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THE LINK
OPINIONS
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(Sex)Editorial: Fake It Till You Make It The Gender Politics of Feigning and Demanding Orgasms April Tardif Levesque @AprilTardif
W
hen I wrote an article on the orgasm gap between men and women, a number of things happened. No, I didn’t get any death threats, probably because I held off on some opinions I had—we all know women with opinions get some real spicy fan mail. What did happen was that a student from the psychology department, male obviously, linked his own research to me on Twitter once my piece got a bit of attention—probably wishing I’d consulted him first about something I’ve seen and heard about firsthand. This isn’t much of a surprise, but one comment was from a woman, who went off about how we need to take it easy on the men because they have a hard enough time pleasing us as it is. It was phrased longer and was more cringeworthy, but essentially that was the message. Think of the men. On the subject of ladies being denied equal pleasure. Look, men treat sex like water, food, the need to defecate.
T H E L I N K N E W S PA P E R . C A
We let guys off with lighter sentences for rape because somehow too many judges and jurors have the attitude that somehow sex is inevitable for men. Sex is for men. Women who want pleasure from sex or enjoy it in a context where they’re not the server but the subject, are not framed the same way. So where does this tie in to orgasms? For women, they’re optional. Men must always finish and they almost always do. Stats can be found by asking any psychology department about studies they’ve done—they’ll gladly oblige, but the gold is in the lived experience. That’s where you find the nuance. In my golden days of socializing, I found myself in many women’s washrooms. Women talk to one another quite comfortably when no men are around. This is where the sauce meets the pasta. The substance. One woman I spoke to, who is both a sex worker and sexually active in her everyday life, totally enjoys sex most of the time. She wants it, gets it...but has
never had an orgasm. Not even once. I have spoken to older ladies, married for years, who have either never had an orgasm, or who did once upon a time with a lover they knew 20 years ago on a vacation. I wondered then how the men took it. I wondered also how, with an orgasm gap so huge in the studies, how the men in their lives handle it. I’ve narrowed it down to about three possibilities: he is too lazy to try, and never asks because he doesn’t know the orgasm exists for women; he has concluded that there is something wrong with his partner despite not ever having figured out the “code to the safe;” or she has faked it every time, and he’s convinced all is well in the world. Let’s unpack what’s up with this and how power dynamics contribute to this. If indeed he never asked and assumed sex is accomplished and well done because he came, that’s enough of a power dynamic in itself. It’s self explanatory in that he truly believes sex is for men, and women are but an instrument to that.
