American Pie - a secretly sex positive film?

In my constant search for pop culture artefacts that aren't horrifically sexist, perhaps I've become desperate or lowered my standards, but re-watching American Pie as it happened to pop up on my TV the other night, it struck me that what is often seen as nothing more than a gross-out teen movie is actually surprisingly sex positive.

Caveat: obviously it's a film about nice-looking, able-bodied, white, heterosexual kids in one of the richest countries of the world. We're not going to be able to get away from that, I'm afraid. But for what it is, I was struck by how, nearly 18 years since I first went to see it at the cinema, this film contains a lot of secretly feminist attitudes to sex.

1) It acknowledges that girls masturbate and have sex drives of their own

Firstly, through the conversations between Vicky (Tara Reid) and Jessica (Natasha Lyonne), which also propel the movie past the boundary for passing The Bechdel Test. Granted, they start off talking about whether Vicky's boyfriend Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholas) has ever given her an orgasm (and pretty realistically for a 17/18 year-old couple without sexual experience the answer is no), but the conversation then moves on to the more likely scenario of Vicky giving herself an orgasm. Jessica clearly has played solo before, Vicky is slightly scandalised at the thought of loving herself. And the exchange premiered the wonderful euphemism for female masturbation "to double click one's mouse." Women not talking about men but instead about how they can please themselves? Feminist and sex positive tick!

Secondly, through Nadia (Shannon Elizabeth)'s explorations when she's on her own in Jim (Jason Biggs)'s bedroom, a scene which also acknowledges that women also look at, and get off on, porn as she helps herself to some of his magazines to aid the experience. And finally, through the revelation Michelle makes when Jim is sitting next to her at the prom after party, bored senseless by her band camp stories, and she tells him that she used her flute as a dildo, causing him to spit his drink everywhere in shock. She shrugs "You think I don't know how to get myself off? That's half of what band camp is," speaking to a million horny teen girls tired of not seeing their own desires, but rather only those of boys, represented on screen.

2) It tells teen boys that they're douchebags if they try to pressure girls into bed

So, the boys' sex pact may seem a bit problematic: Kevin's rousing speech ("No longer shall our penises remain flaccid and unused!") contains some elements of entitlement, as if the boys are owed sex and girls should give it to them. However, the whole premise of the film is that it isn't going to be that simple; the boys are going to have treat girls like human beings if they stand a chance of getting themselves sexual partners.

This is emphasised on several occasions. Firstly, through Jessica's conversation with Kevin, where she tests him by advising him that telling Vicky he loves her is the best way to get her into bed. "That's how I was duped," she adds, and Kevin immediately responds that he doesn't want to "dupe" Vicky, but rather to please her. Jessica recommends giving her what she's never had before...

...which leads to Kevin calling up his older brother Tom for advice. Rather than us seeing blokey blusterings, the two have a surprisingly sensitive conversation where Tom says he's not interested in helping if Kevin is just trying to get his girl into bed. Again, Kevin emphasises that this isn't the case, and. as if Kevin has proven himself worthy of the knowledge, Tom then gives him access to the 'bible' of sex tips hidden in the school library, compiled by generations of boys. The most important section? The "Home of the Tongue Tornado", which although slightly terrifyingly named, leads me to the fact...

3) It acknowledges that for many women, oral sex is the best way to an orgasm

It's already been established that Vicky hasn't experienced an orgasm, either at her partner's hands or her own, but this all changes once Kevin goes down on her. Cue the pretty shonky joke where Vicky's dad comes to her bedroom door to call her down to dinner, and thinks her cries of "I'm coming, I'm coming!!" are her response, when of course it's because Kevin's down south working hard with his tongue. But considering how many books or movies make out that penetrative sex alone will always and easily lead to an orgasm for women--Yo, Sex and the City! Yo, Fifty S***** of ****!--American Pie is pretty damn good at emphasising the reality; that for the vast majority of women, just having a penis inside them ain't going to cut it. When Vicky and Kevin later do have sex, it definitely doesn't seem like an orgasmic experience for her--which again, is a pretty realistic depiction of first time sex, especially between two inexperienced teenagers.

4) It emphasises safer sex

Think how many sex scenes you've seen on TV or in films interrupted by characters stopping and searching for a condom (not including the likes of Grease or  Knocked Up, where lack of protection is central to the plot). Then think how many more you've seen where contraception is never mentioned, hinted at or used at all, but the characters just glide from kissing to foreplay to penetration with nary an awkward scrabble around in the nightstand or the guy stopping to put a condom on. I'm guessing the latter group is much bigger. The amount of films that never show even a quick "are you on the pill?" or "have you been tested?" conversation is depressing, and makes it irritating that the porn industry gets blamed for irresponsible sexual behaviour when Hollywood carries just as much of that blame, if not more, for making out that contraception and STI protection somehow magically happens without anyone ever talking about it or hopping out of bed to "wrap it up before you slap it up" (copyright Tim Westwood, some terrible lost time in the 90s). American Pie, by contrast, shows the four boys making their sex pact official by swearing on a box of condoms, which they all then take some of, and we later see Jim having a good old look at one of his rubber friends, Kevin pocketing a condom before the prom, and also Michelle having brought her own condoms to the after party.

5) It shows first time sex in a variety of ways, good and bad

Hollywood is rarely good with nuance, and subtlety definitely isn't what you expect from a gross-out teen sex comedy. Yet by showing the four different teen boys having four very different experiences, American Pie dodges the trap of depicting first time sex as either all doves cooing and choirs singing or all awkwardness and inconvenient bodily fluids. As mentioned above, Kevin and Vicky's experience is a bit quiet, a bit painful, but nothing terrible; it's pretty much how you'd expect it to go for two first-timers. Oz and Heather have the more stereotypically sensual experience with lots of slow, lingering touches and loving looks, all against the background of a beautiful lake, but (we later find out) don't 'go all the way'. Which is kind of nice in itself, seeing how goal-focused and phallocentric our definition of sex can be; it's important to see all the other things you can do with a partner depicted as appealing, without it necessarily having to end in PIV. It also sees Oz telling Heather about the sex pact and admitting he doesn't care about it; being with her is more important than reaching a 'goal' of sex to impress his friends (could we ask for any more 'right-on' behaviour from a horny teen boy?!). Finch, as we all remember with a smirk, discovers a mutual attraction with Mrs Stiffler and, having found an older woman the right match for his maturity (which is usually read by his peers as eccentricity) ends up having great fun on a pool table. And of course Jim is met with the highly sexual, confident Michelle, which again emphasises that teen girls have sex drives all of their own and a sexuality that isn't constructed as a passive response to male desire.

****

So yeah, there's still the pie scene, and the jizz-in-the-beer scene, and the coining of the term "MILF", and the usual homophobic ribbing one expects from teen boys (although this is confined to Stiffler, who we're generally supposed to see as an idiot anyway). But in amongst all that are a lot of sexual politics more progressive than in many films I see today, 18 years later. While some things need to stay in the late 90s - dial-up internet, belly chains, Aaron Carter's pop career, all-white, all-straight teen movies - there's clearly a lot of other stuff that we in the jaded 21st Century could still stand to learn from the class of '99.

More on Pleasure and Pressure

I wanted to give a shout-out to this excellent Bustle article, titled "Are Vaginal Orgasms a Myth?" for summing up the conflicting anxieties about their sexuality to which modern women are subjected. Situated somewhere between Cosmo, self-help guides, porn and reality, the pursuit of female pleasure remains a complex one. As Gabrielle Moss points out, even women who feel that they're pretty in touch with their sexuality are still made to feel like failures for not being able to tick certain boxes (pun sooo very intended) "I think of myself as someone with a pretty good handle on my genitals, literally and figuratively — I can knock out as many as 15 normal orgasms a day...But I’ve never been able to quite wrap my arms — or legs — around the issue of the vaginal orgasm. And yes, it bothers me."

 

I think it bothers a lot of us. Considering yourself liberated from the socially imposed toxicity of body shaming and sex negativity, which bombards us with so many conflicting messages that a logician would weep - be sexy but not for yourself! Act sexual but don't have sex! Have sex but only do it to please men! Have multiple screaming orgasms but only so your partner feels manly! Actually wait, don't do any of that, cos that means you're a big whore! - is a precarious state to occupy. It can so easily be unseated by an unwelcome piece of information about the type of sex acts that everyone else is performing, or the kind of orgasms everyone else must be having, or pretty much anything that you're not doing. Because our society is prescriptive. It likes to tell us what we should be doing, and make us feel bad if we're not doing that thing. A big reason for that, I've always been convinced, is capitalism. Satisfied people don't buy stuff. Anxious, afraid people who constantly fear being deemed inadequate buy lots of stuff to try and address that inadequacy. But there'll always be something newer, shinier and better to aspire to. And that's how the money machine keeps on churning.

 

So what is the relevance to sex? Well, as Moss puts it, our culture is highly invested in keeping women in a state of perpetual anxiety about their sexuality. If we were to stop, hang up our vibrators and say "Whew, 15 orgasms in a day, I think I can leave it there!" then Ann Summers, most women's magazines, lingerie manufacturers, porn producers, sex therapists and sex manual authors would all go out of business. As Moss also points out, there is a long and pretty sexist tradition of women's orgasms either being disregarded altogether, or ignored if they don't originate from penetration of the vagina by a penis. Women have both feminists and sexologists to thank for deconstructing this myth, otherwise we might still be lying around wondering why our experiences are nothing like those of the women in porn, who Moss notes always unfailingly "exploded into screaming orgasms if you simply penetrated their vaginas." I'd also like to blame Sex and the City for perpetuating the latter myth, as there seem to be hours of footage of Samantha climaxing from just a few thrusts while magically never touching her clitoris - there may be some ways in which that show was feminist, but in terms of realistic depiction of how women come? BIG fail.

 

And yet, as Moss writes, there's still always another study emerging that says vaginal orgasms are real, and if you haven't had one, well damn girl, you just can't be trying hard enough! And as she also goes on to say, "The problem with most of the advice out there about how to have a vaginal orgasm is that a lot of it amounts to “Figure out how to have a vaginal orgasm, and then go have one.”

 

Yupppp. I'm so glad someone has finally said this. Cos you know what, supposedly friendly dispensers of sex advice? I KNOW where my G spot is. Funnily enough, I know where everything is down there, as one would hope after 31 years in this body. I know what makes me come, and what leave me utterly indifferent, and what actually just chafes. And do you know what pressing on my G spot does?

 

I'll let Moss answer this one:

 

"I read New Age guides to finding your G-spot, but all jabbing around at my vaginal walls ever did was make me have to pee." 

 

And speaking as someone who already has an overactive bladder, that is in no way ever, ever fun.

 

That's the problem, though. Pretty much all sex advice on trying to have a vaginal orgasm ends at the point of finding that supposedly elusive spot. No one dares suggest that once you've found it, touching it may not only not feel orgasm-inducing, but may actually feel kind of uncomfortable and weird. Someone really needs to address the false epistemic leap between "find G spot" and "amazing sensations will follow". After all, given the right instructions, I'm sure I could locate Glasgow city centre - but actually having a good time there? Well, that just may be something you can't guarantee.

 

So why, as Moss wonders, will no advice on vaginal orgasms ever just fess up and say  that if touching your G spot "doesn’t feel pretty darn good, you are shit out of luck; you don’t have any sensitive tissue there, and you’re definitely not going to have a vaginal orgasm. Sowwy!”  Why, she asks, do even supposedly feminist and female-friendly sex toy stores such as Toys in Babeland, refuse to "admit that there is a chance that you are just not built for this?"

 

This is where sex positivity is a double-edged sword. The expectation that our bodies perform like three-ring circuses is not feminist, or sex positive - it's prescriptive, limiting and attempts to shoehorn the preferences of 3.5 billion individuals into one-size-fits-all advice. But being a feminist and having sex with men can be a tricky balancing act. As Moss writes "My boyfriend knows I have stowed away my attempts to have a vaginal orgasm in the same box in the attic where I store my old Von Dutch hat and Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle DVD, but I knew part of him was always bummed about it." Yup, I hear that. Sounds like the similar kind of 'bummed-out' that men have experienced when they find that however diligently they attend to me (or think they're attending to me...), they can't get a screaming porngasm out of me without my help. And it is frustrating. It would be lovely for sex to involve simultaneous orgasms, but c'mon, it's like expecting the same behaviour out of a dog and a cat, and whoever propagated the idea that sex is only good if both partners go off like rockets at the same time really does need putting up against a wall and, if not shooting, then at least smacking around with a large vibrator for a bit.

But the guilt is pernicious. Moss says that her partner was clearly subject to a different angle of the same pressure, feeling that "If he were a real man, a “good lover,” he’d be able to “give” me vaginal orgasms, the same way that if I were a “real” woman, I’d be able to have them." As heterosexual feminists, we want to balance the importance of the world knowing "YO, FOLKS! VAGINAS EXPERIENCE PLENTY OF PLEASURE THAT AIN'T GOT SHIT TO DO WITH HAVING PENISES INSIDE THEM!!" with the fact that we have sex with men and we enjoy it. Because it's not a zero-sum game - just because you don't experience vaginal orgasms (or indeed, if like Moss and I, you question whether they even exist) it doesn't mean you don't enjoy penetrative sex per se. C'mon, there's a reason a lot of vibrators are man-shaped - and it's not just about the phallocentric patriarchy, because women don't generally waste their money on sex toys that fail get them off - it's cos they feel good. It was Germaine Greer in the 70s first pointed out that orgasms with something inside you can feel a helluva lot better than ones without, but why has this idea since been twisted to mean that women should be seeing God just because someone penetrates our vaginas but does nothing to our clitorises (or should that be clitori??)?

As Moss puts it, "Vaginal orgasms are like the AP exams of sex: a totally nonsense test that claims to measure your worth and actually measures nothing, but a test that people get obsessed with nonetheless." And it's that kind of obsession that is the most sex-negative of all, because it stops you seeing sex as fun, and makes you start seeing it as a goal-oriented box-ticking exercise. Which is precisely the opposite of what feminists have been fighting for in the battle to free women's sexuality from being viewed as nothing other than something to please men, or something to censor, or repress, or punish, or commodify. Everything else in society is already a test for women - our appearances, our relationships, our careers, why subject our private pleasure to the same insane scrutiny? "Who was I trying to impress with my vaginal orgasms? My boyfriend? The ghost of Sigmund Freud? God? I’m pretty sure all three already think whatever they’re going to think of me, and that a hands-free orgasm isn’t going to change anything. It was just going to change me into a crabby monster who hated sex."

I'm glad Moss wrote this article, because it speaks a lot of sense that's just simply not heard enough among this cacophony of sometimes well-meaning, sometimes deliberately undermining, sex advice for women. So I'll leave the last words to her:

"I can’t have a vaginal orgasm. Maybe you can’t have a vaginal orgasm, either. And you know what? Who cares. 

 

It doesn’t make you more or less liberated, more or less sexy, more or less fun. Being able to have vaginal orgasms doesn’t make you a special little flower — that’s a conspiracy ginned up by old-fashioned sex advice and porn. Don’t buy it. Because whatever kind of orgasm you’re having? It’s already perfect." 

"Revenge porn" can't exist without sexism

The concept of "revenge porn" - the act of someone, usually male, posting naked or sexually explicit images/video of their ex-partner, usually female, online in order to humiliate and distress them, is in the news today. Yesterday it was reported that the UK Justice Secretary is considering new laws in order to tackle this distasteful trend, and empower victims rather than leaving them with bewildered police telling them "there's nothing we can do about it." I've been listening to discussions about revenge porn on Radio 1 and 2 today, with comments ranging from "It happened to me and was horrendous" (mostly from women) to "If you're silly enough to let someone take naked pictures of you, you get what you deserve" (funnily enough, that one was from a man). In between all the hand-wringing about whether today's selfie-crazed generation no longer has any concept of privacy and are therefore all hopelessly naïve to expect that intimate pictures stay private, very few people have raised the question of why exactly "revenge porn" has such a devastating effect on its (usually female) victims.

 

The only article I've seen that touches on this was today's piece by Dr Brooke Magnanti, who writes "We need to assess why, exactly, revenge porn is considered so humiliating and so embarrassing in the first place. In a nutshell it is because so many people believe that a woman who has ever been naked in front of a camera is and should be dehumanised to the point of being seen as a slut." This, to me, goes to the heart of the issue, and I can't believe Magnanti is the only one pointing it out. Why do we still expect grown women to be so ashamed of the fact that they - gasp - sometimes take off their clothes and have sex? Why do we shame them for wanting to show themselves to their partner in an erotic manner? Why do we deem the hundreds of men who think it's acceptable to send women they've never met pictures of their penises on online dating sites merely a subject for gentle laughter, while we judge and sneer at women who trustingly send explicit pictures or videos to their intimate partner as naïve daft cows who deserve everything they get?

 

"Revenge porn" is a self-perpetuating concept. Shame and humiliation is the expected result, and it's what the victims duly display. But why? Why is the evidence that an adult has been sexually active seen as more shameful and disgusting than say, evidence that they were a homophobe? An anti-Semite? There are plenty of acts that can be caught on video or picture that are shameful - harming our fellow human beings, especially children, or animals, or being cruel, rude, bigoted and selfish. Posing in our natural state and indulging in consensual erotic acts with another adult should not be viewed on the same level as the many terrible things human beings can and do carry out every day.

 

Now, that's not to say any of us want our parents, grandparents, children, employers or friends to see us naked or having sex. It's a pretty icky thought (not to mention one that goes both ways - I want to know LESS THAN NOTHING about my parents' sex lives, thanks very much!). But, let's be grown-up about it for a second. We're all adults. We know the majority of us are sexually active. If we happen to stumble across concrete evidence of that, it may put you off your dinner, but what harm has actually been done? We all have parents who have seen us naked, squalling, shitting, pissing and puking. We all have friends who have seen us drunkenly shape-throwing to the The Final Countdown and dribbling Blue WKD down our fronts. We may be lucky to have grown up in a pre-internet era when all of this wasn't captured and distributed online for all to see, but unless we are celebrities, it's unlikely that we care much about how people perceive us beyond our immediate circle anyway.

 

My point is, the 'shame' we expect women to feel over their naked form being spread over Tumblr or Facebook is in direct proportion to the shame we expect women to feel for being sexual, full stop. And this is nothing but full-blown sexist hypocrisy. Our society demands that women sexualise themselves at every turn - but never for themselves. And despite women's magazines effectively churning out a never-ending parade of advice on how to please a man, should a woman actually send erotic images of herself to her male partner with the objective of doing just that, she must be condemned for it. Confused? Yeah, I would be too - if I let the tidal wave of misogynist hogwash that still colours our media dictate my behaviour.

 

So let me come out and say something that sadly still constitutes revolutionary words in Britain, 2014. I'm a 30 year-old sexually active woman. I have sex with men. I get naked. I sometimes wear things considered 'sexy', and display my body in ways that might be considered 'erotic' or even 'explicit', sometimes for my pleasure, sometimes for that of my partner, very often for both. If there are any adults in my life who don't know that, they would have to have been sleeping under a very big rock for over a decade. If pictures of me indulging in any the above acts were to appear on the internet, it would be embarrassing, sure. Of course I wouldn't want my family, friends or employers seeing such images, (and not just because it's often that when you think you look your sexiest, you actually look like a sockful of clothespegs - yet another reason I haven't fallen prey to the selfie cult), but I'd like to think I could get over it once all the sniggering stopped. Because what's really to be ashamed of? I have a body. I have a sex life. Big fucking deal. Post a video online of me kicking a cat to death, and I'll rightly be ashamed, go into hiding and be chased with pitchforks. But till then, fuck the very idea of "revenge porn". Because without sexist beliefs that sex, nudity and being sexual is degrading to women, it couldn't exist. 

The Complications of Compliments

"If it's not too anti-feminist to say this...."

"Can I be horrendously sexist for a minute?"

"I'm about to say something misogynistic..."

 

These are not phrases that immediately precede words of terrible sexism, as one might think. It's entirely understandable that that's exactly what you're expecting to hear, as we all know that as soon as someone utters the words "I'm not racist, but....", they're guaranteed to finish the sentence with a proclamation of racial prejudice. Ditto "I'm not a homophobe, but...", "I've got nothing against them, but..." and all other passive-aggressive forms of expressing bigotry.

 

However, these three phrases were uttered by men in my life, intelligent men who know that any expression of sexism to my ears will be met with a rebuke so forceful it will burn their faces off, so one might expect them to tread a bit more carefully than the average caveman who complains about gays or people with brown skin or thinks sexist jokes are a way to impress a woman. And you'd be right. What followed the three phrases above were not jokes about washing up or domestic violence, not proclamations that the gender pay gap is just women's fault for wanting to have babies, not suggestions that wearing a short skirt is 'asking for it' nor any of the garden-variety expressions of misogyny that one unfortunately still encounters far too often in this supposedly progressive society. Instead, two were compliments about my appearance, and the other was an admission from a male friend that he had had sexual thoughts about a woman he saw that day.

 

So why such caution in expressing these non-earth-shattering thoughts? Has the stereotype of feminism as hostile to all matters sexual and appearance-based really permeated so far that even the smart, feminist-friendly men in my life are afraid to say "You look nice today?" or "I found the woman in front of me in the queue attractive?".

 

If it has, I'm not going to blame feminism for this misunderstanding. To my mind, it's pretty easy to understand. Feminism never made it a crime to comment on a woman's appearance. What feminism has always objected to, is the treatment of women as if their appearance is the first, or only, thing that matters about them, the disproportionate focus placed on the appearance of women, while men's appearances are secondary to their (already assumed) capabilities as people, the insane pressure on women to appear a certain way, and the framing of female sexuality as nothing more than a performance to visually appeal to others and please men.

 

Unfortunately, paranoia about endorsing any of the last four phenomena appears to be halting men from even entering the arena of complimenting women, to the point where they find it safer to just say nothing, rather than risk a torrent of infuriated abuse. Again, I repeat, that's not feminism's fault - if anything, it's the fault of an insidiously-planted and still much-supported warping of feminism's image to that of the (and oh, god I really hate using this phrase) man-hating, humourless harridan.

 

Even though a quick glance around the average feminist meeting will show you plenty of young, slim, white, long-haired, feminine women whose appearance could frankly not be more media-friendly and who tend to outnumber those who prefer short hair or lumberjack shirts, the feared yet mythical misandrist warrior is still the face of feminism in so many people's minds. Even in those of the men who know and love myself (young-ish, size 10, long-haired, make-up and dress-wearing) and many other feminist women in all our multi-faceted, strident glory. How is it that such a tired and offensive stereotype still manages to wash away these men's knowledge of real women, and replace it with the notion that if they tell me I look nice today, they're going to get their face smashed in?

 

It fucks me off that debates still rage about whether we should be trying to make feminism less 'scary', more accessible and more 'appealing'. I say, absolutely not. I say, I'm all for educating and explaining, but I'm dead against pandering, and I am not dressing up my belief system as anything other than its own messy, furious glory in order to placate those who demand such a disguise in the first place. If you aren't sympathetic to feminism's aims to begin with - and that's not the same as admitting you don't know a lot about it, or don't understand certain parts of it, because those admissions are not a problem in themselves - then it's not my job to make it 'prettier' for you. If you can read and you've got internet access (which your reading my blog implies you do!), then you have all you need to educate yourself. If you're already thinking "Wot, I might not be able to refer to women who reject me as 'prick-teasing sluts'?" with outrage, then me trying to glossy-up feminism for you ain't gonna achieve a damn thing - your problems with women run deeper than any argument I can offer in favour of not treating them like shit.

 

But to the 'good guys' who are confused, who feel that the demand for respect sometimes jars with the way they look at, or think about, women, and feel guilty about that fact, I'll say this. It's OK to find people attractive. It's OK to notice a stranger's body parts. It's OK to fantasize, and even though I know there are feminists out there who deeply disagree with this, I believe it's OK to have fantasies that seem dirty, violent, disrespectful, or involve language or imagery that you would not dream of describing out loud. Why? Because they're just fucking fantasies. They're not hurting anyone. If you're feeling like you want to make those fantasies a reality in a way that disregards the agency or bodily autonomy of another person, then that's a problem, yes. But I refer you to my comments above - if that's your problem, it's not an issue for feminism. It's an issue for the therapist's couch, and that's where you should be heading for guidance. As I said in my previous post about porn addiction, I don't care what sexual fantasies a man has, or what his thoughts are about a woman's appearance, as long as he continues to behave in a way that respects women as full people, not just bodies, and not just there for his entertainment. I'm not interested in policing what's in anyone's head - because god knows I'd be thrown in the clink sharpish if people could see some of what goes on in mine.

 

Also, while there are some lucky people who genuinely don't care about how they look, most of us - male and female - do. Although I agree that the disproportionate emphasis on female appearance is evidence of a sexist society, and that our increasingly visual culture is threatening to spiral out of control, I don't think caring about looks per se is evidence that we're warped as a species. Far from it, I think it's quite natural. Animals groom themselves and so do we. In some Native American societies, it was the men who plucked their eyebrows and painted their faces to appeal to the women. We all want to be noticed, we want to be found attractive, and in most cases, that's because we would rather like to have some sex. If I was planning to celibate for the rest of my life, then I might take a lot less care over my appearance (and who knows, I might still strike lucky, because much as a sexist society tells me I'm nothing without my hair done, my make-up flawless, my legs shaved etck, I can recognise that I'm not actually hideous without those things), but the reality is that I'm a pretty highly-sexed individual, and I want the people I find attractive to want to have sex with me. Shocker! So if someone I know and trust compliments me on my appearance - whether or not they're the object of my attraction -  I might be quite pleased, because it's a little bit of confirmation that my career as a sexually active human being is likely to continue.

 

What I'm not going to be pleased about are the following: wolf whistles, car horns being honked, strangers shouting comments about my appearance in the street, comments that reduce me to nothing other than body parts, being touched without my consent, and a million other sleazy, disrespectful approaches that every woman you know will have experienced at some point in her life. What's the difference between this and my male friend telling me I look nice? It's pretty simple. In one scenario, I know I am being seen as a full, varied and complex human being, with feelings, thoughts, values and a personality as well as a face, hair, a bum, boobs and a vagina, and I know this because the person addressing me has known, loved and respected me for 15 years. In all the other scenarios, I instead experience the horrible sensation of having my humanity disregarded and being defined by nothing more than my body. That's the difference. Every woman knows it, because we've all experienced the shitty, undermining and often threatening way in which the latter is carried out, and if he cares about women at all, every man will make sure he knows that difference too.

 

Now, some man (or woman) might be looking at me from across the street and thinking about my bum or boobs or vagina in a way that makes them feel guilty. They may be having 'animalistic' thoughts, filthy fantasies, imagining my body in all kinds of naughty positions. But unless that person uses their thoughts as an excuse to approach me in a way that reduces me to nothing other than a receptive body, I do not care what they're thinking. I have no wish to condemn that person as anti-feminist. A person having dirty thoughts about me and still respecting me as a human being are not mutually exclusive. If you think the two are, then that is your problem to resolve, not feminism's.

 

It's really not that complicated.

Slut shaming, porny pop stars and Rashida Jones

I've been thinking a lot about slut-shaming over the past few months, possibly more so than usual because I've had my first unpleasant experiences of it in my own life, and nothing makes you realise how the personal really is political quite like your personal experience of being negatively labelled by other women. Rashida Jones learned the hard way that people are a lot less tolerant of public slut-shaming these days when she tweeted "This week's celeb news takeaway: She who comes closest to showing the actual inside of her vagina is most popular. #stopactinglikewhores".

 

Naturally there's been some major facepalms, a lot of vocal objection and many articulate takedowns from the feminist community on why Jones' choice of words and targets were extremely ill-judged, so I don't feel like there's a lot to add to it. However, when I read Jones' response in Glamour magazine, I did find myself agreeing with some of her points. I certainly don't agree with all of it, especially the unfortunate decision to use Lily Allen's recent cringeworthy video in her defence. I also don't buy her claim that she wasn't hating on sex workers by connoting 'whores' with despicable, undesirable, anti-feminist behaviour. I think she was probably just using the word without even thinking, so entrenched in our culture is a hatred and suspicion of women who don't have sex in the same way as us (i.e. those who have 'too much' sex, or too little, or kinky sex, or sex with women, or sex for money). I think that, unfortunately, much as I can believe that she really is trying to be a feminist, in using the word 'whores' to condemn other women, Jones has fallen victim to the kind of respectability politics that I wrote about in my last post, the ones which make women clamour to differentiate themselves from "other" women who are too slutty/fat/poor/working class/whatever just in order to get a pat on the head from society.

 

All this said, I do feel Jones is right on the money when she says "...let's be real. Every woman's sexuality is different. Can all of us really be into stripper moves? The truth is, for every woman who loves the pole, there's another who likes her feet rubbed. But in pop culture there's just one way to be. And so much of it feels staged for men, not for our own pleasure". I agree with these words so much, but I feel wrong-footed by the fact that this kind of thinking often comes from anti-porn, anti-sex work feminists (sex-negative, if you will). I feel like as a sex-positive feminist, I often end up stuck between a rock and a hard place when I try to suggest that there must be a middle ground between draconian, right-wing censorship and neoliberal acceptance of the total pornification of culture. Yes, I want to see female sexuality celebrated rather than shamed. But as Jones points out, what we're seeing is not real female sexuality - it's prepackaged, heterosexual, slim, white (or occasionally, horrendously stereotyped hypersexual bootylicious black), abled-bodied, young, cisgendered sexuality. It's hairless, it's odourless, it's flawless. It's also soulless, and bears very little relation to the experiences or bodies of the vast majority of women in the world.

 

You may say it's not my right to decide what version of sexuality is 'acceptable', and while that's true, I think it's just utterly insincere of any feminist to pretend that the saturation of popular culture with the same tedious writhing, panting image of female sexuality is not problematic. Yes, I want to support other women's right to do whatever the fuck they please and not be judged for it. I may not like what other women choose to do with that right, I might not even like the women themselves, but none of that should matter. Men enjoy the privilege of the unexamined life - when did you last hear a man upbraid Robin Thicke for 'letting the side down' by being such a consistently sleazy douchebag? - and if we want true equality, we should be supporting the right of women to make their own choices, even make their own mistakes, free of finger-wagging from the sisterhood.

 

But. But but but. I remain sceptical of 'choice feminism' precisely because no choice takes place in a vacuum, and as I pointed out in a recent post, this supposed 'freedom' that Miley, Britney, Beyoncé, Rihanna et al are supposed to be emblems of actually boils down to the freedom "to wear little, say even less and do whatever's going to sell records." And yes, those women have the right to do all that without judgement, but don't call that a feminist victory. Call it a capitalist victory, call it a neoliberal victory. Call it evidence that pop culture is ultimately about nothing but the lowest common denominator. But until Janelle Monae appears on my video screen in a tuxedo as often as Rihanna does while clothed in a few scraps of cloth, or Adele is considered as sexy as Miley, don't tell me feminism still doesn't have far to travel. Female pop stars are doing what they can within the restrictive parameters they're allowed, and fair play to them - it's not up to them to carry the weight of responsibility to all women on their shoulders, and Rashida Jones may well have missed the point and fucked off a lot of people in the process of expecting them to. But she was right to point out that it's utterly fucked up that women in the public eye are still offered such limited choices if they want to be successful, and she was right to demand better.

Thinking Kink: Is Britney's 'Work Bitch' Video Just More 'Kink-Jacking'?

When I wrote the ‘Thinking Kink’ blog series for Bitch Magazine back in summer 2012, I found myself talking a lot about how "'vanilla' entertainers hijack BDSM imagery to make a quick buck”. Whether it was 30 Seconds to Mars’s Hurricane video implying that there's so much vanilla sex in music videos that only kink can make a video 'edgy' now, or Rihanna’s much-mentioned ‘S & M’ video, it was clear that one thing myself and some amongst the kink community are mighty tired of is a phenomenon I like to call ‘kink-jacking’. As Cliff Pervocracy put it, “The process of discovering you’re kinky…is long and difficult. I hate to see a vanilla entertainer reduce that to some black vinyl and dog chains”.

At first glance, I do feel that’s exactly what Britney Spears is doing in her latest video, ‘Work Bitch’. Slim, long-haired cisgendered women in PVC leotards, eye masks and spike heels? Check. Plenty of girl-on-girl dominating so that no man has to feel threatened and can instead just enjoy the faux-lesbian spectacle put on solely for him? Check. The commercialisation of kink in the form of the inexplicable Pill-speaker bit gag? Check. (Oh, and seriously, what the F is with the inexplicable fake British accent?!)

However, I’m aware of the need to not enact the same kind of presumptuous condemnation that people foisted upon Rihanna for daring to toy with imagery of violent sexual practices when she herself had been a victim of domestic abuse, or perpetuate the patronising idea that women in music videos have no control of their image. Rather than reading the imperative ‘You better get to work, bitch’ as internalised misogyny, we could read it as being declared in the same camp, arch style as RuPaul said it in her ‘Supermodel’ video. Rather than assume that the women of color Britney leads on leashes in her video are unwitting victims of dubious racial tropes, we could remind ourselves that Ciara chose to replicate this image herself in the ‘Love Sex Magic’ video.  While assuming that Britney herself must be nothing more than a marketing man’s plaything, we often forget that it was she who had the idea for the schoolgirl outfit in her very first music video, and therefore may have had more input into her heavily sexualised image than we care to remember.

That said, it remains depressing that the dominant model of sexiness (premised around being slim, white, long-haired, scantily-clad and subject to the male gaze), is still the only thing artists or their teams can think of to resort to when they need to be ‘edgy’. When the most rebellious thing a female artist can do is to remain fully clothed (watch Lorde’s 'Royals' video and try to name another current pop video where a fully clothed woman sings alongside shots of scantily clad men – I guarantee you’ll struggle), you do wonder why the need to ‘express oneself’ always comes down to the need to writhe, pant and pout. Britney’s done so much of the latter in her videos that it stands to reason she would eventually run out of tricks and need to do something new – enter the whips and chains. Yet the way it’s framed doesn’t feel edgy or subversive, it actually feels entirely safe. No men are depicted as submissive in the video, so male dominance isn’t challenged in any way. Instead, a privileged white woman spanks and disciplines her presumably less well-paid dancers.

Now, we might be equally unhappy were Britney portrayed as the submissive in the video,  and maybe that's because we're already tired of the perpetually submissive act from a woman who sang 'I Was Born To Make You Happy'. And maybe that's unfair, because feminism's all about choice, right? - even if that choice is to wear little, say even less and do whatever's going to sell records. But really, why is it so much to ask to see a slightly more nuanced depiction of kink, such as that seen in Madonna’s Human Nature video, where she constantly switches between dominant and submissive roles within a group of men and women. As BDSM educator and feminist porn director Tristan Taormino puts it - "Images of dominance and submission are not anti-feminist in and of themselves, but one of the reasons feminists critique them is because consent is not always explicit and because of the repetition of men dominating women, making it the main type of power exchange we see in [the] mainstream. . ." In a world where female power still feels so precarious, the repeated glorifying of female submission gets very tiresome very quickly, even to those - such as this very author - who enjoy and practice it.

As for the Pill speaker bit-gag, well. The audacious product placement aside, kinksters who get off on being human furniture or treating others as such, might find that particular idea very hot – being turned into a human stereo is not a particularly outrageous idea for many whose kinks include being treated as an object. But the commercialisation of kink does just seem to be another way of wresting it away from those for whom this is a major lifestyle choice - one which has often cost them a great deal to follow - and putting it in the hands of marketing men. Being full-on kinky can be bloody expensive - have you seen the price of a latex outfit, a spanking bench or a fucking machine?! And those who have a vested interest in making us feel that our lifestyles are not sufficiently shiny or sexy will do all they can to try and make us buy more things, as anyone who has walked into Ann Summers and see their 'Shades of Grey' bondage range can attest to. To be blunt, if you really want to gag someone, you can do it without spending a penny (why not use their own underwear?!), and was this bit gag included to actually advance knowledge of kink, or just to objectify the woman wearing it and do some free advertising at the same time? I think you can guess.

Ultimately, I guess Britney is doing what she can within the very narrow parameters she has been provided, and fair play to her. I'm sure she and her dancers peeled off all the PVC with relief after a hot day writhing around in the desert, and probably went home and put their tracksuit bottoms on, kinky sex being the last thing on their minds. Meanwhile, kinky people all over the world played happily in private or semi-public, displaying body shapes, races and gender identities from all across the spectrum, wearing outfits ranging from jeans and trainers to steel-boned corsets to nothing but clingfilm, and experimenting with power dynamics crossing every boundary imaginable. And that's how you can tell when kink-jacking, rather than a genuine and considered tribute to BDSM, is taking place - it's when none of that beautiful variety is represented.

Polyamory and Feminism - Curious Bedfellows?

** DISCLAIMER - this is not intended as an endorsement or criticism/condemnation of any particular lifestyle, be it monogamous, polyamorous, celibate or 'other'. It's merely my own thoughts, reflections and experiences **

There have been some notable online articles regarding polyamory recently. This is really good to see, as despite my frantic Googling I was beginning to think there was very little in the way of public discourse on the issue. Joining a couple of Facebook groups has shown me there's plenty of private discussion, which is great, but obviously those already in the community know what the dealio is, whereas the monogamous mainstream hegemony is often unwilling or unable to learn what polyamory really is about.

So it was encouraging to read this article, which not only did a lot of helpful myth-busting about polyamory (hereafter shortened to 'poly') but also looked at it through a feminist lens. I do think that a lot of the toxic myths that we're sold about monogamy have their roots in the control of women. Fairytales about passive princesses waiting for that One Perfect Man to come and rescue them? Conditioning girls to be dependent and base their fulfilment on another person. Films, books and TV programmes that show however strong, sassy and intelligent a woman is, she still just wants A Man and babies? Modern day fairy tales hoping to insidiously set back feminist progress. Try to think of a film which ends with the female protagonist happy and single. I don't know about you, but I'm struggling. Then try to think of one which shows a woman having multiple partners, and living happily ever after. These cultural artefacts are probably out there somewhere, but they're certainly not anywhere in the mainstream.

Yet the mainstream take on sexuality is often dangerous and anti-woman. The monogamous heterosexual relationship model often seems to me to be based on, if not downright lies, then self-deception, deception of others, and the need to control others. Women complain that men don't listen. Men complain that women nag. Women complain that men don't communicate. Men complain that women don't say what they really mean. Poly forces people to stop using these lazy, gender-binary-enforcing excuses and start getting honest. Much like in BDSM, which despite appearing misogynistic to the ill-informed, actually prizes consent and communication far more effectively than the vanilla model of sex, poly acknowledges that you're not going to get anywhere without talking about stuff. And talking really, really honestly. About all the shitty, shameful and selfish urges to which we're all subject, at one time or another.

I've often felt like there was a conspiracy of silence surrounding monogamous relationships, insofar as no one else seemed to be struggling with them the way I did. No one else seemed to be standing up and saying 'if this person is So Right for me, why do I constantly get crushes on other people? Why is it acceptable to feel deep love for my friends of the same sex, but a connection to someone of the opposite gender is immediately viewed with suspicion? Why are the boundaries of what constitutes OK behaviour for a person in relationships so artificial and arbitrary, when you can have incredible intimacy with a person even if you've never even kissed?'. And when I asked people I'd get the standard answer 'Oh, everyone finds they're attracted to people other than their partner, you just have to get past it'. I never found it very helpful. Or particularly honest.

To me, monogamous relationships often seem to pivot on this kind of fear - fear that you might not love or be sufficiently attracted to your partner, fear that their feelings for you might not be strong enough, fear that you might have to take the painful step of leaving them, fear that they might leave you. I definitely suffered from the first and third a fair bit in long-term relationships, and found the worrying and wondering exhausted. When someone said to me 'maybe you are just better off having a number of less serious attachments', it was revelatory. No one had ever suggested that was genuinely acceptable option for a woman. Oh sure, we're shown caricatures of man-eaters in popular culture all the time (Yo, SATC's Samantha!), but they are usually so one-dimensional as to be unbelievable, or enough of a figure of fun that the viewer knows this is not someone to be looked up to or emulated. You're allowed to fuck around when you're young, when you're going through a 'rough patch', when you're 'just looking for comfort' etc etc. You're not allowed to stand up and say 'Yeah, I don't actually want a full-time partner, perhaps ever, but I really like sex'. The last woman I can think of who really talked such talk and walked that walk was Mae West, and perhaps that's why I've always been unconsciously drawn to her, fantastic trailblazer that she was. I don't say it's much easier for men, who are subject to their own pressures, but when it comes to reasons to be poly, the male sex drive is sufficiently stereotyped that people don't question it so much. He's a man, of course he wants lots of sex from lots of different woman. If a woman's poly? Hmmm, she must be doing it 'for love'...yawn...

And it's not necessarily even men who are to blame for such toxic stereotyping. As the article states,"when we see love as scarce, we are taught to see others outside of our relationship as potential competitors. Women, especially, are conditioned by our culture to see other women as their competitors." Oh boy, are we ever. See, thanks to the aggressive myth-pushing of the fairy tales and films and songs and TV programmes mentioned above, women are still operating with that subconscious idea of The Ultimate Goal - that being, getting and keeping A Man. Never mind that no one ever qualifies how this equates a fairytale ending (although the assumption is that what the women get is economic security, which is bizarrely, the same logic that sex workers are judged and condemned by the vanilla mainstream for exercising), A Man and One Man at that, is what women are supposed to want. So, women for whom this isn't of interest have traditionally been treated with suspicion. You only have to read the horrific stories of how lesbians are routinely treated in South Africa and hundreds of other cultures to see how women who don't base their lives around men are viewed as a threat to the social order. Or look at the rampant slut-shaming of any woman in history who has ever dared to suggest she enjoys sex, or can have it without love, or can enjoy it with multiple partners, or is happy to sell it.

 

Recently I've been subject to what I feel is, if not downright slut-shaming, then at least some pretty harsh judgement by other women due to my fairly sexually open persona. What I perceive in those women is projection of their own insecurities, possibly also jealousy that I'm unafraid to admit that I'm attracted to more than one man, and ultimately a need to police other women's behaviour and desires because I represent a threat to this starvation economy, where Men are the ultimate prize, and Other Women are our competitors for that prize. I find it kind of amusing, if I'm honest, but it's also pretty sad. And in that sense, I do see the poly way of life aligning with feminism much more effectively than the dominant models we are sold. If I am open and comfortable with my partner about our attraction to others, I am less likely to be paranoid and suspicious about his interactions with other women, and the same goes for him with regards to my interactions with other men. Whereas if we're in a relationship where we're supposed to pretend that attractions to others don't happen, we're much more likely to become jealous and possessive over each other, and view all members of the same sex as potential enemies. Much as I don't fool myself that poly is the answer to everything, when considering how it offers many more options for a feminist way of exercising sexuality and relationships, I do think it deals with a lot of issues that the vanilla monogamous hegemony is reluctant to address.

Pleasure or Pressure? The Alleged 'Orgasm Gap'

I read this piece from Alternet on 'The Orgasm Gap' with interest. Subtitled "The Real Reason Women Get Off Less Often Than Men and How to Fix It", the piece considers how "Freudian echoes, anatomical mischaracterizations and gender stereotypes are part of the logic naturalizing the orgasm gap - but there is nothing natural about it." In it author Lisa Wade makes some very valid points, including her demolition of the pesky myth that women just don't need to get off as much as men do, that we prefer cuddles to orgasms, and that we're the more "giving" gender (spew). I do agree that she's bang on that "we often bifurcate the sexual experience in line with gender norms: men are sexual (they experience desire) and women are sexy (they inspire desire)" and that  this damaging idea of women as passive objects to be looked at in turn harms women's ability to be active sexual agents. 

 

(And Christ, if I hear one more person justify the constant objectification of women viz the notion that "the female body is just nicer to look at", I'm going to shove my thread veins against their eyes. Newsflash - the female body can be just as disgusting and fugly as the male body, and I should know: as a care worker I've seen more than my fair share of naked bodies, young and old. The female body that apologists for objectification refer to is a toxic stereotype not representative of the majority of women - it's airbrushed, often surgically enhanced, achieved through the kind of regimes a racehorse would baulk at, and very often fuck-all to do with real, natural femininity. Because Mother Nature actually designed our 'beautiful female bodies' to have cellulite, hair, wobbly bits and funny smells.)

 

Anyway, back to this old orgasm gap. I agree with Lisa Wade that there probably is a correlation between lack of female pleasure and the fact that women are still told that their "primary goal in sex is to deliver a sexy body can focus her attention on how she looks instead of how she feels." Although I have to say, if it really is true, as Wade spectates (without providing anecdotal or statistical evidence) that some women are afraid to have orgasms because their face or body might contort in a potentially 'unnattractive' way, then I find that sad beyond belief.

 

And this is where I find myself a little unconvinced by this study. Or rather, by the conclusions drawn from it. The first study the author cites is 13 years old, and I think it's fair to say that the sexual landscape has changed a lot since the year 2000. Not necessarily for the better, sure, but things move fast in this day and age. Who had heard of vajazzles, ass-to-mouth or read openly about bondage on the London Underground 13 years ago? So I'll be taking that one with a pinch of salt to start with, and as for the second study she cites, it's a study of college students. Hardly representative of the population at large in terms of age or class, and it was only a study of heterosexual students so we can't know how the orgasm rate of LGB students compared. I think this is a key omission in terms of the author's determination to paint women as orgasm-starved victims, because although in some cases this may be true, I think it's painting with far too broad strokes to imply we all are, and that this is because of some failure of feminism or victory of patriarchy.

 

Wade presents the fact that women are much less likely to orgasm during a single 'hook-up' than during a second or 3rd encounter, or a relationship, as some kind of shocking revelation. Personally, I thought the ratio of 3 female orgasms to every 1 male orgasm was actually pretty good going! Not because I consider the female orgasm less valuable than that of a man's - quite the opposite. Making a woman come is a bloody tough thing to achieve. I was put me in mind of an exchange in Kevin Smith's film Clerks, where Dante makes the (admittedly crude statement) "Making a male climax is not all that challenging: insert somewhere close and preferably moist; thrust; repeat...Now, making a woman cum - therein lies a challenge." Much as it is a generalisation, and I do think male sexuality can be oversimplified, I also think most of us would end up agreeing. I remember in my Sexuality & Society classes at university discussing why the female equivalent of Viagra hadn't been successful, and the gist was that female sexual response was still extremely poorly understood, and very difficult to measure. Our tutor summed it up thus - if male sexuality was depicted as a machine, it would be a box with a clear 'ON/OFF' switch. The female equivalent would  be a box covered in numerous mysterious wires, lights and switches without any clear labels or indications of what they did, and you might get a different reaction from flipping a switch the second time compared to when you flipped it the first. Or no reaction at all.

 

So with this borne in mind, why are we supposed to be so scandalised by the idea that when young women sleep with other young men (who we assume are less experienced in the ways of lady pleasing than say, their 30 or 40-something counterparts) who have never encountered their bodies before, they're less likely to come? To me it's less a sign of a patriarchal victory and more simply evidence that nature is a bitch. The female orgasm is tricky and elusive, and what works for one woman might leave another one completely cold. That's why it also makes sense that when a couple hooks up more than once, or gets into a relationship with each other, the woman's orgasm rate rises. Practise makes perfect, we all know that, and familiarity with your partner's body sure as hell helps too. However, Wade concludes that the lack of female orgasms during hook ups must be down to lack of men's investment in their partner's pleasure, backing it up with a statement from a male who says he's "all about making her orgasm" when with a long-term partner, but "in a hookup...I don't give a shit".

 

It's an unfortunate quote, and indeed may reflect many other men's attitudes, although it's important to remember we're not told this and Wade has just cherry-picked one depressing vox-pop out of thousands. The quotes she includes from women are also depressing - they speak of not expecting an orgasm out of hook ups, prioritising men's pleasure, and being too insecure to ask for their own pleasure. And yeah, that's a problem in itself. But Wade's article does seem to contain an implicit message that hook-ups are bad in and of themselves, and relationships are the answer to all. And on that note, frankly, I call some serious bullshit. I've been in very long-term relationships, and I've had hook-ups, and I can honestly say that my likelihood of getting an orgasm is increased by one thing and one thing only - me doing stuff to myself. Whether that's solo, or with the guy involved, that's the only way I've ever been able to achieve it. It matters not whether the guy has known me for four years or four weeks, that's the way it's always been. And to be frank, it has actually made me feel more uptight when the guy in question has decided he's going to be The One to manage to give me an orgasm on his own, because it inevitably involves him reading prescriptive sex manuals ('Do this and it'll drive her wild!' Oh really, will it? EVERY woman? All 3.5 billion of us?), trying out various techniques on me that do absolutely F-A for me, and generally decreasing my chances of being relaxed enough to get any pleasure, let alone a climax out of the experience.

 

I'm not shy of asking for what I want, or demanding that my needs get met, or that I get to be the one lying back having fun stuff done to me. But demanding that my partner be able to give me the Big O makes me feel like my sex life has been boiled down to a bad Cosmo spoof. I don't necessarily want to come during penetrative sex, because the massive amount of concentration involved makes me feel totally disconnected from my partner, as if I'm using him as a dildo substitute. I might want to have my orgasm before penetration, or after, and that's something me and him can do together, which is all groovy. That said, regardless of the radfem sniffiness about such a claim, I also enjoy penetration in and of itself - it doesn't have to make me come. I might feel satisfied without an orgasm at all during the session (this is not BS - it does sometimes happen), and the prescriptive model of sex that dictates your sex is a feminist failure if both of you don't come is not any more helpful to me than the model that dictates male pleasure is all. A readthrough of Shire Hite's Report on Female Sexuality is telling, with women stating,"Now there is such much emphasis on orgasm, a person would feel abnormal not having one" and "I feel a lot of pressure both from men and from women's liberation, to have orgasms or insist on having an orgasm". One interviewees response to the pressure to be coming all over the shop sums up my exact feelings - "I'm not...a two-ring circus".

 

Wade's focus on apparent male selfishness also doesn't reflect my own experiences at all. Sure, my evidence is personal and anecdotal, but then so are the statements she uses to imply men 'don't give a shit' about female pleasure. As I mentioned above, I've had partners who are eager to a fault to try and resolve the orgasm gap between us - after my first sexual experience, the guy in question rather sweetly apologised for the fact I didn't come. I almost laughed out loud and snorted "I didn't expect to!", but held back out of politeness. But I was secretly thinking, 'C'mon dude, go read some feminist responses to Freud. What we just did may have been lovely, but my body ain't set up to orgasm from that'. I wasn't bothered - I had learnt at an early age that orgasms were a gift I could give myself, and let's just say I was always very generous with myself throughout my teen years. And me and this guy were young and inexperienced - yes, we were college students - so I hardly expected to be hitting heights of tantric amazingness anyway. While I agree with Lisa Wade that a model of sex where female pleasure is included and given equal weight to men's is certainly one that can never be promoted enough, I don't think measuring feminism's success by counting orgasms is accurate or helpful. Especially when you're focusing on a very skewed portion of society, who as well as being young and inexperienced, are often obnoxious, impulsive, selfish, insecure and crap at communicating. I might expect academic excellence from college students (sometimes), but I sure as hell don't expect maturity from them, and that includes in sexual matters.

 

As a commenter in the Hite report put it, the 'right' to have orgasms "has sometimes turned into an oppression". And in a society where there's far too many forces dictating How We Should Be Fucking, that's hardly better than when women were considered to have no right to an orgasm at all.

Sex, Scaremongering and Teen Girls

It's been a while since I was a teenage girl. Nearly ten years, and I'm quite content with the growing distance between myself and the era of insecurity, depression and terror - not that any of those things disappear with the onset of adulthood, but anyway. I do read a lot about how intensely awful it is to be a teenage girl today, and I imagine an existence something like my own teen experience of body-hatred, paranoia and unrealistic attitudes toward the opposite sex, but with slim sleek smartphones and buttock-skimming hotpants instead of chunky Nokias and those baggy jeans us nu-metal-listening, 2001-era teens loved so much. So are we really so different? A quick skim over The Daily Mail would have you believe that yes, it is so much more terrible to be a teenage girl today, because you are going to be pressured and sexualised like never before, treated like a disposable object by boys raised on violent pornography, and generally set upon from all sides by consumerism, the diet industry, the music industry etc etc etc, to turn you into a pornified, pouting, passive sex doll.

 

So it's something of a relief to finally hear a dissenting voice in this Guardian article. Showing how the statistics on teen pregnancy and first time sex don't tally with the notion that all girls are now being pressured to be sexually active earlier than ever, Stuart Jeffries also quotes American sociologist, Danielle Egan, who says "Sexual violence is real. But to portray girls as only victims suffering from false consciousness and therefore as trapped in a sexualised culture that they can't change is a mistake". In an article which questions paranoid columnists' automatic assumptions that all 14 year-old girls are being forced to perform oral sex (and shows that legendary teen 'rainbow parties' were just that - a legend, which never actually took place, but which the media seized upon anyway as a sign of teen debauchery), Jeffries identifies how this 'moral panic' renders girls passive objects in the same way that pornography is alleged to do: "Better panic than find out, better to disempower girls rhetorically than suggest they might be forces for change in their own lives."

 

That's the part that always gets my goat the most. Teenage girls may often be silly, shallow, self-obsessed and lack self awareness and judgement (and my God, don't even get me started on adjectives describing teen boys and all their deficiences). But they're still people with brains, desires and agendas of their own. I know, because I was one. And I spent a lot of my late teens feeling that I'd been sold a complete pack of lies when it came to boys and sex. No one ever pressured me to do anything I didn't want, or made inappropriate advances to me. I'm sure this was partly luck, partly going to an all-girls' school. This didn't, however, stop my own sexuality from forming. I spent most of my teen years masturbating like mad and fantasising about the sex life that I was convinced my horrendous ugliness would prevent me from ever enjoying. I wanted to get laid. Does anyone ever acknowledge this about teen girls, that they might want sex?

 

The way our conservative media frames things, you'd think teen boys were the only ones with a sex drive and that sex only ever takes place when girls reluctantly give in to the unstoppable male desire. And again, in my own life, that turned out to be another lie. When I finally did find someone I was powerfully attracted to - and again, the force of my own desire came as quite a shock to me, because I was always taught it was my job to be desired, to be the cause of randiness, not the one experiencing the pangs of 'I must have this person NOW, or I will explode' - I was very much the aggressor, the one doing the persuading. If anyone was 'the girl' in that particular exchange, it was my male partner, who wanted us to stop and think about what were doing and be sure that it was right. And if anyone was the sly horndog who would've said anything just to make sure that sex happened, it was me.

 

So where is the media coverage that acknowledges girls like me, because surely I can't have been the first and last teenage girl to actually be in control of her sexuality and use it for her own, not others', pleasure? Am I to believe that I was the only 18 year old female who ever had sex just because she was horny and wanted to? Much as I'm troubled by the tales of abuse and coercion I hear occurring in teen relationships, I'm also sick of getting such a one-sided story. Not every teen relationship is a battleground in which the evil forces of internet porn and sexism are unleashed upon some poor unsuspecting young woman. As Heather Corinna writes in her brilliant essay 'An Immodest Proposal', we are guilty of sending out horribly mixed messages to young women, and the continuing focus on teen girls as 'victims' of evil sexuality is partly responsible. The 'black hole' that is so often missing in portrayals of teen sex, and indeed so much sex in general, is the woman's desire. Where is the story of teen sex that shows the girl"feeling that if she didn't do it soon, she was going to pounce on him like a hungry dog?". When I read Corinna's words, I was transported back to the sweaty dark of an October night in 2002 when I was exactly that hungry dog, and I felt like I was playing out a script no one had prepared me for. As Corinna asks, why are we still failing to reinforce the message "that women experience, initiate and pursue desire, and that it is completely acceptable to do so with great enthusiasm"?

 

And yes, the problem does lie in our sexualised society, but not in the way that right-wing commentators think it does. Rihanna can writhe around showing off the outline of her vulva all she wants and Beyonce can thrust her oiled butt-cheeks at the screen til the cows come home - women behaving in an overtly sexual way is not the problem. The problem is that girls are never taught to be sexual for themselves, only for someone else. If I believed for a second that Rihanna actually got off to S&M, rather than just decided to make a song about it for cynical marketing purposes, I'd be her biggest cheerleader. But I don't. I think she's making the best of her talents in an industry that isn't going to let her exist outside extremely narrow parameters, and that industry demands that she sexualise herself at every turn. Ditto 'B', ditto Nicki Minaj, ditto Nicole Scherzinger et al. You can tell me these women are 'smart', 'feminists', 'businesswomen' all you want. But until I see them say 'Y'know what? I've had enough of this shit, I'm wearing jeans and baggy t-shirt onstage tonight, and tell my marketing team to go fuck themselves', I'm not going to believe that they're not victims of a culture that tells women to constantly serve their bodies up as passive objects for consumption. Because yup, we all feel like dressing and acting sexy from time to time, but I fail to believe there's any woman who really feels like doing it 24/7. Yet we're supposed to be convinced that all that oiled-up heavy breathing and writhing from our pop stars is genuine? Please.

 

The real heavy breathing and writhing happens in private, under duvets, on sofas, in student residences, in jeans and t shirts and dressing gowns and all other manner of unsexy accoutrement, and my god it's wonderful. And yes, I'm troubled that teens may be growing up not realising this, and thinking that the plasticised version of sexuality that they're increasingly being sold, is the way forward. But just as I was able to appreciate the superiority of Tori Amos to Atomic Kitten, there are teen girls who will be able to see through bullshit now just as I was able to 10 years ago, and there will be teen girls who are owning and controlling their sexuality the way I was, and hopefully still am to this day. And those are the teen girls our cultural commentators keep erasing from our social landscape, and in so doing they reinforce the image of teen female passivity just as harmfully as any sexual myths. Perhaps what society really fears is not the misuses of power against teen girls, but that teen girls might realise their own power, and start to 'misuse' it against a society that would rather they sat down, shut up and looked pretty.

Sex, Disability and Sex Work

I got to thinking about the intersection of disability, sex and sex work after reading this excellent Guardian feature by Frances Ryan. It was good to read a considered, non-hysterical look at the often-glossed-over issue of disabled sexuality, and hear from those who are experiencing the issues first-hand. The part I wish had perhaps been expanded on was where Ryan acknowledges that the discussions about sex being a 'need' which disabled people have the right to fulfil, "is language that is rarely used in reference to women with disabilities".

This, to me, is one of the areas that I've always had most issue with when it comes to defences of sex work. My thinking on sex work is, I'd like to say, evolving - although unfortunately so far it's only evolved to a point where I often feel completely caught in the middle between abolitionist and sex positive feminists - but I do find the argument about sex workers providing a valuable service to disabled people a little troubling. Leaving aside the fact that sex workers also service plenty of able-bodied men who presumably have much less trouble finding sexual partners but for some reason choose to pay for sex instead, the notion that sex work is valuable because it provides "disabled clients who would otherwise never experience the joy of skin to skin contact" rankles with me. First off, it's patronising. As Mik Scarlet points out in Frances Ryan's article, "It's like the world telling you that disabled people are so unsexy that the only way they can have sex is to pay for it". And secondly, it's inaccurate. What the statement really seems to refer to is disabled men.

Although the Guardian article is illustrated by a picture of the late Helen O' Toole holding a sign saying 'disabled and horny', the article doesn't actually quote or speak to any disabled women who have paid for sexual services (or managed a sex life without paying for it). In a Twitter exchange, the author of blog A Glasgow Sex Worker suggested to me that these women are certainly out there, they're just not seeking sexual services as much, or speaking out about it as willingly, as disabled men because of stigma. Women aren't supposed to need to pay for sex, the stereotype goes - we're the ones with the prized 'pussy' and therefore are in a much stronger position than those needy, testosterone-addled men. Therefore there's the inevitable feeling of 'Am I a sad cow if I have to pay someone to fuck me?' - and I'm not being disrespectful here to any men or women who feel that way, because that's exactly how I felt when I was 18 and genuinely believed I was so fat, ugly and hideous that my options were either to die a virgin or pay a male prostitute. I'm not disabled and have long since realised that my barriers to a sex life were much less insurmountable than I thought there were. But my point is, I can well believe that there might be women out there considering the option of paying someone to pleasure them, but not wanting to admit to it. I'd also wager that's a more realistic explanation than the patronising idea that women 'just don't need sex as much' as men, or that we can 'go without' more easily. As Lesley Chenoweth writes, disabled women are at particular risk of being painted as 'asexual', and this is a destructive assumption of the kind feminists have long battled.

Still, it's interesting that only 19% of disabled women said they would see a trained sex worker, compared with 63% of men (Disability Now survey, 2005). It's suggested that disabled women - who are indeed much more vulnerable to violence and abuse compared with the rest of the female population - would not trust a male sex worker not to abuse them. This wariness is understandable, especially when the dominant social myth is that "women with disabilities are so unattractive they should be grateful for any sexual advances made to them". But this leaves us with the kind of asymmetry which is one of my main remaining objections to the sex industry - that it exists for the benefit of men and their sexual needs (which MUST unquestioningly be met), while women just have to sit by the sidelines, horny and frustrated, their needs ignored.

My viewpoint may be superfluous to the debate - after all, I'm not a sex worker, or disabled. But I have been a care worker for nearly 7 years, and worked up close and personal with a lot of disabled people of all ages, abilities and proclivities. I've had the face-reddening tasks of trying to stop autistic teenage boys publicly masturbating, dodging accidental erections whilst trying to put a catheter sheath on men with paralysis, and asking a woman with cerebral palsy exactly how she planned to use a vibrator if she did get her wish of going to an Ann Summers party. I've seen paraplegics who are married with children, and ones who live alone, seeing no one from one day to the next. I've seen people's engagements and marriages buckle under the strain of a serious accident or illness, leaving the disabled person with the double blow of being injured and being abandoned by their lover. I know a woman in a wheelchair who uses internet dating and remains hopeful despite telling me 'I know 99% of men are put off by the wheelchair". I've seen the isolation and frustration disabled people go through just struggling to access the basics of everyday life, let alone the 'luxuries' of a social life. And I can painfully empathise with the desire for love, for sex, for contact, for cuddles. But I'm still not convinced it's something that should be paid for, and I'm not convinced that the need for it automatically legitimises sex work. If the benefit of sex work to women, and the acknowledgement of female sexuality, desires and needs, were more apparent to me, I might be less sceptical. But there's something about justifying sex work on the grounds of serving disabled people that just smacks to me of prioritising men while women are yet again invisibilised, and that's hardly helpful to an already marginalised group.

All that said, until we live in a society that's capable of acknowledging that women get horny and frustrated just as men do, that they seek release through masturbation and sex just as men do, and that sex isn't just something women 'endure' or 'have done to them' but actively pursue, participate in and enjoy, perhaps it's unrealistic to expect disabled women to be on the front line of smashing stereotypes about female sexuality. I'd also be interested to hear what abolitionist feminists think of the woman in a wheelchair who hires a man to pleasure her, (or pays her care worker to hold her vibrator for her...) - is she just as much part of the patriarchal machine that has reduced sex to a commodity as the man who goes to a sex worker? Or do we need to stop seeing sex as such a sacred cow that must never be paid for, and start seeing it more as (in some cases, at least), a therapeutic service? Is a trained masseur, dancer or farmer 'degraded' because they use their body in their work?

Many questions. Many more possible answers. I wish I had more of them. All I know is I'm on board with Mik Scarlet when he says "I want a world that sees disabled people as sexual and valid prospective partners".