Survey Time: What Happened to Your Sex Life After Kids?

Feminist editor/writer/researchers Jennifer Baumgartner and Amy Richards want to know if/how your sex life changed after you had kids, and they’ve made a short little anonymous survey to ask you about it. But they left out a few key questions.

They say they modeled the questions after Betty Friedan’s 1957 survey of Smith college alumni that became The Feminine Mystique, which I take to mean that they’re hoping this will generate book-worthy material. Combining two such hotly debated topics as parenting and sex ought to generate something interesting, and being a bit of a survey junkie, I happily filled it out.

As usual, I suggest you do too—even, or especially, if you don’t think you have anything interesting to say. Don’t let them get just the stories from the extremes.

It won’t take long. In fact, they’ve tried to keep it short and sweet and easy, enough so that I have a few qualms about the usefulness of what they are going to get: I’m kind of surprised, for example, given Baumgartner’s writings on bisexuality, that the survey neglects to ask for the gender of your co-parent if you have one (even though it carefully uses the term co-parent). Nor does it ask whether your co-parent is also your sexual partner, for that matter—it clearly assumes yes, though there are myriad situations in which that isn’t the case.

In fact, I just looked at it again, and it never asks for the gender of the respondent either! Wow. I’m going to guess that one at least is just a mistake. In the meantime, I suggest you note down these factoids in one of the text boxes—keep a research intern employed.

Edited a few hours later to add: Come to think of it, it also doesn’t ask your age, and whether you had a c-section or vaginal birth if you gave birth.

And on the frequency of sex question the options are pretty weird: 0-3 times per week, 3-6 times per week, more than 6 per week and less than once per month. This leaves two options for people having no sex, one of which would lump them in with people having it 3 times per week, but no option for less than once/week but more than once/month. Who wrote this thing? I such well-known writers to have more exacting standards.

Photo CC Chris. Ed. W.

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Tags: Amy Richards, Axel-Lute, feminism, Jennifer Baumgartner, parenthood research, same-sex parents, sex, sex after kids, sex and parenthood, surveys