Lili Loofbourow’s ‘The female price of male pleasure’
What are we talking about when we talk about ‘bad sex?’
Lili Loofbourow’s ‘The female price of male pleasure’ opens with a bang:
“The world is disturbingly comfortable with the fact that women sometimes leave a sexual encounter in tears.”
The thesis of the essay is that when humans talk about having ‘bad sex,’ women and men are often talking about radically different experiences. For men, ‘bad sex’ is a listless partner or an uninspiring, mediocre encounter. Women are often talking about physical violence, coercion, intimidation and physical pain.
She’s writing in response to responses to the Aziz Ansari story, and her point — that, as a society, we’re only capable of roundly condemning truly monstrous outliers, and fail to apply the same righteous judgment to systemic, societal issues — is well taken.
The Aziz Ansari case hit a nerve because, as I’ve long feared, we’re only comfortable with movements like #MeToo so long as the men in question are absolute monsters we can easily separate from the pack. Once we move past the “few bad apples” argument and start to suspect that this is more a trend than a blip, our instinct is to normalize. To insist that this is is just how men are, and how sex is.
Pushback to condemnations of Ansari typically involve pundits who say that aggression and coercion are ‘just how men are.’ Holding men to any other standard is unrealistic, by biological standards. She writes:
The real problem isn’t that we — as a culture — don’t sufficiently consider men’s biological reality. The problem is rather that theirs is literally the only biological reality we ever bother to consider.
The number of men reporting pain during intercourse is negligible. Not so the number of women:
Research shows that 30 percent of women report pain during vaginal sex, 72 percent report pain during anal sex, and “large proportions” don’t tell their partners when sex hurts.
The implication being — if a man hurt during sex, we’d know about it, and something would get done about it. Loofbourow compares the diagnosis and treatment of erectile dysfunction to endometriosis as an example of how men are catered to, sexually and medically. The average woman with endometriosis will suffer 9.28 years before diagnosis, while a man can walk into many doctor’s offices and self-report erectile dysfunction, and walk out with a script and samples in hand.
The problem isn’t that men are different than women; it’s that we — as a society — treat men’s problems differently than we treat women’s. She cites PubMed and its number of clinical trials for various women’s health issues (393 for dyspareunia, 10 for vaginismus and 43 for vulvodynia vs 1,954 for erectile dysfunction) as glaring examples of disparity, to say nothing of the fact that men’s surgeries are considerably more well-compensated than women’s, meaning men will get the better, higher-achieving, higher-paid physicians.
She also quotes from University of Michigan professor Sara McClelland:
While women imagined the low end to include the potential for extremely negative feelings and the potential for pain, men imagined the low end to represent the potential for less satisfying sexual outcomes, but they never imagined harmful or damaging outcomes for themselves.
The conclusion she draws is both sobering and obvious:
This tendency for men and women to use the same term — bad sex — to describe experiences an objective observer would characterize as vastly different is the flip side of a known psychological phenomenon called “relative deprivation,” by which disenfranchised groups, having been trained to expect little, tend paradoxically to report the same levels of satisfaction as their better-treated, more privileged peers.
I took notice of the phrase ‘poor analysts of their own discomfort,’ and it’s sticking with me even now. It makes perfect sense — we teach women and girls to downplay, ignore and explain away their own discomfort and outright physical pain, and then critique them for not acting on behalf of their own desires and needs, like Ansari’s accuser, “Grace.”
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.
In a world where women are co-equal partners in sexual pleasure, of course it makes sense to expect that a woman would leave the moment something was done to her that she didn’t like.
That is not the world we live in.
It’s not the world we live in, and it’s vitally important to recognize and acknowledge that fact. But that’s the world we want to live in, many of us, and as we’ve seen over the past calendar year, that world isn’t necessarily going to manifest itself.
It’s going to take work, and it’s going to take effort.
But isn’t an equal playing field — where women and men are talking about the same things when they talk about ‘bad sex’ — worth some effort?
We think so.
