by Rachel Hills
One of the most common criticisms of the new, sexually fearless feminine ideal is that it doesn’t apply equally to all women. The women who are celebrated as empowered sexual subjects are usually young, thin, white, and heterosexual. Women who deviate from this model—who are older, fat, or have a disability, for example—still find their sexuality marginalized, whether it is framed as a problem, dismissed as revolting, or ignored entirely.
One reason Priya derives such a sense of power from casual sex is because it defies the expectations people have of her as a young woman of South Asian heritage. “The first guy I slept with asked me if he had ruined my arranged marriage,” she reveals with a mix of horror and amusement. Priya’s ethnicity shapes her sense of what it means to be a sexually powerful woman in other ways, too. When I ask her what sexual liberation means to her, she laughs and tells me, “Just being able to go out and stuff without people judging.” Many of the taxi drivers in the city in which Priya lives are Indian, she explains, “and when they see that I’m Indian, too, they ask questions, like: What are your parents doing letting you out this late?” For Priya, being sexually active is a way to take control of her social life and live on her own terms.
The question of which women are cast as independent sexual agents and which are pitied is also tied to class. For upper-middle-class women, to be visibly and actively sexual is viewed as an expression of empowerment and self-determination. In magazines like Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, and Glamour, sex forms part of a bigger aspirational “lifestyle” package, perched alongside a high-status career path, close-knit friendships, and access to designer clothes and shoes as symbols of female power.
When an upper-middle-class woman takes pole-dancing classes, wears a short skirt, or experiments with swinging or BDSM, she is read as being modern and edgy. When a poorer woman does the same things, she is seen as tacky, distasteful, or worse, dangerous. As part of their Christmas 2011 campaign, the UK luxury retailer Harvey Nichols released a commercial showing a succession of young women, mostly aged in their late teens and early twenties, making their way home in the early hours of the morning after a night out. Stockings torn and high heels in hand, they tug at their skirts—suddenly too short now that the sun has come up—to keep themselves from showing too much flesh. “Avoid the walk of shame this season . . .” the advertisement urges, before cutting to a slim, slightly older woman making the same journey in a designer dress and immaculate hair and makeup. She smiles and says hello to the mailman before entering her riverside apartment.
The wealthier woman in the Harvey Nichols ad presumably stayed out just as late as the younger, poorer ones; the sun is rising and the postman is already at work when she arrives home. And she may well have drunk just as much, or had just as much or as little sex as they did. But because her dress is more expensive and her body is model thin, her night out is positioned as aspirational, where the other women are objects of ridicule—sending the message that it is not the act itself that is trashy, but the dress and demeanor of the person doing it.
These contradictions filter through from popular culture into real life. A 2014 study by Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton found that “slut-shaming”—the practice of attacking a woman for being or appearing sexual—is less a reflection of how many people a woman has had sex with than of her economic class and social status. Although the more affluent women Armstrong and Hamilton spoke with had a higher number of sexual partners on average than their middle- and working-class counterparts (and were far more likely to engage in casual sex), it was the poorer women who were labeled sluts.
Slut-shaming, they argued, was not a punishment for engaging in stigmatized sexual behavior, but for “failure to successfully perform an affluent femininity”—to wear the right clothes, date the right guys, and socialize in the right circles. One young woman was even labeled a “slut” for the crime of eating ketchup for dinner. “She has some issues,” her classmates said, laughing.
The fun, fearless, and sexually liberated feminist might be the prevailing ideal of our times, but she remains an ideal that only a small subset of women—chiefly those who are young, white, and middle-class—are permitted to lay claim to.
Rewriting “Girl Power”
Of course, even if a woman does have permission to approach sex in this way—if her mind is assessed as sufficiently self-determining, if her body is deemed desirable—that doesn’t necessarily mean she will want to. A model of sexual freedom that requires having as much sex as you can, minimizing your emotional attachments, and looking as conventionally “hot” as possible while you’re doing it might not be the one that feels most free to her.
She might prefer to be monogamous, or to only have sex when she meets someone she really, really likes—or even loves. She might find it more “empowering” to be judged on her heart or mind instead of on her sexual appeal or appetite. She might find her freedom in dressing in a manner that pleases her when she looks in the mirror, whether it makes her attractive to other people or not. She might prefer not to have sex at all.
More so than men, the ways that women are expected to be sexual closely track our hopes and ideals about the role of sex in our society at any given time. So it is little surprise, then, that as we have moved from a culture that idealizes sexual restraint to one that celebrates sexual freedom and autonomy, so too have our female ideals become more “free” and autonomous. On the whole this has been a positive shift that has allowed many women to seek out and enjoy sex with less shame or fear of censure. But it has also created new sources of shame and anxiety, and like the old feminine ideal, the new one still places sexuality at the core of a woman’s femininity.
Nor is the new fun and fearless feminist as self-governing as she might at first seem. She may be a subject rather than an object, the author of her own sexual stories, but she does not write those stories or make her choices in a vacuum. The ways in which she can choose to exercise her “freedom” are determined by the options available to her—set out not only by her class, her race, and the shape of her body, but by her knowledge of how each sexual choice she makes will be responded to and how she wishes to be perceived.
True female sexual autonomy doesn’t just necessitate the right for women to have sex without stigma or judgment, although this is of course important. It also needs to entail the right to confidently not have sex when it is unwanted or unavailable on the terms she might prefer. And ultimately, it means rejecting the idea that there are only two options for explaining women’s engagement with sex—that any of us are either wholly “pure” or “empowered,” innocent Madonna or self-assured Gaga.
7
Use It or Lose It: The Performance Premium
To succeed under the Sex Myth, it is not enough to be sexually active. The sex you are having must be of a particular type. Good sex is exciting and spontaneous, a product of passion rather than duty or routine. It is novel and inventive (never boring), taking everyone involved to sublime heights of pleasure. Glossy magazines, sex advice columns, and pornography teach us that “good sex” is a skill that is essential not only to attracting a partner and maintaining a relationship, but to our competence as human beings.
In the summer of 2013, Los Angeles–based tech company Ardenturous LABS launched a mobile phone application to help us assess just how good the sex we are having really is. Cheekily titled Spreadsheets, the sound-and-motion-sensitive tool measures how often you have sex, how long each session lasts, and the average number of “thrusts per minute,” allowing users to keep a record of their average, peak, and aggregate performances—and improve their sexual prowess in the process. Users can earn points for “achievements” like morning sex, sex that lasts longer than forty minutes, or having sex more than five times in one day.
Ardenturous wasn’t the first company to use technology to monitor and improve our sex lives, and it won’t be the last. Kindu, a phone app released in 2009, helps couples talk about which positions, fetishes, and other ac
tivities they might like to explore by surveying their responses to more than eight hundred sex acts. Another app, Kahnoodle, sends users push notifications to their phones to remind them when it is time to initiate sex. In 2014, one enterprising design student announced his intention to use Google Glass to create a program that would give people the ability to watch themselves having sex through the eyes of their lover. Think of it as a high-tech, twenty-first-century version of the mirror on the ceiling.
When Spreadsheets launched in 2013, the media response to it was less than enthused. The Huffington Post called it “possibly the least sexy app we’ve ever heard of,” while tech blog Betabeat declared that “if you need an app to figure this out, you’re probably not [good in bed].” But although the particular criteria Spreadsheets tracks might not be to everyone’s tastes, the model of “good sex” it depicts is decidedly more common. The sex Spreadsheets rewards its users for having is long lasting, frequent, penetrative, and lightly transgressive—the same traits that are prized elsewhere in our culture. The app is not a humorous oddity but a reflection of an existing drive for more and better sex.
In part, these standards have developed because of the sheer amount of sexual information we now have at our fingertips. We know more about our bodies and how they work than we used to, and we are also more aware of the sheer breadth of sexual possibilities than we were previously. We don’t take bad sex lying down. “It’s no longer normal to accept sexual dissatisfaction,” observes Pete, the smart, sensitive Seattleite we met briefly in chapter 4.
Just as the Sex Myth’s elevation of sex as an act unlike any other can inflame anxieties about how “normal” or attractive we are, so too can it foster a sense of inadequacy when it comes to our pursuit and experience of pleasure. As UK sociologists Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott put it in a 2004 article for the academic journal Sexualities, “[T]o be bad at sex is almost to fail as a human being.” This pressure can manifest in performance anxiety—for example, in the reports of young men who pop a Viagra before casual sex to make sure they rise to the occasion—but they also shape our expectations of how our bodies should respond to pleasure. A 2011 study found that women made the most noise during sex not when they were about to orgasm, but when they believed their partners were. And it’s not just women who perform pleasure in this way, either. A 2010 study by researchers at the University of Kansas found that 28 percent of sexually active men had faked an orgasm at some point.
There is nothing wrong with wanting sex that is pleasurable, challenging, and fulfilling. But the sex we have been sold under the Sex Myth is not just a pleasure but an imperative, something we must do—two to three times a week, in a variety of different places, styles, and positions—in order to be a good lover and an adequate human being. This chapter examines some of the key traits we are told are necessary for a good sex life, from the continual quest for new knowledge and adventure to the invention of new sexual dysfunctions and diseases.
Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger
A good lover knows how to please their partner and what makes their own body tick. They keep up to date with the latest sexual trends and techniques, and take joy in applying them to their own encounters. Their knowledge reflects not just their skill and experience in the bedroom but the effort they invest into their sex lives. They are informed about sex because they know that sex matters. And if you don’t have the same familiarity with anatomy and technique that they do, there is an entire industry of media, celebrity therapists, and other lifestyle experts lining up to relieve you of your inexperience.
Follow their advice, and you will “reap the blissful benefits.” Ignore it, and you risk becoming a sexual failure, doomed to dreary relationship sex, unfulfilling one-night stands, or involuntary celibacy. As one 2013 article in Maxim put it, if you want sex with the same person more than once, you’d best get it right the first time.
That there is an industry around sex advice at all reflects a simple fact: our bodies may be designed for sex, but few people are equipped to have good sex without at least a few initial pointers on anatomy and technique. At a time when most formal sex education is focused on preventing pregnancy and STDs, informal sex education of the kind proffered in popular sex books or magazines like Cosmopolitan, Men’s Health, or Glamour fills an important gap, covering information on pleasure and technique that you won’t find in most textbooks.
But popular sex advice is not solely about enhancing pleasure. It is also a form of labor, a series of tasks that must be completed, not for money or some other concrete reward, but for the emotional reward of being a good partner or successful individual. Sex is not just a form of recreation but a project for developing a desirable self-identity, not unlike the self-improvement work involved in the other arenas these publications cover, like fitness, beauty, or building a professional career that is also glamorous and fun.
In a 2012 article published in Glamour, sex bloggers Em & Lo present a tongue-in-cheek adaptation of the traditional women’s magazine summer diet plan, describing sex as “the easiest—and most fun—way to get a bikini body.” Just like weight loss, they explain, an active sex life can have a host of health benefits, including “less stress, more intimacy, improved mood, better body image, heightened relationship bliss, a recharged libido, and one very grateful man.”
The parallels between sex and food continue throughout the article. Like a diet, Glamour’s “summer sex plan” runs over four weeks, with six sex-related activities to complete each week. Activities are categorized using food metaphors. “Appetizers” are small tasks designed to get you in the mood for sex. “Lie-down meals” are for when you have the time to “properly indulge.” “Decadent desserts” help readers to be “adventurous with everything from toys to kink.” Activities are recommended for their fat-burning properties, with readers advised to “go long” because “an hour of sex burns 170 calories” or to reach for their partner instead of reaching for sweets during TV commercial breaks.
These parallels are clearly intended to be humorous, and it works—the article is clever and funny. But like a weight-loss plan, it also treats sex as a series of assignments to “accomplish” and “complete.” Only instead of dining on carrot sticks or going for a run after work, the tasks are to send a dirty text message, pin your partner against the wall, and go outside to kiss the next time it rains, just like in the movies. And just like a diet, these activities are designed to create results. “Using a plan is great, because it takes on a life of its own,” reader Michelle, thirty, tells the magazine. “Even on days when I didn’t really want sex, I did want to tick the box and say I’d completed the task.”
It is not just women’s magazines that blur the lines between work and play when it comes to sex. Men’s Health offers workout tips to improve sexual “power, endurance, and control,” advising: “Like many a sport, sex is a legs game, and this position [having sex while standing up] is a case in point. ‘It requires a mixture of isometric strength in your legs to hold her weight, and enough power in the tank to create the thrusting motion,’ says [personal trainer] Cathy Brown . . . ‘What’s more, you’ll need to hold her up with your arms for quite some time, so strength in your forearms and biceps is key.’ ” Incorporating the right moves into your exercise routine, it promises, will make you better at sex.
Both men’s and women’s magazines assume that their readers are sexually active and experienced. Cosmopolitan presents its readers with a “summer sex bucket list,” reasoning that “if you’re going to be having lots of sex”—as Cosmopolitan readers presumably will be over the summer—“how do you stop it from becoming same-same?” FHM advises readers on “how to close the deal with beautiful women,” with a cast of female characters drawn straight from a porn film: the new intern at work, the “hot friend,” and the best friend’s younger sister among them.
In publications targeted at both men and women, sex forms part of a broader “taste culture,” as Finnish communications researcher K
aarina Nikunen describes it, that binds readers together as part of the same tribe. Doing sex in the “right” way is just as important—if not more—to being a Cosmo girl or a Maxim man as wearing the right clothes, having the right kind of job, or going to the right parties. It is an ideal that means not only being sexually active and experienced but also constantly seeking to improve your sexual abilities. Like the old adage “you can never be too rich or too thin,” you can never be too good at sex, either. There is always room for improvement, no matter how much you know or how well you perform.
Being Boring: The Rise of Lifestyle Kink
Being literate in anatomy and technique will score you a passing grade in the school of sexual adequacy. But to truly excel requires an additional layer of commitment: to novelty, innovation, and avoiding being seen as “boring” at all costs. It means not just being, as the celebrated sex columnist Dan Savage puts it, “good, giving, and game,” but actively seeking to expand the ground on which sex is played. An interest in trying new things is considered a skill in and of itself, a sign that you are worth the time and effort to have sex with.
As we have become increasingly well educated in the basics of human sexual response, standing out as a sexual partner means upping your game. And being exceptionally good in bed doesn’t just mean knowing how to produce a mind-blowing orgasm—it means being creative with positions, locations, and your own fantasies. The same media outlets that push the need to be sexually skilled also promote a diluted, mass-market brand of “kink,” advocating once-transgressive acts such as BDSM, threesomes, sex in public places, and more as ways to enliven both long-term relationships and casual hookups.