So, for a few years there, my wife kinda went nuts. I don’t mean she had psychiatric illness or a breakdown or something. In some ways, it was worse, because for so long, there was no cure and no effective therapy.

She got pregnant and decided to get into things like attachment parenting.

Now, I’m not knocking the attachment parenting concept—we ended up doing a modified version of it, with some more traditional parenting sprinkled in, and there’s a lot of good to it. But it meant that my wife, who had already mostly reared a son by a previous marriage in a more old-school way, was frequently on forums, and blogs, and shit online that were constantly bombarding her with the natural uber-involved mommy thing. This left me with a mix of pro-and-con feelings: Nursing our child for the first couple years or so…cool. Gentle parenting…mostly OK with that. Co-sleeping… well, nice to be connected with child more emotionally, but hell on the sex life. Cloth diapers…not so much in favor of that—in fact, never ever again. Unschooling…no fucking way. You get the idea.

My wife never went completely woo-woo and got totally “mommy mad.” You get a high-energy, stubborn girl like ours—currently six going on dictator—and someone like my wife will finally overcome the hormones, and the groupthink and all that, and start bringing some common sense into the mix, along with the newest new-agey stuff. Which is good, because some of the things she read to me from attachment parenting and mommy sites over the years—or that I read over her shoulder when giving her neck rubs during her web surfing—really didn’t seem good for the parents or the kids sometimes. Too much of anything, including liberal parenting policies, is a bad thing.

Also, I’m glad the people in these online venues didn’t totally steal my wife’s mind during her hormonally vulnerable time, because seeing and hearing some of the online rants by uber-mommies also made me feel really bad for the husbands of the women who drink the full-on stay-at-home-mommy-goddess-superwoman-Kool-Aid.

I’m not knocking stay-at-home moms. My wife did it the first couple years of our kid’s life. Many of my online friends are stay-at-home moms or dads. I myself, am a work-at-home dad with a mostly work-at-home wife. But I have to say that there are a large number of stay-at-home moms out there who seem to have some really screwed up attitudes about sex—most particularly a complete lack of realism about male sexuality (and often their own needs, too).

Let me note that I’m a sensitive guy. I love to please, and often to give without receiving. So, clearly, I don’t mind a woman who “gets over” a little bit on a guy. Who takes a bit more than she receives — as long as she doesn’t go too far. But as bad as overdoing the “women gets more” in the bed can be when taken to extremes, that’s NOT what the moms I’m complaining about are doing. The crazed version of the stay-at-home moms just take sex out of the equation entirely, a whole other sort of hell. I can understand wanting to scale back sex when you’re a busy parent (and attachment parenting makes you a busy and beleaguered parent indeed), but most certainly let’s not reject sexual connections in favor of parenting alone. Based on the things that some of these women would post on the mommy forums, I think their husbands would get more loving treatment at the hands of a viciously sadism-minded mistress with a full dungeon than from their current spouses.

One of the things I saw a lot of was women complaining that their male partners wanted to… *gasp*… have sex with them. They often saw this as a terrible imposition. How dare he want sex! Why, I’m “touched out” from spending all day with the kid (or kids) hanging off me! I breastfeed all day and co-sleep with my kids, and I just don’t have anything more to give!

OK, fair enough…maybe.

You’ve decided to be focused on your kids, and you don’t have any libido or energy for sex. Understandable.

Except, of course, for the ones who’ve apparently been denying their partners regular sex not just for a limited period of time, but for years upon years, because he’s some kind of second-class citizen in the family whose sole role is to make money to support the family and shut up. (Truly, some of the women who post on parenting forums and blogs, and the other women who back them up on their diatribes, are an amazingly scary kind of domineering shrew mixed, with equal parts 1970’s feminist and 1950’s mom…a combo I would previously have thought impossible. Many of them refuse to work any job other than being a mother, then they complain that the man doesn’t make enough money, and during all this, they give the man little or no say in how the children will be raised…plus, when he comes home exhausted from supporting his family, he can’t even get any nookie. But he’s still expected to do half the chores.)

So, these very same women, who have gone off the deep end and put their husbands in some emotional and metaphorical version of the “gimp box” from the movie Pulp Fiction, also seemed to get offended if the father of their children wants to jack off. The motto seems to be: If I’m not willing to give it to you, no one can, not even your dominant hand.

And dear God, pity the poor fool who has any porn on his smart phone or computer, and his keeper…I mean, woman…finds out.

Man, this is when the most cold-shouldered and mean-tempered moms on these forums would lose it.

So many posts my wife read to me with mixed horror and amusement, as one woman or another expressed burning indignation that the man she’s denied sex to, and overworked, and bossed around for months or years, has pictures or videos of nude women to which he presumably jacks off. Almost without fail, they expressed terrible feelings of violation, rejection and betrayal. They fretted over whether they should immediately kick him out or divorce him over the possession of porn, and other posters would rush to their defense online to echo the “he either needs to give up the porn or get out!” clarion call.

The mere fact that the man had porn was seen as a sign that he didn’t respect women, particularly the mother of his children. It was instantly assumed to be an all-consuming addiction that was keeping him away from real intimacy with his family (never mind that the woman is too “touched out” to even cuddle with him, much less fuck him, and that his family is probably fast asleep by the time he gets home—seems like a lot of these guys had to work overtime or multiple jobs to support the household). The use of porn and desire to pleasure himself was seen as some terrible, icky moral failing on the man’s part, and something that the woman was honor-bound to cure him of, punish him for or—apparently the gold standard—both.

Now, this ISN’T the world of ALL stay-at-home moms. I realize this. I’m not generalizing, but rather pointing out a very vocal sub-species that is scary as hell. Certainly, you’d see some other woman come in and perhaps defend the man’s position. But the sane ones, when they weren’t blocked or banned by forum admins, usually got shouted down by a huge chorus of voices among forum members, which makes me think that this scary subgroup of women, while not the majority, might be pretty large anyway. I recognize, of course, that in some types of forums, the more extreme people are drawn to it, and that might explain some of the overwhelming numbers.

But still, it was frightening how many of them I saw on those forums, and how quick they were to band together over the importance of family first, while ironically and hypocritically hurting a key member of the family—emasculating their men, and denying them really anything but shelter and food.

Now, we’re here at Eden Cafe, so chances are slim that any of those women are around reading this. Y’all who are reading me now are probably sexually aware enough to realize that both partners should be able to get their rocks off, either together or solo, as the situations warrant. Some of you may be against porn, and there are valid reasons to be against much of it, but I doubt very many of you are against sex and masturbation.

So, I guess this article is mostly for the benefit of entertainment. And venting on my part, on behalf of some oppressed members of my gender.

But on the off chance that a woman of the type I’ve mentioned happens along here and sees this, or plasters this article on a blog with an invitation to her peers to come make my life miserable for deriding them, let me say this:

Porn can be your friend. Masturbation, too. Ideally, both in combination.

And no, I don’t mean they’ll be your friend personally, because you’re probably too “touched out” to touch yourself. But if you fancy the idea of continuing to stay at home and have a stable income when you choose a job with no income (full-time at-home parenting), you might want to keep the guy in the house. If you aren’t going to take care of him, and he’s willing to take care of his own needs with some porn…well, I’d say that’s a lot better deal for you than him waking up, smelling the dead roses, and finding a woman other than you who realizes that family life includes the needs of all members of the family, and not just the mom and children.