Court Fines Man For Starving Wife Of Sex

A French court has woken up men worldwide to the realization that they run the risk of getting sanctioned by the law, if they fail to fulfil a key ingredient of their marital relationship with their women: that is, regularly have sex with their wives.

A judge in the south of France’s highest court in Aix-en-Provence has fined a 51-year old man, Jean Louis, 8,500 pounds,($14,000) in damages for failing to have ‘enough sex’, with his former wife, Monique, also 51 years old.

In giving the rare judgment, the court ruled that : “A sexual relationship between husband and wife is the expression of affection they have for each other, and in this case it was absent.

“By getting married, couples agree to sharing their life and this clearly implies they will have sex with each other.”

The court slammed the fine under article 215 of France’s civil code, which states that married couples must agree to a ‘shared communal life’.

The judge said this law implies that “sexual relations must form part of a marriage”.

The wife, in a report by London’s Daily Telegraph and the French newspaper, Le Parisien, , blamed the break-up of her 21-year old marriage on her husband’s lack of activity in the bedroom. The mother of two children from the marriage filed for divorce two years ago.

A judge in the Family Court Nice, southern France, then granted the divorce and ruled the husband named only as Jean-Louis B. was solely responsible for the split.

But the woman then took him back to court demanding 10,000 euros in compensation for “lack of sex over 21 years of marriage”.

The ex-husband claimed “tiredness and health problems” had prevented him from being more attentive between the sheets.

The French newspaper Le Parisien pointed out that the wife never did specify just what her sexual expectations were. The French national average is, according to the paper, twice a week. Did the wife expect more than that? Less? Neither the law nor marriage contracts offer any precision about what may qualify as acceptable or not which leaves any judge free to decide what they think is appropriate according to the circumstances.

The judgment has attracted a lot of commentaries on Facebook and on the internet. The big question according to the commentators is: just how much sex between couples is normal?

William Quincy Belle, an American blogger reminds us of a report eight years ago in Newsweek which laid out numbers describing the general state of affairs., according to some studies:

* Married couples say they have sex 68.5 times a year, or slightly more than once a week.

* 15 to 20 percent of couples have sex no more than 10 times a year, which is how the experts define sexless marriage.

The blogger now added in an article: I calculate that we only spend 1% of our time having sex. There are 8,760 hours in a year, that is, 24 hours times 365 days. If I go with an average of sex once a week and let’s say I assign 2 hours to the act of sex, I would get 104 hours, that is, 52 sessions times 2 hours. 104 divided by 8,760 works out to be 1.19%. The point of my article was to show that we spend 99% of the time not having sex so we better make sure that we are compatible with our partner. But, I do add the caveat that sex is so very important to a relationship that if that 1% sucks, it is going to spoil the other 99%.

One of the Nigerians, Bunmi Zoe Radioo, who reacted to Kayode Ogundamisi’s posting of the French verdict said on his Facebook page said: I think wives should get fines equally if they overdo it and fake tiredness always. I think women are more guilty in this area than men.

Ekundayo Awe responds: I love the ruling, while Aishatu Ella says that the $14,000 should fetch the woman a new vibrator, with extra for two-year supply of battery.