I am reading a fictional book about a family living in the middle ages in England. The main character is a man who does stone work for palaces and cathedrals. He works many hours as a laborer and barely manages to feed his family. But this man's family is really lucky because, around them, there are single and widowed woman who cannot survive financially.
At one point in the book, the man's wife has had 4 children and lost one to illness. She tells him that her body cannot take another pregnancy, so he assumes it's the end of his sex life. Fast forward to the present, I start to think about how different things were back then as opposed to the current culture of feminist behavior. I imagine that these wives from 1100 AD found a way to keep their husbands close to home, even when they wanted to avoid another pregnancy. Some of these wives probably used their creativity to find other ways that they could satisfy their husbands sexually. And they probably felt like the effort was well worth it in keeping the family together.
I grew up around my mother's feminist friends. One of their ongoing themes was the "belittling" things that wives had to do to please their husbands. So, in one fell swoop, they flipped the interpretation of centuries of thought on the subject. It was no longer honorable for a wife to accommodate her husband's different needs for sex or any other reasonable masculine interest. Now the standard for "normal" was what women wanted and needed. Us men became the outcast elements in our marriages, with dishonorable desires that needed to be feminized.
I keep finding subtle and not-so-subtle ways that feminism has changed the culture, most of it for the worse. This subtle change, this "spin" that the feminists invented in the 1960's, gave all future generations of women the opportunity to feel "belittled" and lessened by their husbands' reasonable desires. It is so sad that we men never really got the equality that was promised.
Tim
