New Stupid Thing: "Choreplay"

To be honest, I only read this because I thought Mollie Hemingway was criticizing Sherrie Steinberg's embrace of Chokeplay, but anyway, I wound up reading it and still thought it was a good article, even if it wasn't about Breathplay like I thought it was.

Caution: I don't know Sherrie Steinberg's actual name. I know it's an S.S. I'm not bothering to correct it. It's the "Lean In" yenta, the FaceBook lady who wants to tell us to all be girls or whatever.

Sherrie Steinetz claims that men and women should engage in "choreplay," which is her idea of trying to make doing the dishes sound Sexy. See, it's not doing the dishes, it's engaging in an erotic dance of cleaning. See, it gets her hot. So doing the dishes is part of Sex.

This is her (sexist) idea on how to motivate men: Tell them it's about Sex, and they'll do it, because they're that Fucking Stupid.

Hey, why not tell them that Doing Dishes is really about Karate? Like Wax On Wax Off? Men like Karate, and they'll do the dishes then, because they are Fucking Dumb and will Believe Anything a Superior Woman Tells Them.

Anyway, so this study that Sandy Sipowitz cites? She claims it proves that men and women who share chores more equally -- that is, engage in the ancient tantric rite of "choreplay" -- have more sex.

A study says so!

Well, no it doesn't. Actually... it says the opposite.

The actual authors of the study cited by Sindy SexxxyLaundry say that while it was trumpeted by the Fake Science reporters in the media that "choreplay" is Hot, in fact, #science tells us that men doing dishes is, as we all expected, Not Hot At All.

Although the notion that egalitarian marriages are sexier was widely broadcast in the media, there is little empirical support for this view. The claim rests on results of a small- scale (N = 300) survey and reports of couples in therapy conducted by Chethik, which, while intriguing, are difficult to evaluate (Chethik 2006; cf. North 2007). Moreover, other research suggests that for all the benefits of peer marriage, more egalitarian couples are more likely to have unsatisfactory sex lives and experience a lack of passion due to habituation, and these differences are not explained by a shortage of time (Schwartz1995). While couples in more traditional marriages may experience a range of marital difficulties, lower sexual interest is especially a problem among egalitarian couples (Schwartz 1995). More recent research finds that husbands' housework is positively linked to sexual frequency, but women’s own housework hours are even more strongly associated with sexual frequency, suggesting that greater egalitarianism may not be associated with higher sexual frequency (Gager and Yabiku 2010).

In this article, we begin by outlining two bodies of theory that offer competing predictions about the relationship between sexual frequency and the household division of labor among heterosexual married couples. We first discuss predictions derived from exchange theory, then predictions from an approach that stresses the gendered nature of sexual scripts, and finally turn to a range of important control variables derived from the existing literature that emphasizes constraints and opportunities for sex. One key innovation is that rather than consider all housework as identical, we separately examine men's and women's time spent in traditionally masculine and traditionally feminine tasks. We use nationally representative data to test whether and how sexual frequency is linked to the household division of labor. Our results do not support the notion that more egalitarian divisions of labor are associated with higher sexual frequency. Instead, we find that households in which men do more traditionally male labor and women do more traditionally female labor report higher sexual frequency. This suggests that among heterosexual couples, the relationship between housework and a couple's sex life is governed by a gendered set of sexual scripts.

Unbelievable. It's not an important thing in the scheme of all the things, but it's remarkable how they just... Make shit up to "prove" their wants. Women want men to pick up around the house more -- understandable enough. I can't argue with that.

But the technique on the left is not to just say "I want this," but "Science proves this." Nothing they say is just a Want or a Demand; it's always something that #Science wants.

So she just completely misrepresents a study as saying the exact opposite of what it said.

Actually, I doubt she even read this study; she read about it in the silly "Science" columns in Women's Magazines, which are all about Orgasms and Losing Weight.

But the point is that those science writers all misrepresented the story, and no one bothered to correct the record, Because It's Okay To Lie If You're Doing It For Feminism.

They simply brand their politics as "science" and then call people who disagree with their politics "Science Deniers."

posted by Ace at 01:26 PM

| Access Comments