Celebrating Women’s “assertive, pleasure-centered, and selfish” sexuality

Feminist pundits have for many years encouraged women to resent their husbands and cultivate dreams of non-stop sexual bliss. It’s having an effect.

Janice Fiamengo, May 10, 2025

About four years ago, a friend alerted me to a popular YouTube channel by two moms called Cat and Nat Unfiltered. Cat and Nat gave impromptu “mom advice,” sharing “all of the dirty details of being mothers and wives.” Many of the videos were recorded in a car [see below], with the two friends gesticulating dramatically and cracking up at their own vulgarities and revelations.

Their talks were intended to be raw and relatable, frank outbursts about the never-ending demands of childcare and housework, and the husbands’ inability to understand (a few samples are here, here, and here).

In quite a few videos, they talked with smirks and guffaws about how unwelcome their husbands’ sexual overtures had become. On the occasions when Cat and Nat agreed to sex, what was uppermost in the women’s minds, they said, was getting it over with as quickly as possible. They also fantasized about being single and having casual sex. They didn’t necessarily want to leave their husbands—in fact, they didn’t want to—but they liked to imagine lives in which the husbands didn’t exist. These revelations did not detract from their self-presentation as heroic survivors of domestic life.

I’d never before seen such unabashed public proclamations of trivial marital discontent. Here were two women with abundant reason for gratitude: they had beautiful children, comfortable homes, husbands making enough money to support them, and preeminence as dazzling matriarchs. Yet the main point of their videos was the need to vent. They billed themselves as the anti-Facebook, with no pretense of domestic joy: on the contrary, they itemized every frustrating and deflating detail of family life, including knowing their husbands’ toilet schedules. The repeated motto was: dissatisfaction is normal, this is what every married woman experiences, don’t feel bad about being turned off by your husband.

Whether it would be offensive, or even simply humiliating, for their husbands to have the whole world knowing that their wives were reportedly repulsed by them didn’t seem to matter at all.

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When I told a friend about Cat and Nat’s open contempt, he chuckled sadly: “You can scroll through hours of TikTok videos and find dozens of women doing exactly that.” He sent me samples (including this recent viral video about a woman explaining why she considered divorce). The variety is impressive: some women make lists of things they won’t do for their husbands; some report on why they don’t want to be sexual with them ; some explain why they’re mad at their guys; some confess that they want to cheat (or have cheated).

What was once cause for anonymous or private confession, not for jubilant announcement, has become a veritable TikTok industry, with women clamoring to broadcast their resentment and infidelity.

The new normal is mirrored at the professional level, with a myriad of articles by psychotherapists and social workers on women’s domestic dissatisfaction. The point of the articles is rarely to help women overcome their negativity; and certainly not to criticize female attitudes and behaviors. It is mainly to affirm, and one can only assume that such affirmation is par for the course in counseling offices across North America as well.

Typical is Tonya Lester’s 2022 article in Psychology Today, “Is Marriage a Bad Deal for Women?” which blames men for women’s eagerness to initiate divorce, arguing that men are failing to put in the necessary marital work to keep their wives happy. Women are reportedly “tired of offering their husbands emotional support and care but getting none in return.” Lester, a licensed clinical social worker who has counseled many couples (ahem), observes the many women who have “come to believe that marriage is holding them back from living the life they want to live.”

Read the rest here . . .