In a recent trend piece in the New York Post, reporter Doree Lewak writes about the ostensibly growing phenomenon of parents going wild while their kids are off at summer camp. Lewak presents us with a series of micro-portraits of modern-day Madame Bovaries and Anna Kareninas, women who spend much of the year feeling shackled by the confines of family life and seize upon the rare opportunity to let their suppressed libidos free.
There’s Elle, who has “been in nonstop [party] mode” since her children left—brackets in the original—and says she plans on filling her seven-week break from parenting with “parties with pot, magic mushrooms, ecstasy and group sex.” There’s Melanie, who is excited about getting drunk but most looks forward to an “epic bash” in which “[t]he couple goes all out—with naked girls and midgets.” There’s the Upper East Side mom who’s “typically quite modest when her kids are around, but all that changes when they leave.” Over the summer, she says, “I’m literally going to put on my tightest dresses. I’ve never worn a bikini in front of them—I don’t want to be too exposed. Now I’ll be walking around naked,” she explained. Similarly, there’s Tara, who made an agreement with her husband that they will be naked whenever home. On their agenda are “regular ‘Playboy party’ dinners with their friends: The women don as little as possible and the men dress like Hugh Hefner.” There’s only one anecdote about a dad letting loose over the summer, and it’s about a “professional Wall Street guy” who got arrested for urinating in public and spent a weekend in jail.
The most obvious problem with this story is that its premise is dubious. Even if the subjects of the article are real people who aren’t exaggerating their exploits—a big if—Playboy parties for parents of small children aren’t exactly sweeping the nation. Less obvious, but more insidious, is the way this trend piece peddles retrograde ideas about family life. In Elle, Tara and Melanie’s lives, the transition to motherhood has a sharp before and after. As mothers, they act different, dress different, and subsume their needs and desires in order to adequately attend to others. Reach an extreme enough level of sexual repression, and you too might find yourself letting off steam at an epic bash populated with nude women and midgets.
Motherhood as an all-encompassing identity is an idea most often promoted by those yearning for what they’d call a “traditional” lifestyle, but it also has currency among more progressive circles. Take, for example, our insistence on asking working mothers how they manage, or the fact that women’s magazines are largely divided between titles for fabulous singles and titles for breeders, or how women with children are less likely to be hired or promoted than women without children. Women hear the message that motherhood can and should dramatically change them on surround sound.
But most women don’t repress their sexual selves when they take care of kids the way the Post article implies. The irony is that married people have more sex than singles, and the less tethered to an all-consuming, self-abnegating narrative motherhood a woman is, the more likely she is to be sexually satisfied. According to the latest research, which comes from Sharon Sassler at Cornell University, “contemporary couples who adhere to this more egalitarian division of labor are the only couples who have experienced an increase in sexual frequency compared to their counterparts of the past, whereas other groups—including those where the woman does the bulk of the housework—have experienced declines in sexual frequency.”
Now, a positive correlation between shared housework and sexual frequency has been disputed in recent years, as has the Sheryl Sandberg-endorsed notion that a man doing laundry is a turn-on. Personally speaking, I know few women who are put in the mood by the sight of their husband folding onesies. However, I know many who have enough energy for sex at the end of the day because their husbands folded the onesies. Sure, as some argue, “expressions of sexual difference create sexual desire,” but these expressions themselves are not mandated by biology. I can think of a wide variety of ways my peacock could display his feathers … and still help with the dishes.
Having children changes a person; it would be worrisome if it didn’t. But this all-in attitude that women are supposed to take when it comes to motherhood is also worrisome—and if the Post article is accurate, it’s leading some women to make pretty bad decisions.
