Wicker man's home repairs draw women's praise online

Alexander Skarsgard's character in the movie Wicker announces he will fix the roof while having sex with Olivia Colman's Fisherwoman. The film opened in cinemas on October 30. Women online say the scene amounts to an instruction manual for men.

In the film, the Fisherwoman does not want to settle for a man in the village who cannot satisfy his wife, so she has one made. Human husbands become threatened by the Wicker man when their spouses grow jealous.

A Starling Bank study of more than 4,000 couples found 72% of women say they do the majority of household tasks. A 2022 study in the Archives of Sexual Behaviour journal found that women in relationships with men who used weaponised incompetence and failed to help with chores reported lower sexual desire.

Becky Crepsley-Fox, a psychosexual therapist, said the scene counts as dirty talk. "I'd absolutely count it as dirty talk, and for many women it can be genuinely fun to hear," she said. She added that the real turn-on is what sits underneath the words: every job mentioned is one less thing on her mind.

One person wrote: "This is not a film. This is an instruction manual for men." Another wrote: "Husband helped me clean all day Sunday. Bed broke Sunday night." A TikToker wrote: "It truly is that simple. We're looking for our third bed frame now."

Gillian Anderson's book Want collects sexual fantasies of women around the world. One Canadian woman wrote of wanting her husband to say he hired a cleaner, did the grocery shopping, changed the bed sheets, did the laundry, folded the laundry, or suggested a trip to the movies. A British woman wrote that her fantasy is to surrender control: "My God, sometimes I just want to surrender. My whole body, all of me, hand it over and let it be completely possessed by someone. No choices to be made."

Crepsley-Fox warned the approach only works when it is genuine. "If the hoovering comes with an expectation of sex as payment, it stops being care and becomes a transaction," she said. "The magic is in noticing what your partner needs and acting on it because you want her life to be easier, not because you're keeping score."

She added that she sees a pattern repeat in her practice: "Men come in believing the problem is the lack of sex, while women feel the problem is everything else."