Finally: A Useful Sex Study!

Finally: A Useful Sex Study!

– Calico Rudasill, Sssh.com

For a subject that we’re often told people don’t like to talk about, or are hesitant to even examine, there sure is a lot of research on sex. Hell, even if you narrow the topic to frequency of sex, you’ll find study after study dedicated to the subject.

Want to if there’s a decline in sexual frequency as we age, and if so, why? There’s a study addressing those questions. Want to get significantly more specific and learn about trends in frequency of sexual activity and number of sexual partners among adults aged 18 to 44 Years in the US, 2000-2018? You guessed it – there’s a study on exactly that.

There’s even a study showing that while sexual frequency predicts greater well-being, “more is not always better”, which makes sense, because having a lot of bad sex seems unlikely to brighten anyone’s mood.

And then there’s the most famous sex study of all: The one which revealed “the bigger the cushion, the sweeter the pushin.” Or maybe that was a Spinal Tap song. Either way, I’m not aware of any research contradicting this bedrock scientific finding.

Very Interesting, but Will it Inspire Him to Take Out the Trash?

Sadly, a lot of the research done into sex isn’t particularly useful – by which I mean useful to me, to be clear. For example, I have no doubt that a paper on “Identity and Relational Factors Associated with Sexual Role and Positioning for Anal Sex among Colombian Sexual Minority Men” is relevant and useful to some Colombian men, but as an American woman who has embraced no-exceptions “No Butt Sex” with respect to her own butt, I think I can safely say reading that paper isn’t going to inform any major changes in my sex life, going forward.

A study on the role of relationship equity in female sexual desire, however, that could be very useful indeed.

My husband, you see, isn’t big on doing household chores. On his nights to wash the dishes, the dishes sit until bedtime, at which point he grudgingly rolls up his sleeves and washes the dishes so poorly that I routinely find myself finishing the job the next time I pull out a plate from the kitchen cabinet.

On the other hand, even after all these years, my husband does still seem to be big on having sex with me. So, if I can persuade him that shouldering more of the burden of around-the-housework will result in me wanting to have sex with him more often, there’s at least a chance the forest of weeds currently growing in our back yard will be attended to sometime this decade.

Maybe I’ll Just Skip the Details…

The authors of the paper, who hail from the Centre for Mental Health at the Swinburne University of Technology, note that this study “explored the role of relationship equity in relationship satisfaction and FSD (“Female Sexual Desire”), by giving 299 Australian women aged 18 to 39 years an online questionnaire measuring relationship factors and dimensions of sexual desire.

“Two mediation models were tested to examine how relationship equity was associated with solitary and dyadic sexual desire, via a connection with relationship satisfaction,” the authors explain. “As expected, equality in relationships predicted relationship satisfaction, which, subsequently, was related to higher levels of dyadic sexual desire.”

I’m sure there’s a lot more to this study than “share the chores more evenly with your wife and your wife will be more interested in having sex with you”, but I’m not going to explore any of those nuances, because understanding this study isn’t my goal. My goal is to use this study as a tool to get my husband to maybe, for the love of God, finally paint the trim, which has needed a new coat of paint since roughly 2009.

A Disappointing Experiment – Which Just Created Another Chore

Armed with the text of this study (well, ok – armed with text cherrypicked from the study’s abstract), I decided to make my move. Descending upon his home office unannounced, I explained to my husband how this means that if he gets better about chipping in around the house, he may well find himself the recipient of more blowjobs.

Honestly, I don’t think he was listening at all until I got to the word blowjob, but I certainly had his attention at that point.

Still, this is my husband we’re talking about, so I should have known his initial response would be snarky, maddening and seemingly calculated to assure none of those blowjobs will ever be delivered.

“Sounds great Cal,” he said, flashing an evil grin. “But are there any chores I can do around here that will make you hotter looking?”

In the aftermath of that needlessly mean quip, I did have a new chore in mind for him: Cleaning up the broken coffee mug that had just bounced off his nose and shattered on the floor.

Oh well…. Maybe I’ll have better luck with the next sex study.