What does the story of Ted and Marie signify?

My Serpentine Friend recently tripped across a book called Married Love by Marie Stopes. It was one of the earlier sex self help books. Stopes was a first wave feminist and her book is a good example of early "progressive" attitudes to sex.

Like an awful lot of early progressives and even a few current progressives, Stopes was also a fan of eugenics and a racist. I won't be going into that aspect much here but suffice to say, "progressive" movements have a propensity to become hate-driven.

What makes Stopes interesting to me is a tendency we continue to see in current feminism. She tends to blame unsuccessful relations between men and women on men. It's not that women never make choices that cause them to be unhappy but if we look at what she recommends for men and women we will see an significant difference.

Stopes lays down the law for men:

The supreme law for husbands is" Remember that each act of union must be tenderly wooed for and won, and that no union should ever take place unless the woman also desires it and is made physically read for it.

Yup, absolutely true in every word. As I read that, however, I wondered, Does Stopes have a supreme laws for wives? Sort of:

She may take it as an absolute rule, however, that unless the touch of a man's hand on hers, and the contact of his lips, are sweet and delicious to her, the man can never be a true husband.

Also true.

But did you catch the imbalance here? All the responsibility to activate her passion or to refrain if she isn't ready lies with the man. And, elsewhere in the book, Stopes explains that women are ready for sex less often than men and that a man should, therefore, restrain himself until those periods when she is excitable. For Stopes, the optimum period for women is the few days around the top of her cycle when she is ovulating. That is less novel a discovery now than it was when she first published but good stuff as far as it goes. Again, though, it's one sided.

And Stopes also admits something fascinating. Some times, at some particularly romantic or otherwise special occasions, it may happen that a woman becomes stimulated outside of these regular cycles. And there you can see what went wrong with the Marie and Ted of my little story. Because if certain associations can help a woman to become aroused and full of desire when she otherwise isn't driven to be, then it follows that she could consciously call these things to mind to arouse herself in premeditated way.

The point here is simple but probably needs to be spelled out anyway. If you can train yourself to desire less, then you can also train yourself to desire more. If men can learn to train themselves to control their desires to more closely correspond to those of women, so can women then train their desires to have them more often and so meet men halfway. Men didn't figure this out—women did. And once it became obvious to some women, other women were obliged to respond.

Consider Stopes' claims again and notice that what she is saying amounts to a generalization about women. From time to time you will hear some women use this generalization in an argumentative form: "This is what women are like, be a man and adjust to that." And that is very good advice in general. But so is the reverse, "This is what men are like, be a woman and adjust to that." And men don't have to get around very much before they will notice that some women have made that adjustment much more successfully than others.

And, as I've said before, the differences aren't subtle. There is a day, usually quite a ways into a relationship (because the first few months are always the same) when you find yourself quoting Samantha, "Ding, ding, ding, jackpot!"

And life is unfair. It's not just that some women will be better at this than others; some women will be much, much better at it than others.

Love the sexual revolution or hate it, one consequence is that women are now obliged to compete with other women in terms of sexual performance. That is what all the sexual signaling by young women we see now is really about. Why do so many young women seem to dress and act in a slutty way now? They do it because they want to signal that they are willing to put the effort into meeting men half way on the sexual desire spectrum. Like most of the human beings who have lived and like most human beings that ever will live, they want love.

Most of this signaling is pointless in much the same way that male posturing is pointless because, posture as much as you want, at some point you have to perform. That said, I think we can understand what is happening here charitably. Life is always a challenge and  today's young women have their challenges.

And whether the posturing is pointless or not, it rests on a  deeper truth. Realizing that being able to be aroused for sex more frequently would give them a competitive advantage over other women, some women began cultivate their sexual arousal. And almost every man will have sex over an extended period with at least one such woman in his life. No longer can women say what Stopes says in her book—that women are this way, so get used to it. And that changed everything.