The women of Stellar Plains, N.J., stopped having sex in December, when a bitter wind blasted through their homes and under their bedsheets.
“All over that town,” Meg Wolitzer writes in her new novel, The Uncoupling, “you could hear the word ‘no,’” as women gave “their husbands or partners or boyfriends the long flat of the back like a door in the face.”
The sudden, unexplained bout of frigidity confounds both the men and the women, and syncs up mysteriously with the arrival of Fran Heller, a new high school drama teacher who’s chosen to put on Lysistrata. In Aristophanes’s comedy, the women of Greece refuse to have sex until the men end the Peloponnesian War.
Women have used “sex strikes” throughout history, most recently this February, when Belgian senator Marleen Temmerman playfully – and unsuccessfully – called on the spouses of politicians to “withhold sex” until that country picked a government. Ms. Temmerman, a gynecologist, got the idea from Kenyan women, who had organized a week-long sex strike in 2009 to protest political infighting. Three years earlier, the wives and girlfriends of gang members in Pereira, Colombia, held a “strike of crossed legs,” hoping to encourage their partners to turn in their guns.
Although she was fascinated with what actually went on in the homes of striking women, Ms. Wolitzer took a more apolitical approach in her (very funny) novel. Here, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are bit players: The real battles play out between couples once each woman goes mysteriously cold.
Ms. Wolitzer spoke with The Globe and Mail from New York.
Have you been following the sex strike that wasn’t in Belgium?
Yes, I have. Every time something like this happens in the world, 10 friends send it to me and say, “Look! Look!” It’s interesting. There seems to be something inherently sexist in the notion of a sex strike because it suggests that men are the ones who can’t live without sex, but women can. They’re really having trouble getting any movement in Belgium, and I don’t know that a sex strike is going to do it.
Unlike the sex strikes in Kenya and Colombia, the one in your book isn’t political or even conscious: All but one of the women are happy with their men.
Even though Lysistrata and the idea of a sex strike is the springboard of the book, it’s about the unconscious forces that always flow through us. Everything is a kind of spell: Falling in love is a spell and falling out of it is a spell. The book was written out of a wistfulness, hearing different women talk about how their relations to men had changed emotionally, sexually and physically. So much goes on in a nuanced way when changes happen in real life, when someone is ill and can’t sleep with their partner for a while, or when someone feels bad about their body and doesn’t want to, or when couples are apart or something has happened in a fight.
One husband will stop at nothing to restart his wife, including a kinky, “off-brand” board game and a clumsy, shared bath. You also mention the race for a pink Viagra and female arousal studies. They're all artifacts in the current anxiety around women’s desire.
Even though we live in a sex-saturated culture, I think the truth is that there’s this enormous continuum of libido, but people don’t tell the truth about sex. They take surveys in magazines, which I always take with a grain of salt, saying how much they exercise or that they eat salads all the time. What about the idea that sex has vicissitudes and is important at different points in life?
What about the men? As his sex life takes a nosedive, Robby gets a bit vicious, telling his wife she has “a pioneer’s hands.” He also stops shovelling the driveway, “separating himself from the house, the home.” Is that male payback?
People do payback to each other in all kinds of little ways that are so petty. It’s so hard to speak openly that we perform little, often unconscious but sometimes conscious gestures of hostility, like not shovelling the driveway. It’s painful to say, “Hey, you’re not sleeping with me. Are you not attracted to me any more?”
Regarding sexual longevity, one of the women asks the others, “How come men can go on and on forever, like little kids running through a field?” Do you think that’s the reality?
Hence, we get into the Viagra conversation. If the problem for men is more often mechanics, and for women more often desire – and that’s a very gross generalization – when the mechanics can be solved in that way, that’s the equivalent of being able to run through that field longer.
Fran Heller is the drama teacher who shakes things up in town. Her husband is not “on-site” – he works in Lansing, Mich., but the two talk every night. Fran believes domesticity dilutes things. Is she a model of marital success to you?
No one’s a model to me. Fran Heller stands in my mind for someone who feels she has the answer for how to live. Of course there is no one answer. Domesticity can change things. Fran’s found one way to do it: Not to live with your partner. Some of us actually like living with our partners. That Robert Louis Stevenson line – about how marriage is a long conversation – I’ve always really liked that because conversations have their ebbs and flows. They stop for a while but it doesn’t mean they stop forever.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
