Pleasure Disparity by Hodgepodge

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Pleasure Disparity

In the wake of #MeToo, countless brave women have come forward with personal accounts of sexual assault and harassment. The details of their stories vary, but a pleasure imbalance ties their stories together Men leave satisfied while women leave dissatisfied, objectified, uncomfortable, hurt, or silenced. This publication investigates the roots of this pleasure disparity by examining the state of sexual education, the socialization of boys and girls, and the accepted expectation that women might endure discomfort both in sexual encounters and in society as a whole.

Discursive Silences

â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Girls & Sexâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;

The Female Price of Male Pleasure

pleasure disparity

vol . 16 , no . 3 , 24 0 – 2 5 4 va n i ta su n da r a m

+ h e l e n sau n t son

In this paper, we present an analysis of the most recent Sex and Relationships Education (sre) guidance produced by the Department for Education (dfe) for England, focusing specifically on discursive silences around notions of ‘pleasure’. How, for example, do we know that discursive silences around ‘pleasure’, if they exist, impact young people’s understandings about sex or relationships?

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Using critical linguistic and qualitative analysis to explore the continued absence of pleasure in sex and relationships education in England

s e x e d u c at i o n

Discursive Silences

2 016

Pleasure and/in SRE The notion that pleasure should be addressed in sre is no longer novel in the field of sexuality studies. The historical ‘missing discourse’ (Fine 1988) of pleasure in sre has been noted by several scholars (e.g. Allen 2011; Fine 1988; Fine and Mcclelland 2006). Lamb (1997) has argued that the absence of pleasure in teaching about sex and its positioning as dangerous or risky is particularly problematic for women. Young women are taught to see themselves as potential victims and as sexual objects, rather than as sexual subjects who have a right to desire and seek pleasure on an equal footing with men. Discussions of ‘empowerment’ of young people in relation to ‘healthy’ sexual decision-making are often vague and rarely entail critical consciousness-raising that encourage moments of resistance to dominant gender and sexual norms (Spencer, Maxwell, and Aggleton 2008). Lamb also notes that discussions of pleasure in relation to boys have become simplistically focused on genital stimulation, with little recognition of the ‘full-bodied pleasure’ that might derive from hugging, caressing or even nurturing one’s own body. The dual construction of women as objects of sexual pleasure and men as recipients and enactors of sexual pleasure can have important implications for young people’s understandings of sexual choices, rights, consent, sexualised harassment and violence. Thus, the absence of pleasure in sre may be problematic for young men, as well as young women.

discursive silences

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Sex as ‘pleasure’ (for boys) In the interviews, while the discursive construction of sex as risky was something that the young women perceived in relation to themselves, they perceived sex as less risky and as being dealt with more frequently in terms of pleasure for their male peers. This was mostly frequently exemplified by discussions about erections and male masturbation in (and outside) the sre classroom. Gemma: I’m pretty sure...remember we had that Boy Talk and then we had Girl Talk but we never watched Girl Talk because we ran out of time so we just watched Boy Talk and I remember they said like masturbating... Lara: Yeah, but [...] especially female masturbation like that’s not ... we don’t learn about it. I mean we know about sex and we learn about first kisses but there’s like an in between and stuff. Gemma: I think if we were taught about masturbation it would be just we’d learn about just guys’ masturbation and I think... Lara: I think we should learn about female. Because that’s like an important bit of people’s lives and stuff and it’s part of puberty. The link between erections and pleasure, and the conflation of male sexual experience with pleasure, was further emphasised by the public 6

discursive silences

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conversations their male peers engaged in about masturbation and pornography. one participant recalled a discussion in school in which her male peers were recounting with pride when they had experienced their first erection and the frequency of their masturbation. The notion that ‘sex as pleasure’ was for boys, and was further emphasised by the use of references to female masturbation as a humiliation technique by boys. While their male peers felt comfortable to talk openly about sexual activity as pleasurable, the notion of young women being interested in sexual pleasure (through masturbation, as an example) was regarded as so inappropriate as to be used as an insult or bullying tactic. In the excerpt above, none of the girls refer to female masturbation as being about pleasure; rather it is referred to as ‘an in between’ and as ‘part of puberty’. This gendered conceptualisation of sex and pleasure was further reinforced by the juxtaposition of ‘periods’ and ‘erections’ in sre lessons. All participants made references to being taught about these topics alongside each other, with references to their relevance for reproduction, but with sexual pleasure being an inevitable outcome of discussions about erections. The idea that sex is about pleasure for boys was further reinforced by the lack of responsibility accorded to boys in relation to pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections or sexual violence. A key issue to emerge from the discussions was that the onus appeared to be entirely on girls themselves to protect themselves

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from unwanted pregnancy, from the (negative) consequences of unsafe sexual activity, and from sexual assault and rape. Boys, on the other hand, were not explicitly taught about the consequences of unwanted parenthood, respect and equality in sexual decision-making and issues around sexual harassment and bullying and sexual consent. Indeed, participants all agreed that there was silence around issues of partner violence, sexual assault and rape within sre. The notion that boys should be taught about rape and accorded some responsibility in preventing rape from happening was mentioned over the course of all three focus group discussions and this resonates with findings from Sundaramâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s recent work (2014a, 2014b). sre could be improved by teaching boys not to engage in sexually harassing behaviours or rape, as well as by teaching girls how to protect and defend themselves from potential assault. Lamb (1997) has similarly noted that many feminist (and other) initiatives have been undertaken to teach women not to be treated as sexual objects or to be victimised, but too little effort has been given to raising boys not to treat others as sexual objects or to sexually victimise others. Gemma: It is the guys essentially raping the girls, so they should be taught not to do it. Because, if youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re just telling the girls how to protect themselves...you should like kill it from where it starts.

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Lara:

Vicky:

Exactly, it’s the guy that gets the girl pregnant; it’s the guy that rapes the girl. It shouldn’t be the girl that has to deal with the [overspeaking]. The ways of reducing risk and minimising harm in risky situations.

Absence of pleasure (for girls) Discursive silence around pleasure for women was reinforced by the focus on their ‘risky’ bodies and their responsibility for avoiding pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections and rape. Sex for women was presented as ‘scary’ and negative, and participants in this study explicitly noted the lack of curricular space given to learning about pleasure for women. The young women in this study also suggested that a gendered doublestandard existed in relation to teaching about pleasure. They intimated that while they were taught about erections and male orgasms, they were given no information about the equivalent for girls. This has implications not only for the discursive construction of male sexuality as substantively different from female sexuality (more active, seeking pleasure), but also for young women’s knowledge about their own bodies. As Gemma asked, ‘What is the female equivalent of an erection? Is there one?’. Young women’s capacity for negotiating independent, informed and safe sexual and relationship choices surely depends on their access to knowledge about their own bodies, sexual desires and sexual rights.

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While fears have circulated about sre functioning to increase and hasten sexual activity among young people, little evidence exists to support these concerns. Indeed, comparative European research suggests that there is no correlation between early and comprehensive sexuality education and age of first sexual intercourse or promiscuity (Parker, Wellings, and Lazarus 2009). Furthermore, the young women wanted to be informed about how to have ‘good’ sex (pleasurable, safe and respectful) and to make safe and positive choices rather than to have sex at a young age. current dfe guidance on sre is characterised by a non-recognition of childhood sexuality, an emphasis on ‘safe’ or delayed sex, a stress on the risks of having sex, and efforts not to ‘promote’ (homo)sexuality. While there is an increased concern with educating young people to make healthy choices in relation to sex, these ‘choices’ rarely encompass resistance to dominant gender norms governing sexual and relationships behaviours (Spencer et al. 2008).

Conclusion In our view, young people (and in this analysis, young women in particular) need access to a discourse of desire and pleasure (termed ‘discourse of erotics’ by Allen 2011) in order that they can articulate clearly and experience their own desires. The absence of such discourses in current education provision reinforces gendered norms for appropriate feminine behaviour, thus privileging a particular sexual subjectivity

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for young women. Furthermore, restrictive and limiting definitions of male pleasure have consequences for the way in which young men negotiate, identify and experience pleasure. A crucial aspect of gender and sexualities equality encompasses a troubling of normative discourses around male pleasure and sexuality also. We recognise that there is not a simplistic link between sexual pleasure for young women and men and empowerment. However, it is crucial that we understand how young women (and men) are taught about sexual agency and the implications of this for their (heteronormative) understandings of acceptable desires, identities and behaviours.

discursive silences

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n pr

– f r e sh a i r

‘Girls & Sex’ and the Importance of Talking to Young Women About Pleasure

t e r ry gros s

m a rc y 29, 2016

This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross. The new book “Girls And Sex” by my guest Peggy Orenstein opens with her confession that a few years ago, when she realized that her daughter was headed toward adolescence, it put her in a bit of a panic because she had heard so much about how girls were treated in the so-called hook-up culture. So she began interviewing girls about their attitudes, expectations and early experiences with the full range of physical intimacy. She spoke with more than 70 young women between the ages of 15 and 20. She’s been chronicling the lives of girls for over 25 years. Her book “Cinderella Ate My Daughter” was about the impact of what she described as the princess-industrial complex that marketed the princess image to young girls. Her new book “Girls And Sex” is in part about how pop culture and pornography affect the sexual expectations that girls put on themselves and that boys project on them.

TERRY GROSS: Peggy Orenstein, welcome back to FRESH AIR. PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Thank you for having me back. So if the princess was the pop-culture symbol that you were concerned about when your daughter was very young, what would you say is the pop-culture symbol now that concerns you now that your daughter is reaching her teens? And are there any particular pop stars or celebrities that you’re concerned are offering an image that girls are trying to emulate and maybe it’s not a great idea? You know, there are great pop stars and there are pop stars that I have concerns about. And one of the kind of fun things about doing the reporting with this book was arguing back and forth with the girls about whether the kind of image of hot that was being sold to them was transgressive or whether it was liberating. And I guess, you know, right now I’d say the person who embodies that and who drives the older generation that I guess I’m part of—crazy—is Kim Kardashian. And it was really interesting to me to watch the recent release she did on International Women’s Day of her nude selfies. I don’t know if you paid attention to that. But what was interesting to me was that there was this argument over whether Kim was a feminist or Kim was a slut. And I kept watching that and thinking, you know, why are those the only two options? And she would talk

girls and sex

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girls and sex

pleasure disparity

about—in her defense she would say, I’m proud of my body and I’m expressing my sexuality. And those two lines were lines that I heard from girls a lot. And I was really taken by them because I kept thinking—you know, when a girl would show me a picture of herself dressed in the crop top and the—I started calling it the sorority girl uniform, the crop top and the little skirt and the high heels—and she would say, I’m proud of my body.

Usually the opposite of a negative is a positive. But when you’re talking about girls and sex, the opposite of slut is prude, both of which are negative. And then a few minutes later she would say but if she gained a few pounds she would no longer want to dress like that because she’d be afraid that if she went to a party that some boys would called her what she said was, you know, the fat girl. And I started thinking, well, proud of your body but who gets to be proud of which body under what circumstances? And how liberating is it if humiliation lurks right around the corner? And that idea of hot, that idea that we our our bodies and that how our bodies look to other people is more important than how they feel to ourselves is something that an earlier generation might have protested against. But today’s generation is sold that as a form of personal empowerment and confidence. But because it’s so disconnected from actual feeling within their body, I found that often

for girls the confidence came off with their clothes. Oh, that’s interesting, especially since they’re in a situation where they’re having probably a lot more sex at a younger age than previous generations of girls. Well, yes and no. If you’re talking about intercourse, kids are not having intercourse at a younger age. And they’re not having more intercourse than they used to. They are engaging in other forms of sexual behavior younger and more often. And one of the things that I became really clear on was that we have to broaden our definition of sex because by ignoring and denying these other forms of sexual behavior that kids are engaging in, we are opening the door to a lot of risky behavior and we’re opening the door to a lot of disrespect. So when I would talk to girls for instance about oral sex, that was something that they were doing from a pretty young age and it tended to go one way. And I got so sort of frustrated by hearing about that—and they did it for a lot of reasons. But I started saying, look, what if every time you were with the guy he told you to go get him a glass of water from the kitchen? And he never offered to get you a glass of water. Or if he did he would say, (sighing) you want me to get you a glass of water? I mean, you would never stand for it. And girls, they would bust out laughing when I said it, and they’d say, oh, I never thought about it that way. And, you know,

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I thought, well, maybe you should if you think that being asked repeatedly to give somebody a glass of water without reciprocation is less insulting than being asked to perform a sexual act over and over. So is that form of sex? Is oral sex not considered to be sex? No, it’s considered to be less intimate than intercourse. And something that girls say repeatedly to me—they would say it’s no big deal. And there’s an argument that some of the girls have in the book about exactly what it is—you know, is it sex? Is it not sex? Is it no big deal? Well, it’s not not a big deal. But it’s more of a big deal than kissing. But it was something that they felt that boys expected, that they could do to not have to do something else. It was a way that they felt— interestingly they would talk about feeling more in control than if it was reciprocal because it was partly that boys weren’t interested in reciprocity and it was partly that girls didn’t want them to reciprocate. Well, and probably also, though, girls kind of have the confidence they’re not going to get pregnant. Yes, and it was—yes, it was a way to not get pregnant. But that was pretty far down on their list honestly. And the other thing that they would say—although this, too, was pretty far down on the list—was that they felt it was safer sex, which

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is true and not true because the rates of STDs have actually shot up among teenagers even though the rates of intercourse have not because they think that oral sex is safer sex, and things like gonorrhea are spreading much more quickly. So you write about, you know, hooking up and what that means today. So just that everybody’s on the same page, what do you mean when you use that expression? (Laughter) That’s one of the things I had to constantly say to girls. They’d say, I hooked up with somebody. I’d say, which means? Which means? Because it can mean anything really. It can mean kissing. It can mean intercourse. It can mean any other form of, you know, sexual interplay. It really is a non-phrase. But what the hookup culture means—I mean, kids did not invent casual sex— right? But what has changed is the idea that casual sex is the pathway to a relationship, that sex is a precursor rather than a function of intimacy and affection. You write that on the college campuses you visited hooking up was the ticket to a social life. Yeah, pretty much if you didn’t want to stay home with microwave popcorn calling your parents, especially for freshmen and sophomores, that was kind of what they did. They went out. They got drunk. They hooked up.

girls and sex

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I feel the need to say—before we go any further— you interviewed a lot of girls for this book. What kind of demographic do they fit into? Like, who are we talking about when we talk about the girls who you spoke with? Well, the main stories I tell in the book span a pretty broad rage. There are girls that are African-American. They’re Asian-American. They’re Latinos. They’re white. They’re Arab-American. They’re gay. They’re straight. All of the girls that I interviewed were educated. And they were all mostly middle-class. And that was because I really wanted to talk to girls who had opportunity, who were the real beneficiaries of the feminist movement because if even those girls who were, you know, leaning in in the public realm who had this voice and could speak politically and could speak out in class and had ambitions—if even they were toppling in their personal lives then I felt that we couldn’t deny that there was a problem. Since we’re talking about how there are forms of sex other than intercourse that a lot of teenage girls, including young teenage girls, are having now and they’re, you know, relatively nonchalant about it, what is the symbolic significance of losing one’s virginity now according to the girls who you interviewed for the book? You know, it was still a big deal. And it kind of surprised me in a way that it was such a milestone because I thought, geez, you know, you’ve been

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sexually active for years. And it’s not that I don’t think intercourse is a big deal but it’s not the only big deal. And as the line between innocence and experience for young women, it’s a problem. You know, it’s not going to be the thing that feels the best to them certainly. And I think that so much of what I was looking at, whether we were talking about, you know, prioritizing intercourse or nonreciprocal sexual acts—all of it kept coming back to this idea that we are completely silent around girls’ sexual entitlement and girls’ pleasure. And one of the things that I really took away from this research is the absolute importance of not just talking about them as victims or not just talking about them as these new aggressors but really surfacing these ideas of talking clearly and honestly to girls about their own desires and their own pleasures. And we still just really don’t do that. So, you know, when my own daughter was little I remember reading that parents don’t tend to name their infant baby’s genitals if their girls. You know, for boys they’ll say, here’s your nose, here’s your shoulders, here’s your waist, you know, here’s your peepee—whatever. But with girls there’s like this sort of blank space that’s right from navel to knees. And that—you know, not naming something makes it quite literally unspeakable. And then they go into puberty education class. And girls have periods and unwanted pregnancy. And you see only the inside anatomy, that—you know, that thing that looks like a steer kind of, a steer head, with the ovaries and everything. And then it grays out between the legs. So we never talk about the vulva. We never talk about the clitoris.

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Very few girls explore. There is no self-knowledge. And then they go into sexual experiences and we expect them to be able to have some sense of entitlement, some sense of knowledge, to be able to assert themselves, to have some sense of equality. And it’s just not realistic that that’s going to happen. If you’re just joining us, my guest is Peggy Orenstein. Her new book is called “Girls And Sex.” She’s been writing about girls for a couple of decades. Let’s take a short break then we’ll talk some more. This is FRESH AIR. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) I want to get back to the question of losing virginity. The impression I got from your book is that a lot of girls told you that they wanted to get it over with, and they wanted to get it over with before college so that they wouldn’t feel—what, disadvantaged?—when they got to college, they wouldn’t feel like... ...Prudes. They wouldn’t feel like prudes. Yeah. Yeah. What were their concerns about that? Why was there almost self-imposed pressure to make sure you’d gotten that done before college?

girls and sex

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girls and sex

pleasure disparity

Well, it just, you know, would—you would be kind of—it would seem like you were unappealing if you—I mean, what’s interesting—one girl said to me, you know, usually the opposite of a negative is a positive. But when you’re talking about girls and sex, the opposite of slut is prude, both of which are negative. So what are you supposed to do? So they’re always trying to walk this line where they’re not considered slutty, but they’re not considered too prude. And, you know, it’s an ever-shifting kind of dynamic. So part of that was getting rid of virginity, which often was something that they did drunk and not necessarily with somebody they cared that much about.

I think a girl loses her virginity when she has her first orgasm with a partner. And, you know, you really have to ask, like, is that really experience, you know? I mean, is the person who rushes towards intercourse wasted getting more experience than the person who spends three hours making out with a partner sober and exploring ideas about sexual tension and pleasure and what feels good, you know? I mean, we have this weird idea—and I think that our emphasis on virginity right now is not doing girls any favors. And of course, it also completely

disregards gay girls. And one of the things that was really great was, in talking to a gay girl, I asked her if—you know, when did you think that you had lost your virginity? And she said well, you know, I really have thought a lot about that, and I’m not really sure. And she gave a few different answers, and then she said, you know what I think? I think a girl loses her virginity when she has her first orgasm with a partner. And it completely knocked me out. You know, I thought wow. I know we’re not going to dismantle (laughter) the idea of virginity or—but what if we could broaden it to think that there’s multiple virginities? And what if that was one of them? That would totally shift our ideas of how we thought about girls and boys and sex. Some of the girls you spoke to were lesbians. And some of them figured that out while they were in high school, some of them knew before that. So if you take gender inequality out of the equation as you do when you have a same-sex couple, what were some of the shifts in, say, you know, pleasure and reciprocity in a sexual relationship? There was a big shift. So one of the things research shows about college-age women and college-age men is that women are more likely to use their partner’s pleasure as a yardstick of their own satisfaction. So they’ll say he was satisfied, so I’m satisfied, whereas men are more likely—not all men, but men are more likely to use their own satisfaction as a measure of their satisfaction.

girls and sex

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girls and sex

pleasure disparity

That does not change when girls go into relationships with other girls. They’re still very concerned (laughter) about their partner’s pleasure, so no surprise—girls are much more likely to have orgasms when they’re in same-sex relationships or same-sex encounters. And what they would say to me were things like—that they felt they could go off the script. And once they got to go off that script of what everybody was telling them—what the culture was telling them about what sex was supposed to be like, they were freer to create their own experience that felt good to them.

women are more likely to use their partner’s pleasure as a yardstick of their own satisfaction. And I think that that’s something—you know, whether a person has a same-sex encounter or never has a same-sex encounter, it’s something that that can teach the rest of us. Let’s talk about how—alcohol and how alcohol is complicating sexual relationships for teenagers. There’s so much drinking now in high school and in college. And what’s some of the relationships you found between drinking and sex for teenagers and how that loss of inhibition when you drink affects the frequency of sex or the quality of sex?

Right. Well, hookup culture particularly is not— you know, it’s not just lubricated by alcohol anymore. It is completely dependent on it. And one sociologist told me that alcohol was what created this compulsory carelessness, so that it was a way to signal that the sex that they were having was meaningless. And it was even—I mean, alcohol—it was almost like it had replaced mutual attraction as kind of a reason in and of itself to have sex. So it was a way to not care. It was a way to say we’re just doing this for one night. And what was tricky was that both the thing that is held up for college students in particular, but high school students, too, as fun—which is getting drunk and hooking up— also facilitated assault because alcohol is really the number one date drug. And although we talk a lot about girls drinking and reducing girls drinking—and I think it’s very important to talk to girls about the particular effects of alcohol on their bodies because drink for drink, we get drunker faster than boys do—we can’t forget to talk about the impact of alcohol on boys because we know that alcohol, you know, at best loosens inhibitions. It reduces a person’s ability to read social cues. It gives young men who might not otherwise have it—courage is probably the wrong word, but the courage, I guess, to commit an assault or to ignore no and tend to be more aggressive when they do. And alcohol also makes boys less likely to step in

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as bystanders when they see something occurring than they would be if they were sober. So we really have to address both sides of this equation if we want to reduce assault. Well, you know, you raise the question—is it blaming the victim, is it sexist to tell girls not to drink because they’re more likely to be taken advantage of if they’re drunk? Yeah, and what girls say is don’t tell us not to drink, tell rapists not to rape. And I totally get that. And I would also, as the mother of a daughter, which I am, be really clear with my daughter about, you know, that every drink you take reduces your power, reduces your judgment. And sometimes you want that, and sometimes you don’t. And that’s true with boys, too. So I think it’s really important not to just—I mean, you could take away alcohol, you know, not allow girls to ever drink again. You could wrap them in burlap. You could stick them in their homes and not let them go outside, and there would still be assault. And, you know—plus, we would live in Afghanistan. My guest is Peggy Orenstein. Her new book is called “Girls And Sex.” After we take a short break, we’ll talk about mother-daughter conversations about sex, and Sarah Hepola, the author of “Blackout: Remembering The Things I Drank To Forget,” will tell us about her big social media

girls and sex

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mistake. I’m Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Your book opens after the introduction with clothing and school. And there’s a scene where the dean of a high school is telling the girl students not to dress in short shorts and tank tops or cropped tops and that they had to dress with more self-respect and wear clothes that their grandmothers would be comfortable with... Right. ...When it comes to dressing for school. And you were talking to a girl—a girl’s telling you this story. You weren’t there when it happened. She’s telling you the story. And she’s telling you about how she stood up in the auditorium and objected to what the dean said. What were her grounds for objection? Yeah, so that’s Camilla (ph), and she stood up and she—because she had learned in this very school system—this was a very liberal school system—to be an upstander. So she went up in front of the whole auditorium and said, I’m a 12th-grader, and I think what you just said is not OK and it’s extremely sexist and it’s promoting rape culture and if I want to wear a tank top and shorts because it’s hot, I should be able to do that. And that has, you know, no correlation with how much respect I hold for myself, and you’re just blaming

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the victim. Everybody cheered in the auditorium, and then she, you know, dropped the mic and she headed back to her seat. And he said, thank you, Camilla, I totally agree, but there’s a time and a place for that kind of clothing. And she was so furious because she said, look, it doesn’t matter what I wear to school. I’m going to get cat-called no matter what. It doesn’t matter what I wear. When I get up to sharpen a pencil, I’m going to get a comment on my butt. And, you know, I cannot help my body type. This is who I am, and you don’t see boys having to deal with this. Boys aren’t walking down the hall with girls going, hey, boy, nice calves, you know? This is something—she said it’s distracting to me to be cat-called. That really affected me, and I thought, you know, we have to teach boys that it is not their right to say things about girls’ bodies, to say things about girls’ clothing, it is not their right to touch girls. And if we don’t start teaching them at that level, how can we expect them not to feel entitlement, you know, down the road at something more extreme? So I don’t mean to sound prudish here, but at the same time, there’s a certain type of clothing that is designed to be provocative. Like, that’s the point of it. Yes. Like, if you want to stay cool in hot weather, you could just wear a sleeveless shirt. It doesn’t have to show a lot of cleavage, it doesn’t have to show your naval with a piercing on it.

girls and sex

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girls and sex

pleasure disparity

We have to teach boys that it is not their right to say things about girls’ bodies, to say things about girls’ clothing, it is not their right to touch girls. And if we don’t start teaching them at that level, how can we expect them not to feel entitlement down the road at something more extreme?

Right, I agree. And that’s why you have to ask, you know, what is it that girls are being sold and why are they being sold this? So it’s a kind of— it’s complicated and it’s both sides. So she, for instance, went to school one day, she told me just right before we spoke, wearing a bustier. And she was thinking, oh, I look hot today. I’m going to have a great day. Which right there I thought, you know, well, why is that your measure of a great day? And then she goes into school and she realizes, uh-oh, everybody’s looking at me and everybody’s cat-calling—although she changed it. She was talking about herself in the first person and suddenly she shifted and said everybody’s looking at you, everybody’s making comments. And I thought, isn’t that interesting that when she gets to that objectified point, she starts seeing herself from the outside too. I actually started thinking about dress codes because my daughter at the time, who was a sixth-grader, went to school wearing spaghetti straps and she didn’t get busted because she was a sixth-grader and she was very slim and had not yet gone through puberty. But other girls were getting busted. And I thought, you know, so who is sexualizing these girls? And we had this conversation about it. In her school, they decided that what the dress code would be for girls was—or for everybody, not just for girls. But the dress code would be you have to be able to move comfortably in your clothing. You have to be able to raise your arms, you have to be able to bend over without having to adjust what you’re wearing. You have to be able to run, you have to be able to play. So that, actually, is a pretty good

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and non-sexualized idea of how kids should be dressed for school. I want to get back to, like, pop-culture symbols and what they’re teaching girls. You know, in so much pop music today, the girl stars or young women stars or women stars are wearing, you know, basically S and M fetish garb. You know, like... I know. Yeah, like, you know, bustiers or, you know, really tight leather revealing things with, like, high boots. I mean, they might as well have a whip, you know what I mean? ( laughter ) It’s just like the dominatrix look. And shouldn’t you be able to, like, be a good musician and not dress like you’re a dominatrix? Give me some guidance of how to talk about that without sounding like you’re a total prude who is not aware of what pop culture means because I just think there has to be a way of talking about this without... I know. Yeah. It’s really hard, right? It’s really complicated, and it’s designed that way. It’s designed to make you

girls and sex

pleasure disparity

girls and sex

pleasure disparity

sound old and out of touch and prude and your daughter feel like she’s expressing some kind of liberation and confidence. And when you say, like, can’t you just be a musician? Even when you look back 20, 30 years at musicians in the ’80s—like, if you look at Joan Jett or you look at—they’re pretty clothed. I mean, it’s pretty interesting that they’re still, you know, you think of them as having been very sexy stars but—you know, Annie Lennox, whatever—they had a broader range. And we do still have, you know, now Lorde or Adele or there—you know, there’s a few stars like that. But I think what’s hard about it is that this idea of hot—and that’s what they’re selling—is so

first and foremost, you are your body. And first and foremost, you are presenting that body in a way that is sexually appealing to others. narrow and so commercialized and so linked with porn, frankly. And it says over and over that first and foremost, you are your body. And first and foremost, you are presenting that body in a way that is sexually appealing to others. And I think one of the big disconnects, and I was exploring this in Cinderella too—“Cinderella Ate My Daughter”—that when girls are constantly acting out sexy from a really young age, they don’t connect that to their actual sexual development from the inside. And the risk is that that disconnect becomes permanent. And we do know over and

over that, you know, self-objectification, self-sexualization is really unhealthy for girls. You know, there’s research stretching back for decades that shows that affects them cognitively. It affects their mental health. And we know too that even in the sexual realm, that girls who are self-objectifyng, girls who are constantly conscious of their bodies, actually report less pleasure, less (unintelligible), less ability to talk to their partners than girls that are not. So they’re really being sold a bill of goods to a great degree. And I don’t think that that’s prude to say because, you know, if you’re interested in their sexual pleasure and you’re interested in their expressing power, they’re not going to get there that way. I think we should take a short break here. If you’re just joining us, my guest is Peggy Orenstein. Her new book is called “Girls And Sex.” We’ll be right back. This is FRESH AIR. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) So let’s talk a little bit about sex education. You went to some abstinence-only classes. You went to a purity ball, in which the girls—is it girls and boys at the purity ball? No (laughter). It’s just girls? It’s just girls. It was kind of like going to—I mean, I guess you could also say it was kind of like a

girls and sex

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cotillion—but it was sort of like a little wedding where the girls are dressed in white and the dads—or the male mentors, ’cause some of them didn’t have dads—are dressed in tuxedos. And the girls take vows to remain pure until they enter into a biblical marriage. And the fathers or mentors take vows to cover them until that time. I have to say, it would be really easy for somebody like me to go to an event like that and just slam it because, you know, it’s kind of creepy. But when I do that kind of reporting, I always like to think what can I learn from this? What can I get out of it? And what really struck me at the purity ball was that, yes, I completely disagreed with the content of their conversation. I completely disagreed with what they were saying. I know from research that what they were doing does not work at all in terms of promoting abstinence or more responsible ethical sexual behavior. But this was the only place where I saw fathers talking to their daughters. It was the only place where fathers were communicating with their daughters about their values and their ethics around sexuality. And when I was in more liberal communities, the alternative to that was pretty much silence. Mothers might talk about birth control, about consent, about disease protection. Fathers said basically nothing. So I was really struck and I was really moved that the fathers were trying—and again, I didn’t like what they were saying about it—but I was really moved by the fact that the fathers were stepping up

girls and sex

pleasure disparity

to support their daughters at this really critical time in their lives. How old is your daughter now? She is going to be 13 in July. OK, so she’s at a turning point. She’s becoming a teenager. Yeah. So since you’ve been writing about girls for two decades, is that going to make it any easier—now that you’ve written this book “Girls And Sex”—is that going to make it any easier to talk about sex with your daughter? Or has it made it easier in the past to talk about it with her? Yeah, you know, it absolutely has affected me as a parent. It’s made me think a lot more about what I want for her; it’s made me think a lot more about how I talk to her. You know, one of the things that I looked at was the Dutch model of sex education. And when you look at research on that, Dutch girls report both fewer negative consequences, like disease and pregnancy, and more positive consequences like enjoying sex, knowing their partner really well, having intercourse later, having fewer partners, being able to assert their needs and desires and limits, feeling that they can communicate with their partners really well. All the things that we want for girls, the Dutch girls report.

girls and sex

pleasure disparity

American girls in the same studies report just the opposite. And one of the biggest differences between the Dutch and the American girls was that while both said their mothers—because the American fathers don’t talk about it—but their mothers were equally comfortable or uncomfortable talking about sex, the American mothers only took a harm-reduction approach. They talked about contraception; they talked about disease; they talked about danger; they talked about risk. The Dutch mothers talked about how to balance risk and responsibility and pleasure. And they talked very frankly about girls’ entitlement to sexual pleasure and that made a huge difference in the outcomes. So when you think about the sexual climate that you lived in when you became a teenager and you compare that to the climate your daughter is entering as she’s about to turn 13, how do they compare? Do you think the issues are any different? Do you think the pressures are any different? It’s so interesting. I mean, on one hand I want to say if they’re not, why aren’t they? When so much has changed for girls in the public realm, where so much has changed for them educationally, where so much has changed in their professional aspirations, why hasn’t much more changed in the private realm? At the same time, there’s a weird way where I feel I came of age in this kind of postour-bodies-our-selves time. There was, among a certain population that I was part of, a sort of sense political duty that we deserved equality in

girls and sex

pleasure disparity

girls and sex

pleasure disparity

the bedroom and a sense among the boys that we were with that they were in it with us. I feel that that—for that same kind of demographic has really not, you know, completely transformed— obviously, that’s still there—but has changed a

we deserved equality in the bedroom lot. And I think a lot of it is because we’ve had a much more aggressive and much more relentless popular culture and porn culture that tells girls that they’re supposed to be sexy, that they’re supposed to perform sexuality for boys, but that their sexual pleasure is unspoken of. And I think it’s because my generation of women, my generation of feminist mothers—I don’t know, Terry, I feel like we somehow have dropped the ball. And... How so? Well, because we haven’t talked to our daughters about these things. It’s as if we replaced it with these messages about, you know, being safe and being responsible. But we didn’t really replace it by talking about these bigger issues of autonomy, of understanding your desires, understanding your pleasures, being able to communicate and assert your needs and your limits. One of the obstacles to having the kind of conversation you’re describing is that it’s really

sometimes awkward for the teenager to talk about sex... with their parents. Yeah... ...With their parents. ...Awkward. Yeah, a lot of teens don’t want to do it. Right. So, like, you can make as many speeches as you want to about pleasure in the bedroom and everything. But, you know, you have to—the teenager has to be comfortable hearing that. Yeah. They have to want to participate in that conversation. And that’s not... I’ll say something... ...Something that you can control. Yeah—yeah, yeah, yeah, and part of it is normalizing the conversation, you know, early on. But I’ll tell you something—I’ll tell you something from my own experience, OK? My mom—my parents told me, you know, that I should wait until I get married to have sex and why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free? You know, they were of

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that philosophy. They changed, but that was their philosophy. At the same time, my mom wanted me to know and to make it really clear that once you have that ring on your finger that sex should be fantastic. And so she would tell me all the time that her sex life with my dad was great and that sex should be really pleasurable for me. And I was, Terry, entirely grossed out. I would plug my ears and hum and yell stop it, stop it, stop it, stop it, stop it. And that said, when I look back now I think, I am so glad I had that voice in my head because... Your mother’s voice? My mother’s voice. Because even though, you know—and really the only thing grosser than thinking about your parents having sex is thinking about about your kids having sex—but really that voice made a huge difference to me when I went in to my own sexual experience. And I’ll tell you something else, my mom died earlier this year, but... I’m sorry. Thank you. But about fifteen years ago she came up to me and said, you know, it doesn’t stop after 70. And again, I was like stop it mom, stop it, stop it, stop it. But I’m really glad I have that voice in my head. That voice is in my head. I know that’s there, and I think that’s terrific. So even if your children are plugging their ears and humming, I think it’s worth it. And maybe it isn’t always

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parents who can give that talk or parents who can have those conversations. Maybe you have to have another designated person in your life. And I have been that designated person in the lives of some of my friends’ kids. And I have gone out to lunch—you know, I remember going out to lunch with a 16-year-old whose mother was—she had a serious boyfriend and her mother thought that she was going to start having intercourse. And we were having lunch, and I—honestly, I would’ve happily had the floor open up and, you know, dropped me through it because I really did not want to have to say these words out loud. But I forced myself. I took myself in hand and I said, look, you know, I hear that you are thinking about this. And I just want to ask you some questions about, you know, again—like, have you ever masturbated? Have you had an orgasm on your own? Have you had an orgasm with this partner? Can you talk to him about things? And if you can’t, why are you—what is it that you want to get out of intercourse? What is the experience that you’re looking for here? And she just kind of sat there with her eyes really big and, you know, I think that conversation made a difference to her at the time. But I also know it made a huge difference to our relationship over time. And that girl is now 24 and we talk all the time about everything—about her sex life, about her work relationships, about everything because she knew that I was there and I was open and I could talk to her. And I think, you know, we want

girls and sex

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girls and sex

pleasure disparity

And one of the things that really struck me about the difference between the Dutch and the American model was that American teenagers grow up by creating a rift with their parents, and particularly for girls around sex. They have to be one person at home, where they’re either lying or sort of lying by omission and pretending to be a good girl and another person out in the world. And that is not what we want for our kids. And with Dutch kids, they expect them to grow up and mature within the family, including talking about sexual issues, and it keeps the relationship closer. It keeps them comfortable, and it keeps them connected. And I know that’s what I want with my daughter.

Peggy Orenstein, thank you so much for talking with us. Thank you for having me on, Terry. Peggy Orenstein is the author of the new book “Girls And Sex.” This is FRESH AIR.

to be our children’s advisors. We want to be on their team. We want them to be able talk to us.

pleasure disparity

the week

The female price of male pleasure

l i l i l oof bou row

When Babe.net published a pseudonymous woman’s account of a difficult encounter with Aziz Ansari that made her cry, the internet exploded with “takes” arguing that the #MeToo movement had finally gone too far. “Grace,” the 23-yearold woman, was not an employee of Ansari’s, meaning there were no workplace dynamics. Her repeated objections and pleas that they “slow down” were all well and good, but they did not square with the fact that she eventually gave Ansari oral sex. Finally, crucially, she was free to leave. Why didn’t she just get out of there as soon as she felt uncomfortable? many people explicitly or implicitly asked. It’s a rich question, and there are plenty of possible answers. But if you’re asking in good faith, if you really want to think through why someone

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The world is disturbingly comfortable with the fact that women sometimes leave a sexual encounter in tears.

might have acted as she did, the most important one is this: Women are enculturated to be uncomfortable most of the time. And to ignore their discomfort.

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This is so baked into our society I feel like we forget it’s there. To steal from David Foster Wallace, this is the water we swim in.

Women are enculturated to be uncomfortable most of the time. And to ignore their discomfort. The Aziz Ansari case hit a nerve because, as I’ve long feared, we’re only comfortable with movements like #MeToo so long as the men in question are absolute monsters we can easily separate from the pack. Once we move past the “few bad apples” argument and start to suspect that this is more a trend than a blip, our instinct is to normalize. To insist that this is is just how men are, and how sex is. This is what Andrew Sullivan basically proposed in his latest, startlingly unscientific column. #MeToo has gone too far, he argues, by refusing to confront the biological realities of maleness. Feminism, he says, has refused to give men their due and denied the role “nature” must play in these discussions. Ladies, he writes, if you keep denying biology, you’ll watch men get defensive, react, and “fight back.”

This is beyond vapid. Not only is Sullivan bafflingly confused about nature and its realities, as Colin Dickey notes in this instructive Twitter thread, he’s being appallingly conventional. Sullivan claims he came to “understand the sheer and immense natural difference between being a man and being a woman” thanks to a testosterone injection he received. That is to say, he imagines maleness can be isolated to an injectable hormone and doesn’t bother to imagine femaleness at all. If you want an encapsulation of the habits of mind that made #MeToo necessary, there it is. Sullivan, that would-be contrarian, is utterly representative. The real problem isn’t that we—as a culture— don’t sufficiently consider men’s biological reality. The problem is rather that theirs is literally the only biological reality we ever bother to consider. So let’s actually talk bodies. Let’s take bodies and the facts of sex seriously for a change. And let’s allow some women back into the equation, shall we? Because if you’re going to wax poetic about male pleasure, you had better be ready to talk about its secret, unpleasant, ubiquitous cousin: female pain. Research shows that 30 percent of women report pain during vaginal sex, 72 percent report pain during anal sex, and “large proportions” don’t tell their partners when sex hurts. That matters, because nowhere is our lack of practice at thinking about non-male biological

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realities more evident than when we talk about “bad sex.” For all the calls for nuance in this discussion of what does and doesn’t constitute harassment or assault, I’ve been dumbstruck by the flattening work of that phrase—specifically, the assumption that “bad sex” means the same thing to men who have sex with women as it does to women who have sex with men.

the female price of male pleasure

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When it comes to ‘good sex,’ women often mean without pain, men often mean they had orgasms. The studies on this are few. A casual survey of forums where people discuss “bad sex” suggests that men tend to use the term to describe a passive partner or a boring experience. (Here’s a very unscientific Twitter poll I did that found just that.) But when most women talk about “bad sex,” they tend to mean coercion, or emotional discomfort or, even more commonly, physical pain. Debby Herbenick, a professor at the Indiana University School of Public Health, and one of the forces behind the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior, confirmed this. “When it comes to ‘good sex,’” she told me, “women often mean without pain, men often mean they had orgasms.” As for bad sex, University of Michigan Professor Sara McClelland, another one of the few scholars who has done rigorous work on this issue, discovered in the course of her research on how

young men and women rate sexual satisfaction that “men and women imagined a very different low end of the sexual satisfaction scale.” While women imagined the low end to include the potential for extremely negative feelings and the potential for pain, men imagined the low end to represent the potential for less satisfying sexual outcomes, but they never imagined harmful or damaging outcomes for themselves. [“Intimate Justice: Sexual satisfaction in young adults”] Once you’ve absorbed how horrifying this is, you might reasonably conclude that our “reckoning” over sexual assault and harassment has suffered because men and women have entirely different rating scales. An 8 on a man’s Bad Sex scale is like a 1 on a woman’s. This tendency for men and women to use the same term—bad sex—to describe experiences an objective observer would characterize as vastly different is the flip side of a known psychological phenomenon called “relative deprivation,” by which disenfranchised groups, having been trained to expect little, tend paradoxically to report the same levels of satisfaction as their better-treated, more privileged peers. This is one reason why Sullivan’s attempt to naturalize the status quo is so damaging. When a woman says “I’m uncomfortable” and leaves a sexual encounter in tears, then, maybe she’s not being a fragile flower with no tolerance for discomfort. And maybe we could stand to

the female price of male pleasure

pleasure disparity

the female price of male pleasure

pleasure disparity

An 8 on a man’s Bad Sex scale is like a 1 on a woman’s. This tendency for men and women to use the same term—bad sex—to describe experiences an objective observer would characterize as vastly different is the flip side of a known psychological phenomenon called “relative deprivation,” by which disenfranchised groups, having been trained to expect little, tend paradoxically to report the same levels of satisfaction as their better-treated, more privileged peers.

think a little harder about the biological realities a lot of women deal with, because unfortunately, painful sex isn’t the exceptional outlier we like to pretend it is. It’s pretty damn common. In considering Sullivan’s proposal, we might also, provisionally, and just as a thought experiment, accept that biology—or “nature”—coexists with history and sometimes replicates the lopsided biases of its time. This is certainly true of medicine. Back in the 17th century, the conventional wisdom was that women were the ones with the rampant, undisciplined sexual appetites. That things have changed doesn’t mean they’re necessarily better. These days, a man can walk out of his doctor’s office with a prescription for Viagra based on little but a self-report, but it still takes a woman, on average, 9.28 years of suffering to be diagnosed with endometriosis, a condition caused by endometrial tissue growing outside the uterus. By that time, many find that not just sex but everyday existence has become a life-deforming challenge. That’s a blunt biological reality if ever there was one. Or, since sex is the subject here, what about how our society’s scientific community has treated female dyspareunia—the severe physical pain some women experience during sex—vs. erectile dysfunction (which, while lamentable, is not painful)? PubMed has 393 clinical trials studying dyspareunia. Vaginismus? 10. Vulvodynia? 43.

the female price of male pleasure

pleasure disparity

Erectile dysfunction? 1,954. That’s right: PubMed has almost five times as many clinical trials on male sexual pleasure as it has on female sexual pain. And why? Because we live in a culture that sees female pain as normal and male pleasure as a right.

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pleasure disparity

we live in a culture that sees female pain as normal and male pleasure as a right. This bizarre sexual astigmatism structures so much in our culture that it’s hard to gauge the extent to which our vision of things is skewed. Take how our health system compensates doctors for male vs. female-only surgeries: As of 2015, male-specific surgeries were still reimbursed at rates 27.67 percent higher for male-specific procedures than female-specific ones. (Result: Guess who gets the fanciest doctors?) Or consider how routinely many women are condescended to and dismissed by their own physicians. Yet here’s a direct quote from a scientific article about how (contra their reputation for complaining and avoiding discomfort) women are worryingly tough: “Everyone who regularly encounters the complaint of dyspareunia knows that women are inclined to continue with coitus, if necessary, with their teeth tightly clenched.”

If you asked yourself why “Grace” didn’t leave Ansari’s apartment as soon as she felt “uncomfortable,” you should be asking the same question here. If sex hurt, why didn’t she stop? Why is this happening? Why are women enduring excruciating pain to make sure men have orgasms? The answer isn’t separable from our current discussion about how women have been routinely harassed, abused, and dismissed because men wanted to have erections in the workplace. It boggles the mind that Sullivan thinks we don’t sufficiently consider men’s biological reality when our entire society has agreed to organize itself around the pursuit of the straight male orgasm. This quest has been granted total cultural centrality—with unfortunate consequences for our understanding of bodies, and pleasure, and pain. Per Sullivan’s request, I’m talking about biology. I’m speaking, specifically, about the physical sensations most women are socialized to ignore in their pursuit of sexual pleasure. Women are constantly and specifically trained out of noticing or responding to their bodily discomfort, particularly if they want to be sexually “viable.” Have you looked at how women are “supposed” to present themselves as sexually attractive? High heels? Trainers? Spanx? These are things designed to wrench bodies. Men can be appealing in comfy clothes. They walk in shoes that don’t shorten their Achilles tendons. They don’t need to get the hair ripped off their

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genitals or take needles to the face to be perceived as “conventionally” attractive. They can—just as women can—opt out of all this, but the baseline expectations are simply different, and it’s ludicrous to pretend they aren’t. The old implied social bargain between women and men (which Andrew Sullivan calls “natural”) is that one side will endure a great deal of discomfort and pain for the other’s pleasure and delight. And we’ve all agreed to act like that’s normal, and just how the world works. This is why it was radical that Frances McDormand wore no makeup at the Golden Globes. This is why it was transformative when Jane Fonda posted a picture of herself looking exhausted next to one of her looking glammed up. This isn’t just an exhausting way to live; it’s also a mindset that’s pretty hard to shake. To be clear, I’m not even objecting to our absurd beauty standards right now. My only objective here is to explore how the training women receive can help us understand what “Grace” did and did not do. Women are supposed to perform comfort and pleasure they do not feel under conditions that make genuine comfort almost impossible. Next time you see a woman breezily laughing in a complicated and revealing gown that requires her not to eat or drink for hours, know a) that you are witnessing the work of a consummate illusionist acting her heart out and b) that you have been

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trained to see that extraordinary, Oscar-worthy performance as merely routine. Now think about how that training might filter down to sexual contexts. Why, men wonder, do women fake orgasms? It seems so counterproductive? This is true! It does. That means it’s worth thinking very carefully about why so many people might do something that seems so completely contrary to their self-interest. Women get dressed up and go on dates in part because they have libidos and are hoping to get sexual pleasure. Why, when the moment finally arrives, would they give up and fake it? The retrograde answer (the one that ignores that women have libidos) is that women trade sex positions they don’t like for social positions they do. They don’t care about pleasure. There might be other reasons. Maybe, for example, women fake orgasms because they’d hoped for some pleasure themselves. If it looks like that’s not happening, they default to their training. And they’ve been taught a) to tolerate discomfort and b) to somehow find pleasure in the other party’s pleasure if the social conditions require it. This is especially true where sex is concerned. Faking an orgasm achieves all kinds of things: It can encourage the man to finish, which means the pain (if you’re having it) can finally stop. It makes him feel good and spares his feelings. If being a

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good lover means making the other person feel good, then you’ve excelled on that front too. Total win. We’re so blind to pain being the giant missing term in our sexual discussions that ABC News’ epic 2004 “American Sex Survey,” which includes an amazing 67 questions, never once mentions it. It doesn’t even show up as a possible reason for orgasm-faking: (ask if ever faked orgasm) What’s the main reason you did that? To please partner To hurry up/get done To not hurt partner’s feelings Was tired Sex was not satisfying Boredom Not in the mood Too young/inexperienced Just wanted to Sick/on medication Other No opinion

26 22 10 9 7 3 2 2 1 * 4 12

This is how bad our science and social science about sex has been. By refusing to see pain and discomfort as things women routinely endure in sexual contexts, even our studies end up narrating them as strange and arbitrary creatures who (for some reason) are “not in the mood” or stop sex because they “just wanted to.” But it’s not just about sex. One of the compliments girls get most as kids is that they’re pretty; they learn, accordingly, that a lot of their social

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value resides in how much others enjoy looking at them. They’re taught to take pleasure in other people’s pleasure in their looks. Indeed, this is the main way they’re socially rewarded.

the female price of male pleasure

pleasure disparity

This is also how women are taught to be good hosts. To subordinate their desires to those of others. To avoid confrontation. At every turn, women are taught that how someone reacts to them does more to establish their goodness and worth than anything they themselves might feel.

Women have spent decades politely ignoring their own discomfort and pain to give men maximal pleasure. One side effect of teaching one gender to outsource its pleasure to a third party (and endure a lot of discomfort in the process) is that they’re going to be poor analysts of their own discomfort, which they have been persistently taught to ignore. In a world where women are co-equal partners in sexual pleasure, of course it makes sense to expect that a woman would leave the moment something was done to her that she didn’t like. That is not the world we live in.

In the real world, the very first lesson the typical woman learns about what to expect from sex is that losing her virginity is going to hurt. She’s supposed to grit her teeth and get through it. Think about how that initiation into sex might thwart your ability to recognize “discomfort” as something that’s not supposed to happen. When sex keeps hurting long after virginity is lost, as it did for many of my friends, many a woman assumes she’s the one with the problem. And, well, if you were supposed to grit your teeth and get through it the first time, why not the second? At what point does sex magically transform from enduring someone doing something to you that you don’t like—but remember: everyone agrees you’re supposed to tolerate it—to the mutually pleasurable experience everyone else seems to think it is? We don’t really have a language for that amazingly complicated transition because we don’t think about the biological realities of sex from the woman’s side. Women have spent decades politely ignoring their own discomfort and pain to give men maximal pleasure. They’ve gamely pursued love and sexual fulfillment despite tearing and bleeding and other symptoms of “bad sex.” They’ve worked in industries where their objectification and harassment was normalized, and chased love and sexual fulfillment despite painful conditions no one, especially not their doctors, took seriously. Meanwhile, the gender for whom bad sex

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sometimes means being a little bored during orgasm, the gender whose sexual needs the medical community rushes to fulfill, the gender that walks around in sartorial comfort, with an entire society ordered so as to maximize his aesthetic and sexual pleasure—that gender, reeling from the revelation that women don’t always feel quite as good as they’ve been pressured to pretend they do, and would appreciate some checking in—is telling women they’re hypersensitive and overreacting to discomfort? Men’s biological realities are insufficiently appreciated? I wish we lived in a world that encouraged women to attend to their bodies’ pain signals instead of powering through like endurance champs. It would be grand if women (and men) were taught to consider a woman’s pain abnormal; better still if we understood a woman’s discomfort to be reason enough to cut a man’s pleasure short. But those aren’t actually the lessons society teaches—no, not even to “entitled” millennials. Remember: Sex is always a step behind social progress in other areas because of its intimacy. Talking details is hard, and it’s good we’re finally starting to. But next time we’re inclined to wonder why a woman didn’t immediately register and fix her own discomfort, we might wonder why we spent the preceding decades instructing her to override the signals we now blame her for not recognizing.

the female price of male pleasure

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catherine bretheim

2018