by Rachel Hills
Jasmine suffers from vulvodynia, a neural condition that causes burning and irritation in the genital region. For some women, the condition is so severe that it is difficult to sit down, but Jasmine’s vulvodynia is concentrated in the ring of muscle that surrounds her vagina, meaning she experiences pain only when she has penetrative sex.
At first Jasmine tried to think her way through the problem, hoping that if she practiced “mind over matter,” the pain would disappear. She thought she might be allergic to latex, so she tried using polyurethane condoms. She visited the campus doctor, who responded by giving her antibiotics for yeast infections. But the pain continued, and it began to take a toll on her relationship. “My partner found it difficult to relate to me,” she recalls. “And I found it hard to talk about because I felt like there was something wrong with me.”
Jasmine and her boyfriend found that they were ill equipped to carve out an erotic life that didn’t look like the straightforward scenarios they’d seen on TV or learned about in sex-ed classes at school. “I think especially when you’re young, you kind of feel like you have something to prove,” she explains. “You feel like in order to be a real man or a real woman, you need to have real, heterosexual sex. And when that doesn’t happen—if for whatever reason you’re thrown out of that paradigm—it’s hard to know who you are or what to do. It can be really scary.”
At first, Jasmine was determined to have a “normal” sex life, but she found it difficult to sustain enthusiasm for sex that felt like sandpaper burning against her skin. “There were times when I wondered if I even had a libido,” she recalls. “I didn’t know what turned me on anymore. If I couldn’t have sex within the narrow definition that society had given me, could I have sex at all? And how could I have a relationship without sex? That’s, like, not even a relationship, right?” she asks dryly.
Jasmine and her boyfriend eventually broke up, and for a long time she felt like her sexuality had gone dormant. It was only a year later, when she briefly dated another guy she had met at college, that she felt like she had gotten her sex drive back. They didn’t attempt intercourse, but the attraction Jasmine felt for him was enough to reassure her that she was still capable of feeling desire, even if her body found it difficult to have penetrative sex.
Now Jasmine’s sex life is dormant once more, and she’s okay with that. Sex isn’t a priority for her right now, and she’d rather put her energies into her studies. And when she does date people occasionally, she focuses her attention on building intimacy through open dialogue and alternate forms of physical intimacy. She is seeing another doctor, though, and trying to get her condition addressed slowly. “I’m unattached right now, so it’s not something I have to deal with on a daily basis,” she explains. “But I would like to get it cleared up before I’m thirty.”
Fake It Til You Make It: Orgasm Inc.
There is a final characteristic of “good sex,” one that hinges not on your ability to provide pleasure but on your capacity to feel it. Leonore Tiefer, the author of Sex Is Not a Natural Act, is also the founder of the New View Campaign, which challenges the medicalization of sex. Over the past three decades, she has noted an increase in what she terms “response anxiety”: a condition experienced by people who “fear they don’t feel enough, that their inner experience isn’t properly passionate.”
In a culture that places so much emphasis on sexual vitality, such concerns are not surprising. Behind our fixation on sexual performance lies a belief in the transformative properties of sexual pleasure. Scientists say an active sex life can boost your immune system, relieve pain, and improve bladder control in women. Psychologists believe it reduces stress, boosts self-esteem, and serves as a natural antidepressant by releasing endorphins into the brain. The free-love evangelist Wilhelm Reich believed that a satisfactory orgasm was a cure for all problems, from individual neurosis to the political fascism that forced him to leave Europe for the United States. But response anxiety isn’t solely a reflection of a culture that places a high value on sexual pleasure. It is also a reflection of a culture that demands the performance of pleasure, irrespective of what is happening to our bodies.
For women especially, part of being seen as good in bed is knowing how to play the role of what sex writer Clarisse Thorn labels “the Sex-Crazy Nympho Dream Girl,” who squirms and moans whenever her partner touches her and is “Super Excited” by whatever her partner wants her to do. The Sex-Crazy Nympho Dream Girl is a character that Thorn learned to play early. “Before I had any actual sexual partners, I knew how to give a good blowjob,” she wrote in a 2011 article for the Good Men Project. “I also knew how to tilt my head back and moan . . . and I knew what my reactions and expressions were supposed to look and sound like—I knew all those things much better than I knew what would make me react.”
Thorn’s critique isn’t about the expression of sexual enthusiasm but the extent to which that enthusiasm can be faked. She is wary of how easily the performance of pleasure can become an acceptable substitute for pleasure itself. “I just got rewarded for it so much,” she tells me when we speak on the phone. “And it’s really hard not to play that role when afterward the person you’re sleeping with tells you you’re amazing.” Even now, she says, it is much more difficult for her to ask for what she wants out of a relationship than it is for her to create “that sexy dream girl shell.”
Thorn is not the only woman to have bought into the idea that her ability to dramatize sexual desire matters as much as, if not more than, her ability to experience it. Lucy, twenty-five, tells me that when she was at college, her sex life was more performative than it was pleasurable. “You make the right noises, you give the right looks, but you’re experiencing it all in the third person. It doesn’t belong to you,” she says. But Lucy’s sexual performances weren’t just a matter of pleasing her partners. They were an expression of hope: that if she faked her pleasure for long enough, eventually she would find someone with whom she wouldn’t have to “act” like she enjoyed sex. She would be able to slip out of the role she was playing and actually enjoy it.
Like being skilled, adventurous, or sexually voracious, performing pleasure helps to construct a socially desirable identity—to become the sort of sexual person you believe you ought to be. As we saw in chapter 4, the current sexual ideal means not just being attractive to others, but demonstrating your desire for and interest in sex. And part of demonstrating that desire means performing great heights of pleasure.
At the heart of this performance lies the orgasm: the objective measure of sexual pleasure and the logical end point to any sexual encounter. In our culture, orgasm is positioned as the “ultimate meeting with our true (sexual) selves,” argues psychologist Annie Potts in her book The Science/Fiction of Sex: Feminist Deconstruction and the Vocabularies of Heterosex—and the ultimate way to gain understanding of another person. Not to orgasm, on the other hand, is to be alienated from an essential aspect of yourself. But not all orgasms are created equally. Orgasms that occur during partnered sex are superior to ones that are a by-product of masturbation. Sex that culminates in mutual orgasm is better than sex in which only one partner orgasms. Orgasms that are man- (or woman-) made are more valid than those that are generated by sex toys. And in a contemporary holdover of the theories of Sigmund Freud, who believed that they were a mark of greater maturity than “infantile” clitoral ones, the vaginal orgasm is still positioned as the crème de la crème of female pleasure. This is despite the fact that 75 percent of women will never reach orgasm from penetration alone.
When Brit, whom we met in chapter 6, started having sex in her midteens, her orgasms ticked all of these boxes. They were loud and enthusiastic, they required no clitoral stimulation, and they always happened at the exact same moment her partner came. There was just one problem: they weren’t real.
Brit faked her orgasms in part because she didn’t want to disappoint her boyfriend. He wanted her to climax, so she did—in exactly the way they had bo
th been socialized to expect her to. But she also faked them to take the pressure off herself. “I would lie about the orgasm, and then I had the freedom to just let the ‘second’ one happen or not, even if for me it was my first,” she recalls. There was no shame in not achieving a second orgasm, but there were great expectations attached to the first.
It was only when she was flicking through a magazine one evening, reading about how some women’s toes clenched when they came and contemplating how she could use this information to improve her performance, that she realized things had gone too far. She told her boyfriend she’d been faking it, and he flipped out. At the time, she found his reaction understandable. “I had lied about it,” she reasons. But, she notes, “There was no move to have a conversation following that about what we could do to make sex more enjoyable. And at least in my experience, sex can be enjoyable without ending in an orgasm.”
Others are less content to go without. The 2011 documentary Orgasm Inc. tracks the race among pharmaceutical companies in the early 2000s to create “a female Viagra.” One of the most fascinating stories in the film is that of Charletta, a sixtysomething woman living in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, who reveals she has had difficulty achieving orgasm her entire life. Diagnosed with female sexual dysfunction (FSD), a catchall term used to describe the struggles with pleasure, arousal, and desire that are experienced by up to 43 percent of American women, Charletta is a regular participant in clinical trials for anything that might aid her condition. The latest of these is a device named the Orgasmatron, a small box, surgically wired to the spine, that is said to stimulate orgasms with the push of a button. Charletta is dismayed by her diagnosis, telling filmmaker Liz Canner, “Not only am I not normal, I am diseased. That sounds real bad.” But she is hopeful that the Orgasmatron will help her achieve the pleasure she desires.
The Orgasmatron doesn’t give Charletta an orgasm, although it does make her left leg twitch. But after having it removed, Charletta reveals something else to Canner: she does in fact have orgasms, and she has been having them all along. Her “dysfunction” is that she has never been able to orgasm in what she describes as “the normal situation”—during penetrative intercourse with her husband. When Canner tells her that most women are unable to orgasm without clitoral stimulation, she is delighted. “That’s wonderful,” she laughs. “To heck with all that disease stuff.”
The last two decades have seen the emergence of a suite of new products and procedures designed to help people achieve greater sexual pleasure and perform better between the sheets. The most famous of these is Viagra, the small blue pill credited with solving male impotence and allowing men to enjoy active sex lives into old age. But there is also the O-Shot, an injection of blood platelets into vaginal tissue to “generate healthier and more functional tissue in the areas of sexual response”; the G-Shot, which injects collagen into the vaginal wall to enhance sensation; and Femprox, a cream designed to enhance the female libido. New York gay lifestyle magazine Next reports that some male porn stars use Caverject, an injectable drug that creates a “superhuman erection.”
These technologies have been marketed as great liberators, which advocates argue will free men and women to enjoy sex without physical limitation. And certainly, treating deficits of desire or pleasure as physiological issues rather than psychological ones has the potential to make them less personal. If you don’t feel like having sex, it doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with your relationship, or worse, with you. It’s an easily solvable medical issue that can be fixed by going to the doctor. But the use of medical rhetoric to discuss sexual issues also serves to entrench ideas of what a “normal” sex life ought to look like. Not experiencing orgasm, not being able to produce an erection on command, and waning interest in sex in a long-term relationship are not just less-than-ideal situations. They are, as Charletta put it, a disease.
And sexual dysfunction is a disease that has the potential to be very profitable indeed. In a 2003 article published in the British Medical Journal, health journalist Ray Moynihan argues that female sexual dysfunction—the condition Charletta was diagnosed with—is a “corporate sponsored” disease, created by pharmaceutical companies to “build markets for new medications” in the wake of the financial success of Viagra. FSD is ill defined, he argues, encompassing everything from waning desire to anxieties regarding sexual performance to difficulty achieving lubrication. What’s more, the claim that 43 percent of American women suffer from it is questionable; the number was achieved by including any woman who has experienced any sort of sexual difficulty for two months or more during the previous year. Even Edward Laumann, the researcher who administered the study, has conceded that many of the women among his 43 percent were “perfectly normal.”
The category of female sexual dysfunction, Moynihan argues, takes what are potentially temporary sexual difficulties and turns them into “diseases” that need to be treated with medical intervention. In addition, it promotes the idea that if you do not desire sex all the time, there must be something wrong with you.
Then there is the matter of what is labeled a sexual dysfunction in the first place. Why is it our bodies that we so readily question, rather than our assumptions of what a “good sex life” is supposed to look like?
More Pleasure, Less Angst
If there is anything “dysfunctional” about our current approach to sex, it does not reside in our bodies, but in the way that we perceive sex and sensuality.
We treat sex as something that can be mechanized and perfected, through the acquisition of skills and techniques, the development of “signature moves,” and a focus on the performance of pleasure rather than the sensation of it. But the problem is not that we are “doing it wrong.” It is that we have been told that there are only a handful of very specific ways to do it right. That “good sex” is whatever looks sexy through a camera or sounds exciting written down on the page, rather than what feels good in our bodies in the moment.
Orgasms aren’t the only route to sexual satisfaction, as many women and men who struggle to climax during sex will happily tell you. Fluffy handcuffs, costumes, and a Kama Sutra’s worth of sexual positions aren’t the only ways to keep your sex life interesting. And checking off three rounds of “spontaneous” sex each week isn’t the only way to measure the vitality of your relationship—or of your life.
Rather than engaging in acts that don’t interest you in order to avoid seeming boring and old-fashioned, the truly “radical” act might be to turn your focus to the sex you actually want to have—however “kinky” or “vanilla” it might be. Rather than assessing the state of your sexual relationships by how often you penetrate or are penetrated by your partner, it might take the pressure off to stop focusing your sex life around intercourse—to make kissing and touching and holding as valid a form of sexual intimacy as what we usually call “sex.”
And finally, as we will soon see, you might shift the focus away from what sex says about who you are and bring it back to how it makes you feel.
8
You Aren’t What You Do: Why We’ve Got It Wrong
If the Sex Myth makes us feel anxious and inadequate, why is its grip on us so powerful? Most of the people I spoke with in the course of writing this book knew on a gut level that there was something wrong with the way that sex is spoken about in our society. They understood that the glossy, stylized images that dominate our media and popular culture were exaggerations that bore little resemblance to the lives of the people they knew. And they believed, deeply and viscerally, that their value and identity lay in something more than how often they had sex, how many people they had slept with, or how adventurous (or not) they were between the sheets. It was why they volunteered to meet and speak with me, in floods of e-mails that numbered almost one thousand.
But being able to identify a false ideal is one thing. To reject it, even in the most vulnerable, uncertain parts of your being, is another. And although the young women and men I i
nterviewed were adept at dissecting social norms and deconstructing their least favorite TV shows, their hearts too often remained open to emotional subterfuge.
Yusuf, the “straight-acting gay man” we met in chapters 2 and 5, knew that he wouldn’t really be shielded from sexual rejection if only he were sufficiently good-looking, but he still felt insecure when he measured his experiences against the gay male ideal. “I often feel like I’m rejected,” he told me, “and I don’t know what to take from that.” Jasmine, the Canadian graduate student for whom intercourse felt like sandpaper, was armed with a catalog of feminist theory, but she was still uncertain of how to carve out an erotic identity when she was unable to have what most people thought of as “sex.” Katie, the lapsed abstinence pledger we met in chapter 6, understood intellectually that her value wasn’t bound up in her virginity, but on an emotional level, she believed it was the only thing that made her special.
I still feel those same contradictions between intellect and emotion myself, albeit not as much as I once did. I can tell you the cultural and historical origins of every negative or limiting belief about sex that I have. I can throw studies and statistics at you designed to prove that you, and I, and everyone reading this are just fine the way we are. I can tell you that there are other people experiencing the same fears and challenges you are, whatever your challenges might look like. And indeed, you could argue that I have done just that over the course of this book.