I haven't been able to reply because I've had something weird going on with my computer. After typing a few lines in the Mumsnet text box things have frozen and my keyboard has been all over the place. I seem to have sorted it by disabling AdBlocker, but let's see.
Bento, thank you – yes, you have summed up the kind of fundamental feminist issue of physical sex between the sexes that I was feeling my way towards. I'm approaching 60 and learned my feminism in the 70s and 80s from women who'd experienced the sexual revolution of the late 50s and 60s. Contraception, abortion, the end of the stranglehold of the church... They were really clear that although sexual liberation had been sold as equally liberating for men and women, it seemed mainly to have liberated men to feel entitled to expect sex from any woman once the danger of pregnancy or the requirement to marry was lifted.
No one explodes or suffers if they don't get to have sex with another human being. Perhaps the fact that I discovered the wonder of masturbation long before I did my O-levels has affected my attitude but really, there is no need for anyone, male or female, to feel sexually frustrated. I'm trying to negotiate my way mindfully through my declining libido and changing body, so this is a personal issue for me too. I'm lucky that my partner doesn't have an particularly strong sex drive and seems to feel that there are other elements of our relationship that matter more. Even so, we sometimes struggle over the issue.
I'm amazed by those who think that a contract entered into when you're young and randy and in love and under the influence of oxytoxin should stand, unchanged, for the next 30 or 40 years or the whole edifice fails. You have no idea, when you're younger, how radically different your body may feel and how your attitudes may change with experience. Particularly for women, with their roller-coaster hormonal patterns. I'm not advocating that people stay together forever whatever comes up – of course not.
I don't have any joined-up thinking about this. Does it go back into evolution, where men went out and impregnated as many women as they could and women were basically there to propagate the species and then die when they were no longer fertile? I see a society that's built still around the public orthodoxy that a man needs to have his sexual needs fulfilled or he'll go to the dark side – whether that's infidelity or using prostitutes or sexual crime or violence. A bit like these incel shooters, where people say if only he'd had a girlfriend... I know that one of the best things that can happen to a young male offender is a girlfriend who'll calm him down and have a child with him. But what about the young woman, eh? Is that her role in life? To have sex and babies and stop him reoffending?
I'm stunned at the glibness of the he should leave/ she should leave responses. There is so much more to a long relationship than sex. And it's possible that many ordinary women in their sixties would be left hard-up and facing their last decades in much-reduced circumstances. Not all women of that age (well of any age, let's be honest) will have had a decent career and a work-related pension and savings. Not all men have, either. The pressure on a woman to get on and have sex she doesn't want with her husband or face a future in which she may be left struggling to heat her home, let alone have a holiday, is immense. Two can live so much cheaper than one.
Lots of really interesting thoughts and responses here. They aren't necessarily making it easier for me to work out what I'm trying to get to, unfortunately. But I posted on this board because i was looking for feminist reflection, not the standard AIBU / Guardian response.