Male Desire Requires No Explanation. Female Desire Always Does.
I was listening to a podcast a few days ago when one of the women said:
“What’s interesting is the only women I know who are fucking their husbands and want to be are the women being cheated on. And they know it. They feel it in their bones. It’s that weird butterfly thing you get. You think it’s because you’re excited, but it’s really just the nervousness and the insecurity. And so those are the women who are fucking their husbands night and day. They’re being cheated on. They’re just trying to hang on.”
I rewound the clip at least ten times so I could capture it accurately.
The podcast is funny; it’s meant to be funny. These women have a very large female audience listening and laughing along.
This article is NOT a criticism of these women. It’s a little bit of a critique of the joke itself, but mostly, it’s a deep dive into why women need to justify their desire for sex at all.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I couldn’t stop thinking about this podcast segment. My immediate reaction was visceral.
Ugh. No. I do not like that.
It poked at my feminist bones, although I couldn’t initially pinpoint why. At first, I thought I was reacting because it was another tired stereotype about heterosexual marriage. Nag, nag. Headache, headache. Bed death.
But after sitting with it for a few days, I realized something else was bothering me. The joke isn’t really about cheating or even about sex.
It’s a joke about what we’re willing to believe about women.
On the surface, this joke is simply the inverse of a weathered trope. The wife never wants to have sex, and the husband is constantly being rejected. This joke flips the premise. The wife enthusiastically wants sex, so obviously she must have a reason, she must need a reason. There must be an ulterior motive. Her husband must be cheating, she must be afraid, she must be trying to hold onto him.
Wanting, on its own, cannot exist.
This is what stayed with me. This is what gave me that visceral no reaction.
The joke isn’t offensive and there are women who genuinely feel this way; there is truth in jest. I’m bummed that the joke lands at all; I wish it didn’t. Because what underpins it, and gives it the power to draw laughs, is an upsetting assumption so deeply embedded in our culture that we barely notice it.
Women don’t simply want sex. There must always be an explanation.
Whether it’s the woman desperately having sex because she’s terrified her husband is leaving, or the woman lying awake silently repeating, Please don’t touch me. Please don’t touch me. Both versions of the joke imagine women disconnected from their own desire. In neither scenario does she simply want sex.
But I am a woman who wants sex. I am a woman who wants to fuck her husband. So I decided to dig into the premise of the joke. I asked my husband if he was cheating on me. He said no. Therefore, there are two possibilities: Either he is lying or the joke is wrong.
Let’s assess the first possibility.
He could absolutely be cheating on me. I have observed no trail of cheating, no scent to pick up on. But he’s smart and savvy, and if he wanted to cheat, he certainly could.
We don’t share our locations with one another; we don’t have that kind of surveillance relationship. I don’t look through his phone. I don’t check the bank account. I don’t go through his pockets in the dirty clothes hamper. I don’t spend my days wondering what he’s doing or whether he’s up to something. He travels for work relatively regularly and goes to work every day without me tailing him. He has time, freedom of movement, and privacy.
Our relationship is built on trust, communication, mutual respect, and an intentional investment in our sex life. These things are protective factors in our marriages, but that’s content for another essay.
For now, let’s assume he’s telling the truth. That leaves the second possibility: the joke is wrong. Or perhaps, more accurately, the premise beneath the joke is wrong. If my husband isn’t cheating, why do I want to have sex with him?
The joke isn’t about frequency; it’s about desire; it’s about what we beleive about women, generally. It asks why women want to fuck their husbands. It argues that women’s desire only survives inside anxiety. Once the relationship is secure, desire disappears. The assertion is that women chase commitment the way children chase bubbles. Running, giggling, reaching, jumping, finally touching it, and…pop! The excitement vanishes the moment they’ve captured it.
To be fair, the joke is grounded in some science. Researchers have observed that anxiety and excitement are remarkably difficult for our brains to differentiate. Both elevate heart rate and release adrenaline and cortisol. Both activate similar neurological pathways in our brain in the amygdala and hypothalamus. Our bodies seemingly experience excitement and fear almost identically, only arriving at distinction when we attribute a cognitive interpretation to the situation.
Certainly, some women have sex because they're afraid of losing their husbands or for other reasons rooted in fear and anxiety. Sex is complex, and the reasons we have it (or don’t) are multitudinous. But there are also plenty of women who have sex because they simply want to. Because they enjoy it. Because they genuinely desire their husbands.
Why is that explanation so difficult for us to believe? Why do we require justification? Why is it so unfathomable to think that a woman wants to fuck her husband simply because she wants to fuck her husband? Only when we craft a cheating narrative does it become logical.
The joke assumes women don’t possess autonomous desire. They only possess strategy, reducing sex to a tool to secure commitment, maintain commitment, avoid abandonment, reduce conflict, become pregnant, keep a marriage together, and so forth.
Sex is not understood as something women want. It’s understood as something women use.
That distinction transforms women from sexual subjects into sexual managers. The wife becomes a supplier of sex, but never its consumer. She is responsible for keeping her customer satisfied. The cadence goes something like this:
Wife gives sex
Husband receives sex
Husband doesn't cheat
Couple stays married
Repeat monthly for marital bliss
She isn’t having sex because she’s experiencing pleasure. She’s having sex because she’s protecting her investment. Even in the version of the trope where she’s enthusiastically initiating sex, she’s still acting from fear. She’s still performing a customer service role.
In this paradigm, we’ve accepted a sexual, gender double-standard.
When men say they want sex, no one asks why. They’re men; we assume sexual desire is innate, biological, expected, and valid. “Boys will be boys.” Society asks no further questions.
A man says, “I want to have sex,” and the conversation is over. It is only in a scenario in which a man doesn't want sex that we automatically assume something is wrong. There must be a physiological problem if he isn't interested in sex. We roll out the medicinal red carpet for the man with low desire or sexual health concerns.
A woman says, “I want to have sex,” and suddenly society becomes a detective. “Why? Are you ovulating? Are you trying to get pregnant? Trying to keep him; trap him? Are you feeling insecure?Are you repairing your marriage? You must be hormonal or perhaps lonely?”
There must be a reason beyond the simplest explanation: because. Simply because she wants to. It's the epistemology of the joke that has left it reverberating in my brain. It’s about whose explanations count as sufficient and whose testimony is accepted without cross-examination.
Male desire is treated as inherent. Female desire is treated as strategic, or calculating, even.
Feminist scholars have written about this far more eloquently than I, for many years. When women express desire simply for desire’s sake, rather than for some separate outcome, they disrupt long-standing assumptions about power, sexuality, and agency. The disruption goes beyond the notion that women have desire. It is the assertion that women have authority over their own experience. They don’t need someone else to explain or validate it.
Women should be allowed to want; to want without explanation or justification. Women should be able to want without someone asking what they’re trying to accomplish.
“Because I want to” has always been enough for men. It should be enough for women.
Women are no less capable of experiencing innate sexual desire than men are. Sometimes women just want to fuck. And sometimes they just want to fuck their husbands. Not because they’re trying to save a marriage or because they’re afraid of losing one or because they’re chasing a man. Sometimes they simply want to.
Perhaps the most radical thing we can do is believe women when they tell us what they want.
