Here at PC we take the future very seriously, and, in the knowledge that without sex there is no future, we take sex seriously too.  (In fact, we take sex.)  One poor deprived male has not been getting his self assessed fair share and thus recorded his partners excused over one month and tabulated them – below

A sad litany of excuses I’m sure, however the striking thing to me is the three “Yes“.  Is that enough to ensure our future?

Well, some people do not even tackle that question, instead they rail about the use of a spreadsheet to document the excuses.  Is this a proper use for your laptop they ask.  In fact Holly Baxter, writing in The Guardian,21 July 2014, suggests
“Creating a blowjob tally on your laptop feels like admitting that the once ferocious predator is now an easily startled animal of prey that needs coaxing out of its hiding place.”
In fact her whole article is worth a look, so here it is:

Does anybody owe anybody else sex? It’s a question that has been asked with strange regularity throughout history, one that a lot of people – in fact, the majority – used to answer in the affirmative. The idea that specifically a woman owed her partner regular sex once they were married meant that the euphemism “performing your wifely duties” became widespread, and remains well known to this day.

Despite that fact, I don’t anticipate a groundswell of sympathy for the man whose own complaints about his wife’s failure to perform her duties have gone viral. Incensed by her endless excuses in the marital bed, he apparently compiled a list of every reason she’d given him for not wanting sex that night (“I’m tired”, “I’m watching my show”, “I’m still a bit tender from yesterday”) replete with bitchy asides about how or why they didn’t ring true (“I feel sweaty and gross, I need a shower” had the note next to it “Didn’t shower until the morning.”) This document was apparently sent to his wife’s work email as she was about to depart from a business trip, with some accompanying text explaining that he wasn’t going to miss her while she was away (yes, I also find it hard to imagine why he wasn’t getting any.) And, of course, the wife in question subsequently uploaded the whole thing to Reddit, because what else does anyone do with something highly personal these days except display it prominently on an internet forum?

Now, usually there’s usually nothing hornier than a spreadsheet – apart from maybe a spreadsheet documenting your perceived inadequacies – but I get the feeling that this husband hasn’t secured himself a starry new sex life with this passive-aggressive move. His bizarre abuse of Microsoft Excel got a frosty media reception on most mainstream publications – except for one article on Thought Catalog, where James B Barnes wrote that “sex isn’t owed, but it is expected”, and failure to meet this expectation can justifiably be met with negative consequences.

I’ll have to respectfully disagree with Barnes here, because while sex is indeed a fair expectation in most marriages, so unfortunately is stress and hardship. Problems such as a partner’s declining sex drive should never be met with punishment. Nobody gleefully denies sex for kicks; instead, their libido diminishes because of workload or emotional issues, or a communicative breakdown in the marriage. I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the latter is the problem of the husband and wife whose troubles in the bedroom were spread across the global media this morning. Just a hunch.

Last year, Brad and Amy Feld wrote a book about spreadsheeting their sex life, and as far back as 2008 Charla Muller made headlines when she decided to schedule in sex every single day for a year as a birthday present to her husband. Despite the fact that these (slightly unorthodox) cases of sexual planning were discussed prominently in the media at the time, the idea that marital sex may have to incorporate any sort of organisation still feels uncomfortable, sometimes to the point of taboo, between couples. After all, the regimented management of one’s orgasms does seem deeply unsexy. For the first 30 or so years of our lives we are told that lust is an uncontrollable, spontaneous force which has to be fought if any of us are to get anything done. Creating a blowjob tally on your laptop feels like admitting that the once ferocious predator is now an easily startled animal of prey that needs coaxing out of its hiding place.

Facing up to the fact that sex is just another aspect of a relationship that needs work to remain healthy is surprisingly difficult. After all, this sort of work is rarely honestly portrayed in sitcoms or films, where characters’ sex lives are easy, regular and problem-free. But the fact of the matter is that these are common frustrations, experienced across age ranges – the couple at the centre of this latest controversy are only 26 years old, and they don’t have children. The husband in this instance could have used his energy to open a dialogue rather than create a spreadsheet. Instead, the people he’s caught the attention of are all the procrastinating online voyeurs like myself, and the one person who really matters in the situation has wandered off to Reddit, her loins still stubbornly refusing to be set aflame.