One more double standard.

Not that I think it will surprise anyone...

I was reading over at MDC this morning, in their pregnancy section (sidenote: 14 weeks! woot!) and one of the women said she didn't feel as if her child had been conceived in love because, although it was a planned child, it had taken several months of charting and trying for her to get pregnant, and during that time she had pretty much demanded that her husband service her whenever she told him to, and her husband admitted that he was unhappy about it.

Quite frankly, it's my opinion that she should feel bad, but strangely that wasn't the general response.  Someone actually said "Sometimes love is sucking it up and doing something even though you don't necessarily feel like doing it."

Really?

Do you know what we call it when a man coerces his wife into sex?  We call it rape.  You've heard the old saying "sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander", yes?  You can't have it both ways.  It can't be abusive for a man to insist his wife have sex but reasonable for a woman to insist her husband have sex.

The justification goes like this:  We both agreed we wanted to have a baby.  I'm charting, I know when I'm about to ovulate, so I need to tell him when it's time to have sex because I'm fertile. 

That's not good justification.

I know there's a popular conception that all men want to have sex all the time.  In reality, stress affects a man's sex drive just like it does a woman's.  And no one I know of appreciates being expected to perform on demand.  I'm not a guy, but I can't imagine "I don't want to have sex now, I'm not fertile" followed by "I'm ovulating!  Sex! Now!" is really that arousing.   To say nothing of those going by the old fashioned every-other-day routine.  "We can't have sex today.  We had sex yesterday."  (I can imagine the look of confusion from Erik if I tried that line.)

I'm not sure why so many women think this is okay.  I really am not.  Women raise holy hell--should raise holy hell, don't get me wrong--when men make decisions without taking their wives' feelings into account.  How this does not work in reverse is beyond me.  How a decision to have a baby trumps a man's autonomy over his own body is really beyond me.  And once again, I find myself glad.