08 December 2014

All about the sex

I always hear about women having trouble having an orgasm.  About 10% of women have never had an orgasm, and I've heard plenty of male friends tell tales of girls who just "lie there".  As someone who feels sex is a very important part of life, this strikes me as extremely tragic!
First off, I want to say, I’m not anti-porn or pro-censorship and I freaking love sex – let’s just get that out of the way up front. I am definitely not one of these women, but I have talked to several of them and have always been puzzled by this issue.  (And because I'm a hetero cis female, I will speak from that point of view, so excuse me for leaving out all the lovely LBGT beauties, but that is not my experience, so I don't want to speak for anyone in that community.)
Porn gets blamed for the brokenness in male/female sexual relations a lot, but as adults. But I think the disconnect happens sooner, and it isn’t just in porn, but in the idea of what “sexy” is via the male gaze. Think about it: what we think of as “sexy” has been highly constructed. I believe the disconnect for women is that their first introduction to sexuality in our culture is entirely focused on the external than the internal — looking sexy as opposed to feeling one’s own sexuality. So in other words, women learn to act sexy according to pre-prescribed ideas of what sexy is visually…but they learn little to nothing about how to pleasure themselves. (Think about it — we don’t even really have much popular slang in this culture for women’s masturbation, but dozens of terms for the male — how do girls learn about masturbation for themselves?) So many women fall into a sort of “performative” sexuality that is disconnected from their own body and what it’s doing, instead focusing on “acting” sexy and not communicating with their partners.
Which is the key point: sex is a thing we do together, not a thing we do to one another. The best sex includes communication about what feels good and intense connection — if women are just “lying there” I’m guessing that they don’t feel good and they don’t know what will enough to communicate it to their partner, or they feel like they can’t communicate with their partner in the first place without being judged possibly. (I don’t know for sure, I’ve never been one to “just lie there”.) I’m guessing this is where the “feeling safe” idea comes into play — “feeling safe” could just mean feeling able to express themselves, however, if they don’t know what makes them feel good, then they’ll have trouble expressing that anyway.
This is compounded by the idea of “experience” — if a woman seeks to gain experience to become better at sex, she is slut-shamed…and if she talks about liking sex, forget about it. For a woman to be sex-positive is to be "dirty" or a "whore", and acknowledgement of female masturbation is almost non-existent — there are very few examples in the culture of women experiencing pleasure for themselves, it’s all performative.  If a woman is thinking about how she looks, it’s not going to be as easy to think about how she feels…or to lose herself in a sexual experience.
I believe we are all responsible for our own orgasms. It isn’t your partners job to “make” you come — sex happens in your head, and if you aren’t a full participant than having the expectation of an orgasm almost seems unreasonable to me. Conversely, under that model, a woman having an orgasm isn’t an “accomplishment” for the male, or an example of sexual prowess, which I think would take some of the performative pressure off of men (which can’t be easy).
I don’t know how we change this except to do a better job educating girls about their bodies and about pleasure!  I’m always shocked when I hear about women not communicating or just lying there…it makes me sad for both them and their partners.  They're missing out on one of the best parts of life!