For Married Men, More Housework May Mean Less Sex?

Credit: www.media.winnipegfreepress.com

No Sure Path from Kitchen to Bedroom.

If you're one of those husbands who thinks taking over some of your wife's household chores such as grocery shopping, cleaning and cooking will translate into having sex more often, maybe you should think again.

While there are studies which showed that husbands got more sex if they did more housework, implying that sex was in exchange for housework, those studies did not factor in what types of chores the husbands were doing.

A new study shows that sex isn’t a bargaining chip.  Instead, sex is linked to what types of chores each spouse completes.

Couples who follow traditional gender roles around the house – wives performing traditionally female household tasks; men doing yard work, paying bills and auto maintenance – reported greater sexual frequency.

The findings come from a national survey of about 4,500 heterosexual married U.S. couples participating in the National Survey of Families and Households.

Men and women reported having sex about five times, on average, in the month prior to the survey. But marriages in which the wife does all the traditionally female tasks  reported having had sex about 1.6 times more per month than those where the husband does all the traditionally female chores.

“The results show that gender still organizes quite a bit of everyday life in marriage,” said co-author Julie Brines, a UW associate professor of sociology. “In particular, it seems that the gender identities husbands and wives express through the chores they do also help structure sexual behavior.”

Husbands shouldn’t take these findings as justification for not cooking, cleaning, shopping or performing other traditionally female household tasks, warned lead author Sabino Kornrich. “Men who refuse to help around the house could increase conflict in their marriage and lower their wives’ marital satisfaction.”

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The above story is based on the January 29, 2013 news release by the University of Washington.

The study, published in the February issue of the journal American Sociological Review,

Kornrich S, Brines J, Leupp K. Egalitarianism, Housework, and Sexual Frequency in Marriage. Am Sociol Rev. 78(1) 26–50. DOI: 10.1177/0003122412472340

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