Dennis Prager writes for Townhall.com:
If most women wait until they are in the mood before making love with their husband, many women will be waiting a month or more until they next have sex. When most women are young, and for some older women, spontaneously getting in the mood to have sex with the man they love can easily occur. But for most women, for myriad reasons — female nature, childhood trauma, not feeling sexy, being preoccupied with some problem, fatigue after a day with the children and/or other work, just not being interested — there is little comparable to a man’s “out of nowhere,” and seemingly constant, desire for sex.
2. Why would a loving, wise woman allow mood to determine whether or not she will give her husband one of the most important expressions of love she can show him? What else in life, of such significance, do we allow to be governed by mood?
What if your husband woke up one day and announced that he was not in the mood to go to work? If this happened a few times a year, any wife would have sympathy for her hardworking husband. But what if this happened as often as many wives announce that they are not in the mood to have sex? Most women would gradually stop respecting and therefore eventually stop loving such a man.
What woman would love a man who was so governed by feelings and moods that he allowed them to determine whether he would do something as important as go to work? Why do we assume that it is terribly irresponsible for a man to refuse to go to work because he is not in the mood, but a woman can — indeed, ought to — refuse sex because she is not in the mood? Why?
This brings us to the next reasons.
3. The baby boom generation elevated feelings to a status higher than codes of behavior. In determining how one ought to act, feelings, not some code higher than one’s feelings, became decisive: “No shoulds, no oughts.” In the case of sex, therefore, the only right time for a wife to have sex with her husband is when she feels like having it. She never “should” have it. But marriage and life are filled with “shoulds.” Continued…
Here is a response to Prager’s first column on this topic from Megan at Jezebel.com:
Conservative pundit and marital rape apologist Dennis Prager has some advice for you ladies with faltering marriages: don’t think that just because you don’t want to have sex your husband shouldn’t try to fuck you.
Like Tucker Carlson before him, Prager thinks the key to a successful marriage is just doing it even when you don’t want to. In Prager’s case, he means "whenever your husband wants," regardless of your "mood," which shouldn’t matter. Of course, you could be in that mood because your husband is a liar and a cheat, or because he’s just driven your family into debt or hit you (not too hard, of course, but things happen), but as long as he wants to…, well, you should suck it up and submit.
According to Prager, women just don’t understand that men view your willingness to "submit" to his penetration of your body as the way that you show love.
First, women need to recognize how a man understands a wifes refusal to have sex with him: A husband knows that his wife loves him first and foremost by her willingness to give her body to him. This is rarely the case for women. Few women know their husband loves them because he gives her his body (the idea sounds almost funny). This is, therefore, usually a revelation to a woman. Many women think mens natures are similar to theirs, and this is so different from a womans nature, that few women know this about men unless told about it.
I mean, of course women don’t desire sex for the sake of, you know, "pleasure" (and certainly not in Dennis Prager’s house), so it’s obviously all about love. Deep, deep love, which your husband returns so deeply…
Jeff Fecke wrote Dec. 23, 2008:
Remember Dennis Prager? Sure you do! He’s the guy who told women that they really want is to stay home and keep the house nice for their husbands. Prager’s only 0-for-2 on marriage, so clearly he has his finger on the pulse of what makes marriages work. And this week, ladies, he’s looking at you, and what you’re not doing to keep your man happy.
I’ll give you a hint: it’s about sex. But first, grandiosity:
Given our preoccupation with politics and economics, it is easy to forget that for most of us micro issues still play a greater role in our lives. So here are some thoughts that, as heretical as they might sound, have been found extremely helpful, sometimes even marriage-saving, from listeners to my radio show, which features a male-female hour every week.
Awesome! Because the marriage that Dennis Prager can save is worth saving, right?
The subject is one of the most common problems that besets marriages: the wife who is not in the mood and the consequently frustrated and hurt husband.
Now, this is going to happen from time to time. One partner’s gonna be in the mood, the other won’t be. The solution that most of us who’ve been in relationships have settled on is to wait until tomorrow, and check again. Now, if our partner is never in the mood, that may be a problem, but it’s usually a sign of a deeper problem in the relationship.
Oh, and it’s not always husbands in the mood and wives who aren’t, but Dennis will hand-wave that away.
There are marriages with the opposite problem — a wife who is frustrated and hurt because her husband is rarely in the mood. But, as important and as destructive as that problem is, it has different causes and different solutions, and is therefore not addressed here. What is addressed is the far more common problem of He [sic] wants, she doesnt want.
On Jan. 7, Dennis hosted Megan Carpenter and Jeff Fecke on his show.
Dennis: "I was accused by various sites, all on the ideological left, of advocating marital rape… I can usually predict how my words can be distorted…but I was wrong [in this case]. The lying about what I said, putting words I never said in quotes as if I said them, was unanticipated. This was a new low for critiques of my work.
"I decided to have these people on my show because I am curious how their minds work, how they morally can live with themselves after lying about what I write."
"I write that if you love your husband, you will have a better marriage if you don’t regularly deny him sex…. How do you justify your charge that I advocate marital left?"
Megan: "The problem with many of us on the Left by advocating that a woman have marital relations…that she should do it whether or not she is in the mood. Rape is defined as a man having sex with an unwilling woman. That unwilling woman should have sex with their husbands."
Megan: "If we’re striving for clarity, I would define a woman who is not in the mood as a woman who is not willing to have sex."
Jeff: "Your two columns boil down to, though women have the right to say no, she should expect her marriage to fall apart… If you say no too many times, your marriage will fall apart. Therefore, even if you do not want to have sex tonight…"
Dennis: "In most marriages, will a woman’s constantly saying no to sexual overtures of her husband, if he is a good man who she loves, will that have disasterous impact on most marriages?"
"If you can’t define whether your husband is a good man, you have a serious marital problem."
"Why saying that is tantamount to advocating marital rape? Both of you have raped the word rape, you have cheapened what is an evil act, you have made it laughable, you have hurt the cause of combatting rape by your hysteria."
Jeff: "Hysteria is an interesting word to choose."
Dennis: "Because it comes from hysterectomy and is related to females?"
Jeff: "Precisely."
Dennis: "That is a brilliant insight."
"Do you feel it was overkill to say I advocated marital rape?"
No, they don’t.
Megan says there aren’t significant differences between men and women regarding sex.
Stacy posts on Jezebel: I’m not sure what Dennis’s issue is. If he gives his wife enough Jigsaw Magnesium she should be up all night because she doesn’t need as much sleep.
Dennis: "I won’t tell you some of the names I am called on these blogs because I can’t say these words on the radio."
The same type of raunchy talk occurs on blogs Prager praises, including Little Green Footballs. Yet Prager never mentions that when he praises such sites.
Dennis says that male sexual nature is closer to the animal than female sexual nature.
Jeff: "I can’t think of anything more anti-male than that statement."
Prager accused him of naivete. "I lived on pretty much of a farm for ten years (from 1996-2006 in West Hills). I raised chickens. When the rooster would hop on a hen, the hen was never in the mood. It was pretty analoguous to the way humans are made. Unless one has been educated out of reality."
