If you're one of
those husbands who thinks taking over some of your wife's household chores will
translate into having sex more often, maybe you should think again.
A new study suggests
the opposite may be true.
Married men who
spend more time doing what many consider traditionally feminine household tasks
-- such as grocery shopping, cleaning and cooking -- reported having less
frequent sex than do husbands who stick to more traditionally masculine jobs,
like gardening or home repair.
When it comes to
chores, equality between the sexes doesn't necessarily turn on either the man
or the woman, said study author Julie Brines, an associate professor in the
department of sociology at the University of Washington, in Seattle.
So it's not sexy to
watch your husband folding socks or unpacking the groceries? "While wives
tend to be more satisfied with the marriage [when there aren't issues about
housework], it doesn't translate to sex if the men help," Brines said.
"For women in traditional arrangements, the wives' sexual satisfaction is
greater. The wives are benefitting too."
In other words, even
though women may say they like having their husband help around the house, his
well-intentioned efforts may end up turning him into a helpmate rather than an
object of desire.
The researchers'
interest in the topic was sparked by media coverage of a report from the
Council on Contemporary Families in 2008, Brines explained. "The headline
was that men who did more housework got more sex," she said. "My
colleagues and I saw that and didn't see the evidence."
But Brines admitted
that such thinking is understandable. "From Grecian times, the women who
were unhappy with their men decided to withhold sex," she said, referring
to the Greek play Lysistrata. She said it would make perfect sense if
there was a sort of exchange of favors in marriage, and that if wives were
happier, sex lives would benefit.
"Our research
is counterintuitive," Brines said.
The study, published
in the February issue of the journal American Sociological Review,
tapped information on roughly 4,500 married U.S. couples who participated in
the National Survey of Families and Households.
The nationally
representative data, collected between 1992 and 1994, is considered the most
recent large-scale information measuring sexual frequency in married couples.
The average age of survey participants was 46 for the husbands and 44 for the
wives, and the marriages were all heterosexual.
Together, the
couples spent about 34 hours a week on traditionally female chores, plus an
additional 17 hours a week on tasks typically considered men's work. Husbands
did about one-fifth of so-called traditional female chores and a little more
than half of the male tasks, suggesting that wives helped out with the men's
chores more often than husbands took on the wives'.
The researchers
accounted for differences in self-reported happiness in the marriage, how
recently the couples were married, family structure, each spouse's time spent
in paid work, the wife's share of income, education and self-rated health,
among other factors.
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Men and women
reported having sex an average of about five times a month. For those couples
in which the wife does all the traditionally female housework, husbands and
wives reported having sex 1.6 times more a month than those where the husband
does a larger share of those chores.
Does the data still apply now, 20 years after the survey was done? Brines said
that although a lot has changed in marriage since the 1960s -- especially with
women increasingly taking on jobs outside the home and men having a greater
role in child rearing -- research shows relatively little change in household
assignment of tasks since the 1990s.
"I'm skeptical
that the relationship between housework and sex changed a lot because housework
responsibilities haven't changed much," she said.
For her part, Markie
Blumer, an assistant professor in the marriage and family therapy program at
the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said the age of the data is a big weakness
in the study. "The economic crash definitely changed a lot of the
household dynamics," she said, adding that many of those who became
unemployed were men who started doing most of the housework.
Lead study author
Sabino Kornrich said it's possible that when both spouses work outside the
home, sheer fatigue could reduce the frequency of sex.
"I suspect that
in cases where people are too tired to do any chores, they just don't have
sex," said Kornrich, a researcher at the Juan March Institute in Madrid,
Spain. "Our research and earlier studies find that couples who do more
housework overall have more sex, suggesting that those who have more energy to
do housework also have more energy for sex."
Kornrich added that
although same-sex couples were not the focus of this study, research suggests
that the division of household labor among gay, lesbian and cohabitating
couples is influenced by gender. "But differences remain in how these
couples divide household labor compared to heterosexual couples, so we cannot
say from our results," he noted.
Brines suggested married couples consider having direct conversations or
negotiations about the division of household labor and about their sex lives.
"Put it up for renegotiation at any time," she said. "If you
want a different arrangement, talk about it rather than letting inertia take
hold."