Is this a white knight/vanilla/feminist man-child?
I haven't read the article. Now I'm starting to be happy that I didn't.
He's got two main points.
The first is that the notion of "Men trade love for sex, women trade sex for love" is fundamentally flawed. First because men also desire to be loved and women also desire to have sex, so it's not a very useful distinction, and second because it's not a very good foundation for a healthy relationship: If you show love to a woman to get sex from her, she's basically a hooker who accepts a different kind of currency. The idea that sex is something a woman dislikes but reluctantly gives because her husband did something nice for her is completely silly, and is more rooted in sitcoms than anything else.
The second is that men can, in fact, control their sexual desires. There is this strange, horrific, twisted mentality out there that suggests that if a woman is not sufficiently pleasuring her husband, he is justified in looking for pleasure elsewhere. This is the same sort of mentality that says that women who dress immodestly are asking to be raped. It is categorically reprehensible, and it paints men as being some sort of unthinking beasts who are incapable of doing anything that doesn't satisfy their carnal desires.
No, if your wife does not have sex as often as you'd like, you are
not justified in turning to inappropriate contentography or other women, and no, a woman who wears revealing clothing is
not asking you to fantasize or objectify her. This fear of taking responsibility and willingness to blame your own lack of self-control and discipline on others is nothing more than immaturity.
To be honest, I kinda wonder if abstinence culture might have something to do with it. Christian teens are told "Just hold on until you're married, and then you can have all the sex you want!" and then get married and are shocked to discover that their libidos don't match up exactly with their spouses'. So they start thinking, "Hang on, I'm married, I'm entitled to sexual release!" and so when they don't get it from their wife, they either think it's okay to search for it elsewhere, or they become the abusive, Mark Driscoll type and start saying "You need to put out for me whenever I want it because I am a MAN and you need to submit to ME!" Just because you're married to someone, boys and girls, doesn't mean that coercing them to have sex isn't rape.
Lust and self-control are lifelong battles, and when you treat them as things that magically stop when you get married, you're gonna have a bad time.
