The ‘Chore’ of Having Sex to Try to Get Pregnant - Council on Contemporary Families
▻https://thesocietypages.org/ccf/2022/04/05/the-chore-of-having-sex-to-try-to-get-pregnant
There are three different types of work involved in sex for the purpose of pregnancy. The first is body work (Gimlin 2007). Women need to monitor their ovulation cycle, with many taking their temperature, using ovulation predictor kits, checking their cervix, and entering data into phone apps or spreadsheets. The second is cognitive labor (Daminger 2019). Once they determine when they are supposed to have sex, they must coordinate their schedules with their husbands to make sure that they are both available to have sex at the right time. The third is emotion work (Hochschild 1979). Because in many heterosexual couples there is the expectation that men should initiate sex, many women also perform desire to make their husbands amenable to having sex at the best time for conception.
To illustrate the experience, here are the words of one participant explaining what it was like to have timed intercourse:
…when I finally started ovulating again, it was very like, ‘Okay. Now here we go.’ Now everything’s chugging along and sex was like, ‘Come here Tiger, put a baby in me.’ And four, five, six, seven months go by and it’s no longer sexy, ‘Come here and put a baby in me.’ Now, it’s like, ‘I have egg white cervical mucus. I know you’re tired but we’re doing it tonight.’ That’s just not sexy.