Susie Bright Points Out The Lame Sex Advice Given To Pregnant Ladies

Feminist sex-positive writer and mother Susie Bright blogged about her experiences with sex during and after pregnancy. She describes her memories of perusing manuals and books intended to prepare women for changes in their bodies and sex drive. However, what she encountered was a whole lot of nothing. Sex advice to moms-to-be was either non-existent or adhered to a pretty sugar-coated narrative of women’s bodies.

Susie observes:

All the manuals, from Dr. Spock to the latest yuppie know-it-all, followed an almost identical script: “Mommy and Daddy love each other very much…” Following this vein, the paragraphs on sexuality gave advice that was unexplicit, vague, and almost threatening in their avoidance of the nitty-gritty.

She writes that when getting to sex, the books were “steeped in a romance-novel notion of marriage,” with references to the dramatic changes in women’s sexual desire. She notes that “great emphasis” is given to husbands coping with “the burden” of pregnancy and how the condition modifies the sexual routine.

She points out that none of these books were authored in ye olden days either:

None of these books was written in the sixties. All of them glow with feminist and holistic approaches to mothering, supporting working moms, refuting the sexist prejudices against breast-feeding, and offering all manner of enlightened positive self-esteem for the mother-to-be.

Susie writes that she began to wonder if any of these experts understood anything about sexuality during pregnancy as, “The most definitive statement the books managed was: Sometimes she’s hot, sometimes she’s not.”

She concludes, “This wouldn’t be the first time that conventional medicine had nothing to contribute to an understanding of female sexuality.”

(photo: susiebright.blogs.com)