Sex Strike?

Mistress and slave had a bit of a contrarian reaction to yesterday’s “Women’s Strike”. Women were supposed to show their political solidarity by withholding their labor, paid or volunteer, to show the world how they’d be missed if not around.

Well of course, we know how much women would be missed. And, unlike immigrants, no one is trying to show them the door. But it seemed a little counterproductive to make the women who could not afford (or didn’t have) a sick day to stay home with their kids, because the local school district’s teachers did not show up for work. 

Should Ruth Bader Ginsburg take the day off on the Supreme Court for an important vote or hearings?  

What about those female immigration lawyers trying to protect moms from deportation by Mr. Trump’s newly empowered ICE goons? 

Or Moms making lunch for their kids?

Of course, Mistress could have afforded to take the day off. She has a slave to handle pesky household chores. Even making a cup of tea would seem to violate the bizarre strike protocol. But she did not avoid calls from clients yesterday who needed her help. And thank god for that. Now that I’m retired someone has to support me in the manner to which I have grown accustomed, right?

But there maybe something more sinister here. Are America’s women on a stealth sex strike?

I’m referring to a recent report in the Washington Post (linked here ) documenting an horrific decline in sexual activity by American adults, particularly married couples.

Among all American adults, sex was “had” 60-62 times per year in the 1990’s. But that declined to less than 53 times / yr. by 2014.  Barely once per week!

The rate of decline was even worse if you were married. You’d assume married folks had more sex than unmarried folk right? And they did in the 1990’s, at the rate of 73 times/wk. But by 2014, married folks were having sex only 55 times / week – barely once / week and not much more than the general adult population’s nookie rate of 53 times / wk.

It gets worse for folks in my age bracket. If you’re in your 20’s you have sex about 80 times / yr. But by the time you are in your 60’s the average rate is only a pathetic 20 times a year – only 1.6 times / month.

Apparently, Mistress and I are outliers. While we don’t keep a daily log like some of you, my “back of the envelope” estimate is that in the last year we’ve had full blown marital sex here in UCTMW land about 306 times (that’s about 6.5 times a week over 48 weeks, taking into account 4 weeks when we may have been away from each other, and maybe one day every other week when had an “abstinence” day for some odd reason or another.). Of course, that does not include times when Mistress had sex with another lover (maybe 10-15 times) or oral worship of Mistress, which certainly totals in the hundreds.

But what explains why the rest of you are so far behind our pace?

“The report did not list causes for the decline. But it cited possible factors including increased access to entertainment and social media, a decline in happiness among people age 30 and over, higher incidence of depression, and use of antidepressants associated with sexual dysfunction.

“Are they less happy and thus having less sex, or are they having less sex and therefore less happy? It’s probably some of both,” said Jean M. Twenge, the study’s lead author, who teaches psychology at San Diego State University and wrote “Generation Me,” a book about millennials. “We do know that sexual frequency is linked to marital satisfaction, so overall if you have fewer people having sex, you could have people who are less happy and less satisfied with that relationship.”

The decline in sexual activity was sharpest among people in their 50s, people with a college degree, people with school-age children, people in the South and those who do not watch pornography. It was less pronounced among younger people, men, nonwhites, people with children under 6, people in the West and those who had watched a pornographic movie in the past year.”

So maybe one prescription for this malaise it to move to a western state and watch porn?

But as I think about it, there may be another explanation for this seemingly sad decline in marital intercourse.

Could the popularization of the  cock cage as a way for a wife to better control her husband account for the decline in sex among married folks?  Are there hundreds of thousands of married women who keep their husbands on lock down for most of the month? Certainly our friends Terri and Diane have found a fulfilling sex life that features very little actual marital intercourse? Maybe the study doesn’t count it when a wife has sex with her bull side dish?  Or include a wife’s deployment of a strap-on on her caged hubby for her own satisfaction and amusement?

Clearly, some deeper  research may be required to get to the bottom of this apparent “sex strike”. I find it hard to believe that it’s all about too much Netflix and too many “devices” to watch it on.