by Rachel Hills
Even today, some people assume that when a woman has sex, she is doing it in exchange for something else: emotional intimacy, commitment, or family and children. Women who have sex outside the bounds of a monogamous relationship are depicted as doing sex and relationships on men’s terms, even if they believe they are pursuing their own desires. Within committed relationships, we are told that women’s libidos are “fragile” and “easily distracted,” prone to fizzle under the pressures of everyday life.
Where young men are taught that desire will burst forth from their bodies whether they like it or not, young women are taught that their sexual urges need to be awakened by someone else, like Snow White waiting for a kiss from Prince Charming. In her book The Power of Beauty, author Nancy Friday recalls how powerless she felt in the matter of her own sexual initiation. “Was there anyone more starved than I in adolescence, more vulnerable to ‘that feeling’ boys aroused when I was held and kissed?” She wishes that she had known she was able to produce the same sensations in her own body, instead of depending on a boy or man to arouse them. “Until [a girl] discovers that her own hand touching herself unleashes some of this same feeling,” she writes, “it will be the boy-prince who holds the key; she will sit by the telephone and wait and wait in expectation of the next magical moment when he holds her in his arms and ‘makes’ her sexual.”
The same male-as-teacher and female-as-student dynamic can be found in the bestselling Fifty Shades of Grey series, in which the virginal Anastasia Steele learns about sex in the arms of the wealthy and charismatic Christian Grey. “We can start your training tonight,” he tells her before they have sex for the first time. Later, she describes her libido as “woken and tamed by him.”
But being sexually passive doesn’t just make it harder to take ownership of your sexual desires. It also makes it more difficult to say no to sex that you don’t want. If women are taught that their sex drives are naturally weak, not wanting sex is not sufficient reason not to have it. If sex is supposed to hurt the first (and second, and third) time you do it, it is okay to have sex that doesn’t bring you pleasure. If sex is framed as a duty, something that “must” be done in order to keep your partner happy, is it any wonder than many women in long-term relationships start to view it as a chore? If you are taught that your value lies in being “chosen” by someone else—for a date, a hookup, or even a marriage proposal—it matters less than it might otherwise if you would choose to be with that person in return.
In a 2013 article for the New York Times Magazine, author Daniel Bergman suggested that over time, the message that women want sex less than men do might become a self-fulfilling neurological prophecy. “If boys and men tend to take in messages that manhood is defined by sex and power, and those messages encourage them to think about sex often, then those neural networks associated with desire will be regularly activated and will become stronger over time,” he wrote. “If women, generally speaking, learn other lessons, that sexual desire and expression are not necessarily positive, and if therefore they don’t think as much about sex, then those same neural networks will be less stimulated and comparatively weak.”
Jennifer, twenty-four, reached out to me via e-mail after reading a story I’d written for a women’s magazine about what I’d called “the new sexual double standard”—the misconception that women were so indifferent to sex and men were so insatiable that male consent was assumed, rather than needing to be negotiated or asked for. It had made Jennifer think about her own relationships, she told me—not only the way she had treated her male partners, but also the way she had been habituated to the role of sexual sentry, able to say yes or no to men’s advances but unable to initiate sex or set the terms of her own engagement. “I would let people have sex with me, rather than sex being something that we did together,” she wrote.
Jennifer grew up in the peaceful northern suburbs of Adelaide, on the southern rim of Australia, the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants who raised her to be independent and strong willed, but who also held very conservative views about sex. She didn’t meet her first serious boyfriend until she was twenty-three, when she moved out of her family home and bought her own apartment, living alone for the first time. Until then, her only engagement with sex was through flings and one-night stands, conducted clandestinely at the houses of the guys she slept with, with Jennifer sneaking back home to her parents before the night was over.
But although she was sexually active, Jennifer didn’t feel in control of her sex life. She tells me about Oliver, a guy she hooked up with on and off for a year and a half before she started dating her current boyfriend. They met shortly after she finished college, as her friends were dispersing in different directions and beginning their adult lives. Jennifer felt isolated and lonely, and “it was nice to think somebody wanted me and loved me and enjoyed being in my company,” she says.
Maintaining that sense of approval meant saying yes to sex, whether she wanted it or not. She describes her role in that relationship as that of a titular gatekeeper. Oliver set the terms—Would she come over to his house? Would they have sex tonight? Would she have a threesome with him and another girl he was seeing?—and in theory, Jennifer had the option of accepting or declining his requests. But in practice, she felt her only real choice was to say yes. “In a superficial sense I was completely in control of the situation, but in another sense I wasn’t at all,” she says. “I didn’t feel like I could ask for what I wanted; I could only respond to what he wanted, and in a way that was agreeable to him.”
That Jennifer never had an orgasm in these encounters only exacerbated her feelings of powerlessness. “It’s not like I just lay there, but I felt like sex was my duty,” she recalls. She likens herself to Kristen Wiig’s character in the opening scenes of the film Bridesmaids, thrashing about in a succession of porn-inspired positions with a bored glaze over her eyes. “You’re not just saying yes to sex in that situation, you’re also saying yes to not pleasing yourself,” says Jennifer. “And the longer you spend pleasing other people at your own expense, the harder it is to do anything else.”
Jennifer’s passivity didn’t just impede the pleasure she took in sex. It also impacted the way she felt about herself. Meeting the obligation she felt to be constantly sexually available meant ceding her desire to fulfill another contemporary feminine ideal: that of the “strong, independent woman.” She explains: “I just felt like being with him meant that I was lacking self-respect.” In other ways, Jennifer’s relationship with Oliver strengthened her affinity to that archetype. “I guess having this secret sex friend made me feel like I was living the Sex and the City–type life, being all in charge of my sex life by actually having sex,” she says with a note of irony. “But it didn’t really seem glamorous, fun, or fulfilling.” On reflection, she thinks, “choosing not to have sex seems like it would have been the more independent decision.”
Fun, Fearless, and . . . Feminist? The New “Good Woman”
The passive and pure feminine ideal hasn’t disappeared entirely. She still looms large in the hearts and minds of many women. But she was not what most of the women I spoke with aspired to, especially once they moved out of adolescence and into adulthood. The modern feminine ideal is confident, independent, and empowered, built more in the mold of the fearless Lady Gaga or 1980s Madonna than Madonna, the mother of Christ.
It is an ideal that is epitomized by Cosmopolitan’s “Fun, Fearless Female,” who, according to the magazine’s South African edition, “embodies ambition, passion, and a confidence that breaks all barriers.” Today’s “good woman” is attractive, self-assured, and pursues sex with the same enthusiasm with which she goes after everything else in life. She may not explicitly refer to herself as a feminist, but her modus operandi is shaped by an ideal of female empowerment.
Priya, twenty-three, is a proud feminist and has identified as such since she was a teenager. Her feminism is shaped as much by the freewheeling thirtysomethings on Sex and the City as by the well-worn
copy of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch she used to read during her high school lunch breaks—and sexual freedom is an important component of it. “A lot of people assume that casual sex hurts your self-esteem, but I don’t see it like that,” she tells me.
Like the women whose sexual adventures she enjoys watching unfold on television, most of Priya’s relationships to date have been casual. Not one-night stands, necessarily, but short-term liaisons predicated more on physical chemistry than on any ongoing emotional commitment. Nor does she really date—at least, not in the dinner-and-a-movie sense. “I meet someone, I sleep with them, and we go from there,” she explains. Sometimes the sex turns into something longer-term, other times the relationship stays informal, but either way, she is content with the outcome.
For Priya, the freedom to have sex when she wants it and with whom she wants is a feminist act in and of itself. It’s not that she avoids committed relationships; she has been in one before, and she expects that she will have another at some point. But she also believes that having sex outside of a relationship shows confidence and strength of character. “It’s pretty gutsy to decide that you don’t care about the stereotypes that might be applied to you if you have casual sex,” she argues. “Women should be able to have sex without being judged for it.” And when Priya and her friends have casual sex it is because they want it, “not because [they’re] looking for validation,” she says.
Priya’s thoughts on casual sex echo those of many women of her generation. They also reflect the broader transformations that have taken place in how we expect women to behave when it comes to sex and relationships. Just as sexual freedom is a symbol of political liberalism, so too are our perceptions of women’s power and agency intertwined with what they do with their sex lives.
In many respects, this shift has been a positive one. Jennifer hated casual sex when she was cast in the role of the sentry, saying yes or no to other people’s requests. But when she was the person choosing her partners and setting the terms of their interaction, she felt bold and powerful. Hooking up with Oliver made her feel manipulated and demeaned, but one-night stands were an act of liberation. “Because I wasn’t going to see them again, the sex was spontaneous,” she explains. “There was no obligation to do it again and again, whether I wanted it or not.” It wasn’t casual sex that made Jennifer feel bad about herself, but the circumstances under which she was having it.
Similarly, Annabelle still lives in a community where purity is highly prized. Some of the girls she is friends with at college date, but most of them are still virgins. But Annabelle doesn’t feel “broken” the way that she used to. She recalls one of the first dates she went on after she ended her relationship with her abusive ex-boyfriend, how she phoned her mother after to tell her, with bittersweet relief and delight, “Mom, I was with a guy and he didn’t rape me.”
Annabelle is dating another guy now, a fellow student at her university. They are sleeping together. When Annabelle told her roommate that she was sexually active, her roommate replied that she would pray for her to stop. Annabelle says she responded by telling her: “I know you might be feeling disappointed in me, but you have to realize that this is really important to me. To be able to take back something that was taken from me and make it something beautiful.”
Annabelle’s current relationship is a markedly different experience from her first one. “After I lost my virginity in a consensual relationship, I was like, wait, I don’t feel like I’m not a woman,” she says. “I don’t feel like I’m lesser or like he took anything from me. I feel happy and fine.” It surprised her at first. “I’d been taught that sex is like this horrible, bad, impure thing. But I don’t feel like that’s the case at all now.” That is to say, sex can be good for a woman’s soul.
According to some experts, casual sex might also be good for a woman’s bank balance. In a 2012 essay for the Atlantic, journalist Hanna Rosin argued that hookup culture was “an engine of female progress,” the unspoken secret of young middle-class women’s educational and career successes. “For college girls these days, an overly serious suitor fills the same role an accidental pregnancy did in the nineteenth century,” she wrote, “a danger to be avoided at all costs, lest it get in the way of a promising future.”
Rosin pointed to research by academics Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton, which found that some high-achieving young women were consciously delaying committed relationships for fear that they would compromise their future career prospects. Casual relationships were a way to bridge that gap, to enjoy the physical intimacy and companionship of a conventional relationship without the associated outlay of time and emotion.
“To put it crudely, feminist progress right now largely depends on the existence of a hook-up culture,” Rosin asserted. Her arguments were echoed in a 2013 feature by New York Times journalist Kate Taylor, which contended that young women at elite colleges were eschewing serious dating relationships in favor of committing to a demanding schedule of schoolwork, volunteering, and extracurricular activities. “There’s this hypothetical, ‘I would like to be in a relationship, because it’s, like, comforting and stable and supportive,’ ” Pallavi, a senior at the University of Pennsylvania, told Taylor. “But then, the conversations that I’ve had, it’s always like, ‘Well, then what do I do when we get to May, because we’re graduating, and so where do we go from there?’ ” Pallavi was planning to stay in Philadelphia to pursue a master’s degree after she graduated, and later move elsewhere to do a law degree and PhD. But that, she was aware, was a ten-year undertaking, which was too much to ask anyone to commit to.
For the young women Taylor and Rosin interviewed, casual sex wasn’t just a way of staying focused on their studies. It was an expression of female empowerment. “I definitely wouldn’t say I’ve regretted any of my one-night stands,” a Penn junior, who went only by “A,” told Taylor. “I’m a true feminist. I’m a strong woman. I know what I want.” Another young woman, a Yale sorority girl, told Rosin that she found hookup culture empowering and that she liked the control it gave her. “Guys were texting and calling me all the time, and I was turning them down. I really enjoyed it! I had these options to hook up if I wanted them, and no one would judge me for it.”
Where the old feminine ideal turned women into sexual objects, today women are viewed as sexual subjects. In the English language, the “object” refers to a person or thing to which something happens. An object may be many things—beautiful, cherished, even revered—but it is also necessarily passive. By definition, it cannot act; it can only be acted upon by others. “Subjects,” on the other hand, are dynamic. They are the creators of their own stories, sentient beings with their own desires and motivations.
But subjects are not entirely self-governing, either. The feminist term “objectification” refers to the process by which a three-dimensional human being is reduced to a two-dimensional “thing.” But philosophers also use another term, “subjectification,” to refer to the process by which our sense of self is shaped—not independently, according to our own free will, but by drawing upon the stories, norms, and archetypes that permeate the culture around us. This new brand of femininity, though less destructive than the compliant one, comes with its own set of issues. Sexual objects might be policed by other people, but sexual subjects police themselves, watching and regulating their own behavior in order to create a self-identity that fits the cultural ideal.
In a 2012 article for Psychology and Sexuality, UK academic Kaye Mitchell examines the emergence of the confessional sex blog and erotic memoir, dissecting in detail French art critic Catherine Millet’s The Sexual Life of Catherine M, Brooke Magnanti’s The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl, and Zoe Margolis’s Girl with a One-Track Mind. These stories are sold as bold, real-life examples of female sexual freedom and power, and on the face of it they seem to be just that. But the power exercised in these books isn’t one of self-directed sexual pleasure, Mitchell argues. Rather, she wr
ites, it is “the secondary empowerment that comes with being able to sell yourself successfully.” As Brooke Magnanti observes dryly in Belle du Jour, “Let’s be honest—this is a customer-service position, not a self-fulfillment odyssey.”
The commercial success of these stories, and their resonance with the public—Belle du Jour was later adapted into a television series, while Zoe Margolis now writes for the British newspaper the Guardian—also reinforces the idea that the most interesting stories that women have to share are their sexual ones—that the truth of women’s status in the modern world can be derived from the contents of their sex lives. Mitchell wonders why the memoir, a genre concerned with the creation and articulation of the self, “has for women increasingly become the erotic memoir, and the blog . . . has increasingly become the sex blog.”
Why the stories women are encouraged to tell are so often sexual is a question that Hannah Horvath, the twentysomething memoirist at the heart of the cult HBO series Girls, might ask as well. In the penultimate episode of the show’s second season, Hannah has a meeting with her book editor, who tells her he didn’t finish reading her drafts—not because he didn’t have the time to read them, but because he didn’t want to. “Where’s the pudgy-faced liquid semen and sadness?” he asks, vocally disappointed by her decision to focus her work on friendship rather than sex. “We were talking about Anaïs Nin, you know, your life on your back. Right? That’s actually a great title. My Life on My Back.” If she’s not having sex right now, he suggests, she can “make it up.” “Can you make it a novel?” he proposes eagerly.
Women’s sexual memoirs appeal for the same reason that news stories about spring break, hookup culture, and online pornography do: they play into familiar narratives about the depths and dangers of sexuality, while maintaining an appearance of being transgressive. We hear them as often as we do because they are stories we want to hear. But we only want to hear them from certain types of women.