Fucking in the Hellscape of Aziz Ansari’s Modern Romance
This weekend, The Week published a piece deservedly ricocheting around my feminist media bubble. I myself have managed to find any and every occasion to send it to friends and they, in turn, can’t stop sending it to me. Like Cat Person, this essay plainly speaks to a widespread pain that so rarely gets recognized that when it’s faithfully appreciated as fuckery in an article like this, we all lose our shit.
In all the media shock surrounding allegations of Aziz Ansari’s sexual miscondcut, Lili Loofbourow reminds us that we mere common people are in danger of forgetting just how normalized women’s sexual pain really is in everyday heterosexual encounters. Citing some pretty gruesome statistics, she shows how medical researchers are singularly preoccupied with studying men’s erectile dysfunction to a point where you’d think keeping dicks hard is on par with curing skin cancer. But alarmingly, there’s hardly a fraction of that funding going towards the seeming pandemic of vaginal pain.
If you’ve ever found yourself lying awake at night, crying, frantically googling your vaginal symptoms in the dark as your oblivious partner snores next to you, then you probably already know all signs always point to vulvodynia: a chronic condition that makes all sex excruciatingly painful and CAN NEVER BE CURED.
