A new study by sociologists at the University of Washington in America claims that Married men and women who use traditional gender roles to determine who does the household chores have more frequent sexual relations.
Previous studies have shown that husbands who did more housework found their wives to be more receptive to their advances, but this did not take into account the type of chores that the husbands were doing.
This latest study, published in the American Sociological Review journal, shows that sexual frequency is related to the types of chores that each person is doing. In couples where the women does the cooking, cleaning and other chores traditionally allocated to women, whilst the man does all the DIY, maintenance, and paying the bills, the frequency is higher than for couples who share out the chores equally.
“The results show that gender still organizes quite a bit of everyday life in marriage,” said co-author Julie Brines, a UW associate professor of sociology. “In particular, it seems that the gender identities husbands and wives express through the chores they do also help structure sexual behavior.”
What this seems to mean is that denying traditional gender roles erodes people’s gender identity and therefore reduces libido.
