The female price of male pleasure

gothhabiba:

giandujakiss:

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 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….

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 trained to see that extraordinary, Oscar-worthy performance as merely routine.Now think about how that training might filter down to sexual contexts….

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.

“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.”

this is even more disturbing once you consider that at least some of the “passive partners” these men are complaining about were probably “passive” because they didn’t really want to be there at all.

plus, Loofbourow talks about how men’s pleasure often relies on women hiding or enduring pain but doesn’t mention (maybe it would be a bit too controversial, or maybe it seemed beside the point) the fact that men’s pleasure often relies on knowingly causing women pain. she describes men as “the gender for whom bad sex sometimes means being a little bored during orgasm”–think about what kinds of sex we as a culture consider “boring,” “uninteresting,” “vanilla,” etc. generally it’s sex in which a woman isn’t being hurt above and beyond–although these lines are blurred–what’s generally expected to be “unavoidable” or “ignorable” during sex (which is enough of a problem of itself). not only does women’s pain not factor as a disincentive to sex but it’s very often cited as an incentive or even a requirement, as what makes sex “sexy”