Man and Wife

[Originally posted on goofyblog 4.6.07]

The number one podcast show in the Health category is Man and Wife. It is the greatest! Sex advice every episode (there are about 20 now) in a video podcast by a stocky black couple. Their interplay could not possibly be scripted. They take calls, give out advice, fight a bit, all the while doing everything from shoveling snow in front of the house to soaking in the bath.

The advice is dead-on and the visuals of them doing the show together tell you all you need to know about how couples get along. They introduce every show with their 3 rules:

Check it out!

Savage Love

Dan Savage reviewed Joan Sewell’s I’d Rather Eat Chocolate: Learning to Love My Low Libido and Richard Dawkin’s The God Delusion last month:

I’m saddened to report that, according to Sewell … there’s no such thing as a woman who wants sex constantly. They don’t exist—never did.

All that yammering about women with voracious sexual appetites during Sex And The City’s long reign of terror? A cruel hoax. Women have naturally lower sex drives, Sewell writes. It’s a hormonal thing.

So if straight women don’t want sex—or as much sex—what do they want? Chocolate, says Sewell, or a good book.

For a while, women with high libidos were normal, and women with low libidos were freakish. Now women with low libidos can hand their husbands Sewell’s book and rip open a bag of Doritos.

But there’s a silver lining. Back when women with low libidos were regarded as abnormal—way back at the beginning of the month—it was fashionable to blame the man in a woman’s life for her lack of desire. For years, whenever I printed a letter from a guy who wasn’t getting any, or wasn’t getting much, mail would pour in from women insisting that he had to be doing something wrong.

I called them the “if only” letters: If only she didn’t have to do all the housework, she would want to have sex. If only he would talk with her about her day, she would want to have sex. If only she weren’t so exhausted from taking care of the kids, she would want to have sex. If only he didn’t ask for sex, she would want to have sex.

Well now, thanks to Sewell, straight guys everywhere know that it doesn’t matter how much housework you do, or how sincerely interested you are in her day, or how much of the child care you take on: She still won’t want to fuck you. So leave the dishes in the sink, grab a beer, and go play a video game, guys. Your “if only” nightmares are over.

One thing that hasn’t changed in the wake of Sewell’s book is my advice to women with low libidos: You can have strict monogamy or you can have a low libido, ladies, but you can’t have both.

And finally, a word about a book I have read: In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins tears the intelligent-design idjits into a million little pieces. I feel bad about piling on—almost. Hey, intelligent-design idjits? If God really wants us to have heterosexual sex only, and then only within the bounds of holy matrimony, and if adultery offends Him so much—it’s a stoning offense, right up there with gay sex—how come He designed men and women to be sexually incompatible?

Well, I should say that He designed straight men and straight women to be sexually incompatible. Lesbian couples, with their bags of Doritos, and gay couples, with our mutually insatiable sexual appetites, seem pretty intelligently designed. Thank you, Jesus!

Dan now has podcasts and they are just about as good as his columns. His is the top podcast in the Sexuality sub-category under Health at iTunes. Check it out!