Tabby’s Deep Dives 4
Sexual Scripts
Sexual scripts can affect your entire relationship — without you even being aware of it
Sex is something that almost all of us enjoy, but it has been little researched by comparison to just about any other human activity. One aspect of sex that has been under study since the mid 1980s though, is the widely held beliefs and expectations surrounding sex, examples including the way sexual happiness is so often measured by how much sex people have, and by how often women have orgasms. These are examples of what is called sexual scripting.
To explain, a script is a set of beliefs about how we are expected to behave in a given situation, and scripts vary between the sexes and across cultures. Scripts are all around us, and — usually, without us being aware of it — they control what we do and how we react. Greeting traditions provide a very good example of social scripts at work, with Americans expecting to shake hands, the Inuit to rub noses, the Japanese to bow, Arab males to shake each other by the right hand only, and to hug and kiss each other on both cheeks, while the British stand apart, often going risking no more than saying ‘hello’. When an Inuit meets a Brit, a clash of scripts looms unless the Brit understands that the other has to close in enough to do the nose rub.
Sexual scripts are at least as common as social ones, and although we learn them from our families and by conforming to our friends’ behavior, social media and pornography increasingly have a role to play. One of the most dominant sexual scripts is that the man should take the initiative. Another common script is that the man is responsible for the woman having an orgasm, and third is that if she doesn’t come, then a sexual encounter has been no good for her, and a failure for him too. A refinement of this script is that many men believe that the woman should come first. All of these scripts are faulty, yet they persist.
Yet another script is the ancient ‘treat her rough and she will love you’, adage, which still has its adherents despite being several millennia past its sell-by date. Today it is often adopted by men who have been subjected to abuse themselves and if a guy believes in it, be wary, because individuals scripted that way often have associated attachment issues. In script-free sex though, some women do enjoy a bit of domination, but only with consent, and not every. single. time.
How do sexual scripts affect us?
The central core of sexual scripts cuts women so little slack that one respected US study found that every woman included reported lower levels of sexual arousal and enjoyment than the men. I would like to hope that this was an outlier result, but if not, it is a salutary warning that our belief systems are becoming increasingly problematic. While society has made reasonable progress in areas like social scripts surrounding employment for women, it has made virtually none in borderline taboo areas like sex, where we are lumbered with script systems that have gone unchallenged and unchanged since Victorian times.
Gender binary frameworks remain so tight that today, boys and girls are still learning time-expired behavior patterns at the toddler stage which won’t be even vaguely appropriate before they reach their early teens. These prescribed gender roles are being reinforced on all sides — by the printed media, by social media influencers, and by well-meaning friends and relations, until they become a part of our behavior.
Examples of scripts
One of the problems that scripts pose is that they have been around for so long that many have become complementary, despite not necessarily being appropriate. A perfect example is the traditional dating script, where both sexes are still inclined to expect the man to pick up the girl, to pay for the meal, and to take her home. I have trampled all over this one in my time and as any woman will tell you, some guys can’t cope with the idea of their date picking them up, paying for everything, and then dropping them off at the end of it. As women, we are scripted to clutch onto their arms, to hang on their every word, and to keep coming back to them. Some guys can’t believe their luck when we do the opposite, because they don’t have the appropriate scripts to deal with it.
Another script is that men are expected to be sexually experienced, to be sexually skilled, and to have had more sexual partners. The complimentary script is that women are expected not to have sex until a relationship has been established, to gatekeep their sexual desire, not to discuss sexual pleasure, and to have had fewer sexual partners. Clearly there is something of a conflict here, but the big problem is that these scripts set the scene for every consent issue imaginable — not to mention the fallout that men are scripted to expect women to be sexually passive and inexperienced, and to regard women who do the opposite as sluts.
But wait a minute, guys — you are the ones who are scripted for slutty behavior, not us, so why do we catch the crap for behaving in a way that scripts encourage you to do?
I don’t find it surprising at all that there is a script that characterizes women as having ‘complex sexuality’. In many ways, we don’t, but society has put us in an unenviable position because if we have too much sex, or even talk about it too much, binary sexual scripting encourages us to feel unhappy about the same behaviors that it encourages to the hilt in men. Yet the men who do fulfill the male counterpart of these scripts have to have sex with someone, and in some cultures which prize virginity, this has had extreme effects, resulting in an underclass of women emerging, who are groomed for sex but despised as sluts and then outcast for having had it. If scripts are so powerful that they are being used to justify abuse and exploitation, just imagine the other effects they are having on women that we haven’t appreciated yet.
Here lies part of the explanation why the American women in the survey reported lower levels of sexual arousal and satisfaction — the scripts they have been handed trap them between a rock and a hard place.
A script that has been registered widely in society is that women can be objectified much more than men. We are expected to be attractive, keep ourselves in good shape, to dress to please — just don’t show your bra too much — and to be immaculately made up. A side script is that we are also expected to service or pleasure men when I can’t see any logical reason why it shouldn’t work the other way around 50% of the time.
Scripts can be enduring, but there is evidence that new ones are emerging, and some of these look much healthier to me than the ones they are — hopefully — replacing. For example, research done in Scandinavia has shown that younger women are finding it easier to accept that they can have sex-based simply on desire, or because they would like to explore new possibilities of experience. This new wave of scripts may reflect the way improved communications allow women to share their experiences and to appreciate that the male-dominated norms of yesterday’s society are inappropriate today. If so, it offers hope for the future.
How scripts alter our experience of sex
How driven are we by scripts? If you are honest, you can work it out for yourself by asking the correct questions, and many of us, of either sex, would identify subconsciously with a large proportion of the scripts I have mentioned already. Our subconscious becomes involved because of the bad habit we have of conflating scripts with character. ‘She must be a slut because she had casual sex with me’ is a great example, because a. the fact that a woman had casual sex with you on a single occasion doesn’t define who she is, and b. the script is loaded against her, because in any fair world, you would be beating yourself up for the same behavior too.
Another example of a script in this class is, ‘men need sex more than women’, which goes hand in hand with, ‘men have a stronger biological need for sex than women’. This pair are pure ‘excuse’ scripts, which have been deployed since time began by guys attempting to justify everything from affairs to rape. Not only are these scripts untrue, they are dangerous because they offer an excuse for some men to picture themselves as being at the mercy of their hormones, which is ironic. There is another script that says the same of women, but disapproves entirely of it because of the risk it might lead a virtuous male astray.
Getting personal
The first time I came across these scripts was in college, and the nearest I have ever got to being raped was by a boyfriend who point-blank demanded sex because he ‘needed’ it. I grabbed his balls and squeezed them so damn hard that the word ‘need’ went out of his mind for a fortnight. He did come crawling back in the end, and had to sit through a lecture about allowing his arousal to conflict with my human rights. However, what made me really see red was that after he had accepted all of that, he whined, ‘but I always make you come!’
Sure baby, but a. I don’t need to come to have good sex, b. you don’t need me to come for you to have good sex, and c. if I want to come, it is not like I am totally reliant on you to do it. Here, the ‘if a woman has an orgasm, she must have had great sex’ script was being weaponized to justify, ‘my biological need for sex script overrides the need to get her consent’ script.
How bad scripting affects sex
Sometimes scripts are appropriate, sometimes they are not. Occasionally they help, more often they do not. The biggest trouble comes when they are highly inappropriate, and the scripts around men’s biological ‘need’ for sex and women’s ‘need’ for orgasms to prove that they have enjoyed it are definitely problematic because of that.
Even within consensual sex, the female orgasm scripts challenge many women and can have negative effects on relationships, not least because a large majority of men are decidedly average in bed. A substantial proportion of women rarely or never have orgasms, and even female writers risk accidentally leaving them feeling that something is wrong with them because of that, when it is perfectly natural for women who can’t come to be that way. I know I stand out on Sexography for writing about some of this stuff, but I have friends who rarely if ever come, and they go through agonies about it when there is no reason for it.
Scripting in this area can build stress to such an extent that it can cast a shadow over a perfectly good experience of sex. For example, if a woman who never has orgasms is in a relationship with a man who measures his sexual success by her having orgasms, she may well end up dealing with it by faking it, instead of talking it through. Imagine what it feels like faking orgasms three times a week.
Unscripted sex doesn’t just mean, ‘Rush home and take me against the wall’, it means throwing out a lot of the clichés that we have been encouraged to believe and taking a long, warm look at what is on offer. I introduced this piece with a trio of common sexual scripts surrounding which side should initiate sex and the symbolism around women’s orgasms. All three can be replaced with one script: either partner can initiate sex, orgasms should be a shared responsibility, and that if a woman can’t have an orgasm, then sex can still be perfectly good for her. All the really good lovers I have had have understood that script, and so haven’t fallen prey to the ‘WTF?’ moments that are prone to cause problems for more heavily scripted men.
It is an art, this sex business — you cannot do it by script. You will be surprised what a difference it makes to sex when you approach it without any preconceptions, and tailor it to each other instead of a norm set by society.
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