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Finding a boyfriend (partner, special friend, whatever) whom you actually like involves a lot of hard work and some advanced algorthims a little serendipity. But what happens when your significant other isn’t in the mood to have sex with you? And it does happen, GQ’s Siobhan Rosen reports, even to women. In fact, Rosen explains, a man’s rebuff stings extra hard because we’ve been conditioned to believe that “all men are Wile E. Coyote-level schemers trying to get laid.” That makes modern woman the Road Runner of this metaphor, but she’s way slower, because these fuck-me boots render her immobile, and instead of saying “meep meep,” she tells you she’d like to have sex with you. And Wile E. doesn’t implode under the weight of his own gratitude? You can imagine what this does to the self-esteem.

No one likes rejection. But men have had millennia of sexual entitlement during which to invent the tools to brush it off, like porn and the concept of the “friendzone.” For women, every refusal shakes the rickety feminist scaffolding that allows us to vocalize our desire to have sex in the first place. “There are only so many times even the most brazen among us are going to get rejected before icily retreating into non-initiation mode forever,” Rosen writes. Worse, because we’re so accustomed to playing defense, we don’t exactly have the longest seduction playbook to get us out of sexless standoffs. (If we did, we probably wouldn’t have come up with stuff like vajazzling.) In the name of starting somewhere, the Cut scoured the news, past relationships, Kardashianships, and our collective memory of Sex and the City to provide a handful of Dos and Don’ts for getting your significant other to have sex with you.

DON’T go to work. According to the Cut’s informal survey, the No. 1 reason people are not having sex is work-related stress. Have you considered getting him fired recently?



DO work FOR him. Assuming an obsequious position within his professional orbit — be it devoted intern, captivated biographer, or dogged documentarian — is a time-tested way to get your work-obsessed man to have sex with you.

DO eat. If you collate these three lists of aphrodisiac foods, you’d be hard-pressed to get through a meal without consuming at least one. (Wine.)



DON’T forget to remind him he’s lactose intolerant. Or has Celiac disease. Or had a lot to eat already and should maybe slow down. (Why are men forever eating things that make them too sick to have sex with us?)

DO propose doing it somewhere illicit. Like the car or a roof. He may be nervous, but it’s working for lots of couples. Don’t take our word for it, it’s been all over the news lately.

DON’T demand oral sex at knife point. It did not work out well for this wife.



DO toss his Propecia. It has been shown to cause low libido and other sexual dysfunction. (So have antidepressants, of course, but that has much higher backlash potential.) You could fill the bottles with vitamins, or you could just disappear it. Maybe one of your pillhead friends stole it at his last party.

DON’T mention the Propecia. Insecurity is gender blind, and he can feel you looking at his receding hairline while you’re going at it.

DO install a sex swing. When Samantha met her soul mate on Sex and the City, the promise of a sex swing induced her to get a much-feared HIV test. Could it convince your partner to be your sex partner again? Maybe. Maybe the mere sight of it will scare him into having normal sex with you.

DON’T install your own sex swing. Unless you need an adorably farcical subplot on your family’s reality-television show. When Khloe Kardashian got in her swing it nearly pulled her ceiling down. And it’s hard to be sexy when you feel construction-incompetent.



DO casually note how long it’s been since you had sex. For the competitive couple, the mere suggestion that the you might be the more libidinous one will yield some creative overcompensation.

DON’T casually note how long it’s been since you had sex. Sorry. The Cut was divided on this one. Your passive-aggressive scolding will only increase his boner-killing feelings of inadequacy.

All right, break.