[Content Note: Hostility to consent; painful sex.]
"Women have spent decades politely ignoring their own discomfort and pain to give men maximal pleasure. They've gamely pursued love and sexual fulfillment despite tearing and bleeding and other symptoms of 'bad sex.' They've worked in industries where their objectification and harassment was normalized, and chased love and sexual fulfillment despite painful conditions no one, especially not their doctors, took seriously. Meanwhile, the gender for whom bad sex sometimes means being a little bored during orgasm, the gender whose sexual needs the medical community rushes to fulfill, the gender that walks around in sartorial comfort, with an entire society ordered so as to maximize his aesthetic and sexual pleasure — that gender, reeling from the revelation that women don't always feel quite as good as they've been pressured to pretend they do, and would appreciate some checking in — is telling women they're hypersensitive and overreacting to discomfort? Men's biological realities are insufficiently appreciated?"—Lili Loofbourow, in a terrific, must-read piece, "The Female Price of Male Pleasure."
After reading this piece, all I could think was: Most men will never allow themselves to really contemplate and internalize how painful sex is, emotionally and physically, for so many women, because that would be such a boner killer.
If that sounds like a joke, it isn't. It is a lamentation.
[H/T to Fannie.]
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