Celebrating Women’s “assertive, pleasure-centered, and selfish” sexuality

Feminist pundits have for many years encouraged women to resent their husbands and cultivate dreams of non-stop sexual bliss. It’s having an effect.

About four years ago, a friend alerted me to a popular YouTube channel by two moms called Cat and Nat Unfiltered. Cat and Nat gave impromptu “mom advice,” sharing “all of the dirty details of being mothers and wives.” Many of the videos were recorded in a car [see below], with the two friends gesticulating dramatically and cracking up at their own vulgarities and revelations.

Their talks were intended to be raw and relatable, frank outbursts about the never-ending demands of childcare and housework, and the husbands’ inability to understand (a few samples are here, here, and here).

In quite a few videos, they talked with smirks and guffaws about how unwelcome their husbands’ sexual overtures had become. On the occasions when Cat and Nat agreed to sex, what was uppermost in the women’s minds, they said, was getting it over with as quickly as possible. They also fantasized about being single and having casual sex. They didn’t necessarily want to leave their husbands—in fact, they didn’t want to—but they liked to imagine lives in which the husbands didn’t exist. These revelations did not detract from their self-presentation as heroic survivors of domestic life.

I’d never before seen such unabashed public proclamations of trivial marital discontent. Here were two women with abundant reason for gratitude: they had beautiful children, comfortable homes, husbands making enough money to support them, and preeminence as dazzling matriarchs. Yet the main point of their videos was the need to vent. They billed themselves as the anti-Facebook, with no pretense of domestic joy: on the contrary, they itemized every frustrating and deflating detail of family life, including knowing their husbands’ toilet schedules. The repeated motto was: dissatisfaction is normal, this is what every married woman experiences, don’t feel bad about being turned off by your husband.

Whether it would be offensive, or even simply humiliating, for their husbands to have the whole world knowing that their wives were reportedly repulsed by them didn’t seem to matter at all.

**

When I told a friend about Cat and Nat’s open contempt, he chuckled sadly: “You can scroll through hours of TikTok videos and find dozens of women doing exactly that.” He sent me samples (including this recent viral video about a woman explaining why she considered divorce). The variety is impressive: some women make lists of things they won’t do for their husbands; some report on why they don’t want to be sexual with them ; some explain why they’re mad at their guys; some confess that they want to cheat (or have cheated).

What was once cause for anonymous or private confession, not for jubilant announcement, has become a veritable TikTok industry, with women clamoring to broadcast their resentment and infidelity.

The new normal is mirrored at the professional level, with a myriad of articles by psychotherapists and social workers on women’s domestic dissatisfaction. The point of the articles is rarely to help women overcome their negativity; and certainly not to criticize female attitudes and behaviors. It is mainly to affirm, and one can only assume that such affirmation is par for the course in counseling offices across North America as well.

Typical is Tonya Lester’s 2022 article in Psychology Today, “Is Marriage a Bad Deal for Women?” which blames men for women’s eagerness to initiate divorce, arguing that men are failing to put in the necessary marital work to keep their wives happy. Women are reportedly “tired of offering their husbands emotional support and care but getting none in return.” Lester, a licensed clinical social worker who has counseled many couples (ahem), observes the many women who have “come to believe that marriage is holding them back from living the life they want to live.”

Many articles detail, usually without judgement and with some sympathy, why infidelity is becoming common among women. Marisa Lascala’s 2022 “Why Do Women Cheat?” offers various reasons, including “insecure attachment style” (i.e. keeping one’s options open), the desire to exit an unsatisfying relationship, and “outsourcing […] sexual pleasure […] in an effort to remain in the primary partnership.”

With so many women and pundits making the case for ditching one’s husband, who can be surprised if a lot of women do?

**

But how did it happen that it became so acceptable for women to publicly disparage their husbands and express a longing for whoredom?

As the saying goes, gradually at first; then all at once.

Complaints about marriage, especially from the female point of view and with emphasis on male sexual obtuseness, were surprisingly common in the 19^th-century Anglosphere. Whether socialist, Christian communist, feminist, or spiritualist, reformers poured out millions of words to lament the women trapped in unions with men they had come to abhor. (Far fewer were interested in men trapped in marriages with women they had come to abhor.) Pundits argued that forced monogamy not only denied women a rightful sexual pleasure, but was actually injurious to their health and that of their children, producing “diseased, crippled, imbecile [and] perverse” offspring (Marriage, p. 286).

Many took inspiration from the writings of French utopian socialist Charles Fourier, who had published The Theory of the Four Movements in 1808. In this treatise, Fourier imagined ideal communities (phalanxes) where men and women would contribute work that pleased them for the general good. He also attacked the hypocrisy of marriage, arguing for women’s right to enter into a variety of sexual arrangements, including marriage, co-parenting, and transient affairs, none of them exclusive. “Happiness, about which so much, or rather so much nonsense, has been talked,” he asserted, “consists in having many passions and many means of satisfying them” (p. 95).

Fourier’s sexual utopianism proved attractive to philanthropists and social critics in America. In 1854, Thomas Nichols and his wife Mary Gove Nichols published Marriage: Its History, Character, and Results, with sections contributed by each. Mary Nichols, survivor of a previous bad marriage, had become an ardent advocate for women’s rights; she and her husband were also water-cure proponents who had opened a series of hydrotherapy facilities in New York City. In their co-authored treatise, they proposed free love as an alternative to the worse-than-slavery of “monogamic marriage,” which they denounced as the “center and soul” of a “system of superstition, bigotry, oppression, and plunder” (p. 88).

Employing abundant biblical quotations and appeals to Christian spirituality to buttress their view, they expressed righteous indignation over the lot of married women in the United States: “Often the only real difference between a wife and a prostitute” wrote Thomas Nichols in one of his sections, “is that the former is compelled to sleep every night with one man whom she does not love, while the latter has the happiness of sometimes sleeping with one she does” (p. 104).

Echoing the spirit of Fourier, who was admiringly quoted in the book, Mary Nichols contended that “Variety is as beautiful and useful in love as in eating and drinking” (p. 128). She stressed that “There is a large and increasing class of women in our land who know what purity is […] They know that it is not fidelity to a legal bond where there is no love” (p. 206).

Once love and sexual attraction had disappeared—as it almost invariably did, in the Nichols’ opinion—one partner owed nothing to another. In fact, it would be immoral to remain with one’s spouse without sexual desire (p. 322). Only free love was true to human nature: “Men and women find universally that their susceptibility to love is not burnt out by one honeymoon, or satisfied by one lover. On the contrary, the secret history of the human heart will bear out the assertion that it is capable of loving any number of times and any number of persons, and that the more it loves, the more it can love” (p. 128).

Nothing was more beautiful and more conducive to general happiness and the proper care of children, they argued, than a woman’s right and instinct to choose her sexual mate(s) without legal, moral, or social constraint (see especially p. 286). She could be trusted to make the right choice and, as Thomas Nichols phrased it, it was nobody’s business “Who I love, or how many I love, or whether I love the same person to-day that I loved 10 years ago” (p. 300). As for jealousy or possessiveness, these could all be dealt with by learning to think and act with a pure heart.

The Nichols made approving reference to the utopian experiment known as the Oneida Community [pictured above], which existed near Oneida, New York from 1848 until 1881. It was a perfectionist communal society composed of a few hundred members. Its adherents practiced Bible Communism, holding all property in common and mandating what the founder called “complex marriage,” a form of free love in which every woman was understood to be the wife of every man, and vice versa. Natural birth control was practiced through male continence, i.e. sex without male orgasm, with younger men initiated into the practice with older (post-menopausal) women. The sexual pleasure and agency of women were affirmed as priorities.

Children were taken from their parents once they were weaned, and raised by the Children’s Department of the community. Sexual jealousy between man and woman was prohibited; as were special bonds between parent and child. In their book, the Nichols quoted a number of Oneida adherents who extolled the happiness and freedom they had found there. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Oneida was disbanded a few decades later, at least in part because many of the younger members wanted to practice traditional marriage. Sexual utopianism usually runs aground on the reality of human need.

Free love, however, remained popular as a feminist ideal, finding perhaps its most vivid expression in the writings and speeches of Victoria Woodhull, whose name became synonymous with feminist radicalism in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Born Victoria Claflin, Woodhull and her sister Tennie (Tennessee) charmed and shocked America with their boldness as advocates for socialism, spiritualism, feminism, and free love. From a young age, Victoria worked as a spiritualist medium in her father’s traveling medicine show, developing her talents for public performance alongside her father’s entourage of mesmerists, sellers of miracle cures, and fortune-tellers.

After an unsatisfying marriage at age 15 to Channing Woodhull, whose name she kept even after divorcing him and becoming involved with another man, Victoria opened a stockbroking office in New York City with her sister, using money provided by multi-millionaire Cornelius Vanderbilt, one of the sisters’ many admirers (who at one point proposed marriage to Tennie, but was refused). The sisters also ran a tabloid newspaper, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly (1870-76), which was, among other things, the first American paper to print Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto.

Woodhull accepted the nomination for President of the United States from the Equal Rights Party in 1872, and was a much-sought-after public speaker in the 1870s, with thousands of people regularly turned away from her talks on such subjects as women’s rights and sexual freedom (see Cari M. Carpenter’s Selected Writings of Victoria Woodhull: Suffrage, Free Love, and Eugenics).

Like the Nichols before her, Woodhull [above] embraced an absolutist commitment to free love and its purifying effects on society. In her speech “The Principles of Social Freedom,” she declared, “Yes, I am a Free Lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional, and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere” (qtd in Selected Writings of Victoria Woodhull, pp. 51-52).

Free love mattered not only because it was free—and therefore a social good like freedom of religion or conscience—but also because it was indispensable to physical health. Sex without desire, Woodhull argued in her speech “The Elixir of Life,” produced “nervous debility or irritability and sexual demoralization” in its victim (almost always the woman) as well as sowing “the seeds of disease” (p. 177) in children. Only “mutual desire” (p. 177) should govern sexual choice, Woodhull argued.

Woodhull also spoke out in the strongest terms against the damaging consequences of compelled sex, alleging that “The wife who submits to sexual intercourse against her wishes or desires virtually commits suicide; while the husband who compels it, commits murder, and ought just as much to be punished for it as though he strangled her to death for refusing him” (p. 178).

Even worse than such submission was what Woodhull termed “unconsummated intercourse,” intercourse in which the woman was left unsatisfied. Woodhull hailed a new era in which women would choose for themselves and would raise children in the purity and amity of relations of mutual affection and attraction:

“If we would change the present rotten state of the world with regard to our sexual horrors, all that we have to do is to acknowledge and inaugurate this grandest of all liberties; to recognize the right of woman to rule in the domain of the affections” (p. 194-195).

Woodhull prophesied that when sex was taught to children in schools and women were allowed to choose their lovers without constraint, the prejudices and bigotry associated with sexuality would disappear, and healthy love would spread throughout the land. “It is impossible that anything but good should follow the natural expression of a natural desire” (p. 182).

**

Even in the repressed old days of Victorian sexual morality, a great deal of talk about female desire rationalized women’s infidelity and warned husbands of the need to placate their wives and give them priority. As Woodhull stressed, “every man needs to have it thundered in his ears until he wakes to the fact that he is not the only party to the act, and that the other party demands a return for all that he receives” (p. 178).

Monogamy, it turned out, was yet another patriarchal plot designed to destroy women’s pleasure and even their ability to have healthy pregnancies. The message was clear: women, at least as much as men and probably more, needed to have satisfying sex on a regular basis; and that could well mean multiple affairs and lack of exclusivity. Women who talked themselves out of wayward desires were being untrue to themselves.

**

A near-straight line can be drawn from these 19^th century formulations—certainly unorthodox in their time—to recent statements about women and sexual freedom.

Feminist pundit and academic Wednesday Martin, a self-described “social researcher” (PhD in comparative literature) has defended women’s need for sexual variety, claiming that women have a harder time than men with monogamy, which she described as “a tighter shoe” for them. She reports that most women’s desire for their mates drops dramatically between years one and three of a relationship, creating unique female hardships. “We have to deal with the fact that women like variety and novelty and adventure,” she asserted in interview with Shaun Galanos, relationship coach and author of The Love Drive on Substack, “and need it, probably even more than men do.” (She claims it to be a “myth” that men have stronger libidos than women; women simply have a different “desire style”).

Alleging that there is a “silent majority of women who are struggling with monogamy,” Martin described female sexuality as “assertive, pleasure-centered and selfish” and suggested that women who find themselves fatally bored in a monogamous marriage or partnership may well need to seek out, openly or clandestinely, other sexual experiences in order to save the relationship. It is not good for women to give their men “service sex,” sex that the woman does not herself strongly desire. Women’s need for novelty and variety is natural, she asserted, and what is natural should not be ignored.

One of the many interesting features of Martin’s presentation is how little she thinks our societies in 21^st century North America have changed since the era of Woodhull, when divorce was difficult to obtain and scandalous. Martin lamented that women are still thought of as the primary caregivers of children, still boxed in by taboos against infidelity, and still over-dependent on bread-winner husbands for their economic survival. She waxed eloquent about hunter-gatherer societies and the power women allegedly had in those ancient times, and called for greater economic as well as sexual autonomy for women to free them from the burdens of caregiving and their entrapment in heteropatriarchy.

What is different in Martin’s argument from those made by the Nichols and Woodhull is that Martin no longer tries to make the case that sexual freedom for women will make society better or healthier. Unlike former free love advocates, she doesn’t claim that healthier children will be born from free unions, or that women will choose to mate with men of good character—or even that women have a higher conception of sexual love than men do (on the contrary, she enthusiastically approves transactional sex and recreational sex).

Concern for women’s sexual happiness need no longer be linked to any larger idea of the social good; female libidinal satisfaction matters merely because it is for women. The idea that natural desires can and should be restrained in service to other, higher values such as faithfulness, morality, or the good of children, is not even considered. How long will it be before Cat and Nat decide that they owe it to themselves to take the lovers they’ve been fantasizing about?

Despite Martin’s laments, we’ve already been trying for a long time to live out the precepts of free love. We have seen an explosion of female promiscuity and infidelity, and abundant female-initiated divorce. Our laws and welfare system have made it possible for single women to have children without the father’s involvement (except for his money). We have made it possible for women to live singly or in a series of uncommitted heterosexual (or homosexual) relationships and to abandon their mates when boredom sets in. Millions of women now spend decades of their lives in “dating” and trying out impermanent liaisons. Millions of abortions testify to their poor choices.

The rejuvenated lives, renewed vitality, and blooming happiness promised by advocates like Woodhull have notably failed to materialize. On the contrary, liberal women have higher rates of reported loneliness and dissatisfaction (see, for example, here). The results for children and families have been mistrust, anger, fracture, insecurity, unhappiness, and rising suicidality. The ones doing well are the social workers, therapists, counselors, lawyers and family court officers—many of them feminists and lesbians—who play an ever-greater role in pushing the theories that make their roles necessary.

Perhaps stigma against infidelity isn’t such a bad idea after all!