The (Unwanted) Sex Lives of Married Women: Eight Books About Complicated Desire

The most violating sex I ever had happened in the one place where even today, after seven years of #MeToo-fueled inquiries, few would ever look: in my marriage. I didn’t always loathe having sex with my husband. And over fourteen years of marriage, the loss of desire was so slow, the rise of antipathy so unsanctioned by our governing marital myths that I could hardly perceive these changes, let alone act on them.

My husband still desired me—despite our total loss of emotional intimacy—and sex is healthy for the marriage and the individual: everyone says so, including couples counselors, who often recommend performing it regularly in a kind of fake-it-till-you-make-it optimism. So I submitted. But I faked nothing.

It took many years after leaving for me to acknowledge that submitting to sex with someone who knew I didn’t want it and yet was fulfilled by it erased my sense of self and destroyed my love for him. When I finally wrote about that experience in my memoir, Mad Wife, I discovered that the ways that sex made me feel then and traumatized me afterward have much in common with women’s experiences of what we call “rape.”

When I started talking with women friends and acquaintances about it, I found that nearly all of them had had similar experiences in marriage and knew others who had as well. Yet little in cultural parlance or even in feminist theorizing gives us helpful ways of talking about this kind of sexual coercion—of sexual abuse—or of thinking about how to respond to and change an element of sexual and marital culture that has been normalized into invisibility.

This reading list gathers seven recent books that explore issues central to Mad Wife, concerning women’s desire, consent, and autonomy, especially as distorted by marriage: How much do we owe our spouses and partners, of our bodies and our care? What are we willing to do and risk to be true to ourselves and honor our heart’s desires? In a patriarchal culture that tells us to be and desire what men want of us, how can we even recognize our own desire or lack of it?

And how can marriage change to grant women the right it has always encoded for men—to be and express one’s full self? What are the consequences—for women, for society—of maintaining the status quo?

*

Deborah Levy, Hot Milk

Hot Milk imagines what a woman discovering her ferocity early, before being damaged by marriage, might look like. In a dusty seaside town in Spain, a woman in her twenties and dislocated in all ways, Sofia, finds her desires—sexual and otherwise—and begins to enact them while protecting herself from the emotional onslaughts of her parasitic mother, narcissistic father, and a manipulative lover.

Repeated encounters with “medusa” jellyfish transform her from meek subservience into audacity, rage, and appetite, refiguring her skin as they “sting her into desire” and make her” monstrous.” By novel’s end, Sofia has no need for Mad Wife. I love that about her.

Han Kang, The Vegetarian (trans. Deborah Smith)

The Vegetarian has gotten a lot of attention as a Man Booker winner whose English translation differs dramatically from its Korean original (and now as the best-known work by our newest Nobel Prize laureate in literature). But little attention has been paid to the novel’s serious treatment of the role unwanted marital sex plays in a husband’s socially sanctioned disregard of his wife’s personhood and in her profound suffering.

Yeong-hye never tells her own story. First, her callous husband describes her mystifying disobedience; then her brother-in-law transforms her into an object for his own creative and sexual pursuits. Finally her sister, In-hye, understands the rationale and bravery of Yeong-hye’s efforts to “shuck off the human” by attempting to transform—Daphne-like—into a tree, first refusing to eat animal flesh and then to ingest anything but sunlight.

This manifestation of Yeong-hye’s attempt to elude male objectification is a version of the anorexia that often accompanies sexual or domestic abuse, which I describe experiencing in Mad Wife. If Yeong-hye can’t be saved, her example can inspire In-hye, and all of us, to “wake up” from the trance of patriarchy that renders women as subhuman from the start.

Rachel DeWoskin, Banshee

Rather than becoming a plant or wasting away, Samantha Baxter turns into a banshee. Two days after receiving a potentially life-ending diagnosis, she finds herself “soaping up one of [her] graduate students,” a woman her daughter’s age.

The novel’s visceral pleasure comes from watching a respected academic, wife, and mother stop being nice and start being totally, wildly herself. The novel asks, is a woman who acts like most men—entitled, rapacious, unapologetic—a  “banshee?” Samantha’s reasonably selfish, apocalyptic response to her own possible end makes us wonder whether it should take the threat of obliteration to break the female habit of niceness.

Donna Freitas, The Nine Lives of Rose Napolitano

When Rose Napolitano lies passively under her husband, head turned to the side, wondering whether she’s consenting to the sex she neither wants nor resists, she’s held in place not by a sense of duty, as I describe feeling in Mad Wife, but out of a desire—her husband’s desire—that she get pregnant. Donna Freitas’s novel explores the complexities of consent and desire as they intersect with the social imperative of reproduction, which can turn marital sex into an act of eradication for women on many levels.

Rose’s nine lives grow out of nine ways of reacting to the impasse between her and her husband about whether to have a child. She has a baby or she doesn’t, or she experiences a miscarriage, or has an affair, and we watch how Rose blooms or withers as she capitulates or asserts her own desires. In Mad Wife, I consider why I flailed and suffered in some of these same ways, prolonging my misery by refusing to end the marriage.

But every time Freitas runs her simulation, Rose and her husband must part, suggesting that one core truth about the necessary consequence of such basic incompatibility unites all nine Roses.

 Miranda July, All Fours

All Fours tells the straightforward story of a forty-something woman falling in love and lust with a young stranger, feeling her marital intimacy wane, and registering the cruelties of perimenopause. But it confronts the problem of women’s desire in marriage and mid-life so bluntly, and its main character is so unapologetically committed to exploring her actual desire and resisting cultural pressures to fake its acceptable versions, that reading it can feel like undergoing an incantation.

As one previously unimagined scenario after another opens your mind and moves you in equal measure, you can feel a veil being lifted. Has such a world always been possible, one in which a woman can claim her authentic sexual desire, fulfill her artistic vision, be a loving mother, and reimagine marriage as accommodating all those things simultaneously?

Miranda July asks us to imagine such possibilities, even if we can’t enact all of them right now. All Fours is what happens when a woman believes all along in her right to self-determination and desire—and is married to a man who would sooner transform or end the marriage than cage, shame, or coerce her: she bypasses monstrosity and “madness” and heads straight to self-revelation.

Soraya Chemaly, Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger

When I decided to begin writing about the painful and confusing end of my marriage and its many punishing after-years, my good friend and colleague suggested that first I read some books about anger. I didn’t understand why. At the time, I felt no anger about that relationship, only deep shame. Then Rage Becomes Her changed everything.

This book enabled me finally to name the disgust I felt for the man who said he loved me while systematically violating me, and to acknowledge the anger that propelled me out of that marriage, through my own “banshee” phase, before I could even articulate why I had to leave. As Soraya Chemaly explains, anger is wise; anger is creative; anger is brave. We would all do well to listen to our anger.

Tracy Clark-Flory, Want Me: A Sex Writer’s Journey into the Heart of Desire

Tracy Clark-Flory is brutally honest about the sometimes considerable gap between things she did and what she wanted, examining her sexual history and pop-culture education to understand what created that gap and how she might close it. She expects us to respect her wisdom and intellect and recognize her growing awareness of her own clarity and power, even as she divulges all manner of sexual exploits and foibles.

Her bluntness and candor inspired mine in Mad Wife, when I reflect on sexual things I was convinced to do and even convinced to think I wanted. What kind of “want” is that? I hope both books inspire more women to write so honestly about sex and desire.

Mona Eltahawy, The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls

Mona Eltahawy’s opening gambit, about the night she decked a guy in a night club in Montreal when he put his hand on her ass, made me want to go back and do my whole life over, decking every guy who ever groped me without my permission. This book is a rage-fueled manifesto about how and why women should disrupt the patriarchy, using the “sins” of our anger, attention, profanity, ambition, power, violence, and lust.

Seven Necessary Sins is shocking, provocative, and unapologetic. I teach it every chance I get. If only a little of its audacity wears off on my students, on me, and on you, the world will have to become a safer, more glorious place for women.

______________________________

Mad Wife by Kate Hamilton is available via Beacon Press.