops. I'll be hunting for these books as I think they will tell me a lot about my mother as young woman.

In fact I may even have to buy one for her.

Maddy

I wasn't much in the habit of refusing to have sex with my husband before we had a Taken In Hand relationship. I generally used to go along with it if I didn'tmuch feel like it,for the sake of a quiet life, which sometimes used to make me feel a bit resentful. Unreasonably so, since I hadn't told my husband I didn't feel like it. However, i eventually made the discovery that, if I just relaxed and let myself get into the mood, instead of lying there physcially compliant but mentally detached, I would start to warm up and enjoy it. This greatly improved relations between us years before we started the Taken In Hand thing.

However, what I have found since starting Taken In Hand is that there quite genuinely never is a time when i don't feel like it, except if I am literally overwhelmed by tiredness or illness. It has been one of the major benefits for me.

Apart from tiredness or illness, the only time my husband doesn't fancy having sex with me is when I have my period. Sometimes, when he is overcome by lust, he will fling himself upon me and have his wicked way with me even when I am bleeding like a stuck pig, but he is always somewhat unenthusiastic about the results afterwards. "It looks like the Battle of Culloden in here" he remarked accurately but unromantically the last time we did this.

I quite see that it seems reasonable that a man should not refuse his wife's request for sex, in fact I believe it says something to that effect in the Bible, isn't there something about the woman not refusing the man nor the man the woman, it's in one of Paul's interminable letters to somebody or other I think.

The only slight reservation I have about that is that whereas all a woman has to do to be sexually compliant is to just BE there, the man has to make rather more effort, so asking for sex if you're not sure he'll be up to it or not may put too much pressure on him (especially with advancing age).

What I find I do is that when my husband grabs hold of me and starts fondling me, I get very turned on very quickly, and I will respond very positively to his ministrations, if he then says something like "You want me to take you upstairs, don't you?" then I'll say "Oh, yes please" or something like that. But I sort of tend to leave it to him to make the initial move, because I am pretty well in a mood for sex any time he wants it these days, it doesn't really matter when.