Oy. You've surely seen the headlines by now: Women in charge have less sex! Too bossy to make love: Women who make all the decisions at home pay the price in passion!
The message is clear: The stronger the woman, the less likely she is to get laid.
The thing is, though, that's not exactly the case. The flurry of salacious news items all refer to a recent study out of John Hopkins University, which found that, of the women surveyed --women from six African countries -- the more decisions they were responsible for, the less often they had sex. But the bit that gets left out of the headlines is, according to study co-author Carrie Muntifering, in places such as the countries where the study was conducted, this is likely a good thing, indicating more control over their sex lives.
What grates is the way such results are parlayed in our neck of the woods -- where, in fact, more equality has been shown to be associated with more nookie, not less -- as though women had better absolve themselves of any decision-making power, lest those decisions become the only form of action they can count on getting. And look at the judgment in some of that language: Bossy? Seriously? (And when you click on that one, the top of your browser will read: Desperate Housewives. Nope, not kidding.) Even leaving the (admittedly obnoxious) semantics aside, why is our first instinct to take a study like this -- one that, for all intents and purposes, has precious little to do with us -- and spin it in such a way as to strike the greatest amount of fear possible into our collective hearts? It's all yet another way in which women are led to question the way we're living, to worry over being too fill-in-the-blank and not fill-in-the-other-blank enough, and yet another way in which we're faced with the false dichotomy that refuses to die: successful or sexy, ladies, not both.
Interestingly, the same day my inbox was assaulted with these headlines, I came across a couple more, about Iris Krasnow's new book, "The Secret Lives of Wives: Women Share What It Really Takes To Stay Married." For her book, Krasnow interviewed 200 women, and found:
The happiest wives have a sense of purpose and passion in work and causes outside of the home. Wives who counted on a spouse for fulfillment and sustenance were often angry and lonely.
Huh. What do you know? Independent women have happier relationships? There's a headline I'd love to see.