How do you measure your pleasure and sexual fulfillment? Is there a checklist of things that are supposed to happen, for example mutual orgasms? Or have we been programmed to believe that there more specific requirements when it comes to measuring and comparing our encounters? And, is it possible that there is a particular obstacle, ingrained from an early age, that has kept us from actually exploring our sexuality? Well, the truth is that early sexual education is not equal. We might outgrow these concepts that were handed to us in our pre-teens and early teens, yet there’s a chance that they have remained in the back of our minds. They have shaped the way we think and feel about sex so, unless we become more self-aware, we risk never reaching true sexual pleasure.
In preparation for her book Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape, Peggy Orenstein spent three years interviewing young women between the ages of 15 and 20 throughout the United States regarding their concept of sex, as well as their own experiences. Her findings were actually kind of depressing, particularly coming from a landscape and generation that is more open about self-exploration and discovery. While most of the women she talked to felt they were free to experience and carry out healthy sexual relationships, this right did not seem to reach include their enjoyment.
During her TedTalk about her findings, Orenstein spoke about assistant professor in Psychology and Women’s Studies, Sara McClelland’s research into what she has named Intimate Justice, as in equal opportunity sexual fulfillment. According to McClelland, the underlying problem that has kept young people from growing into adults who know their sexual encounters are intended to be enjoyed by all parties is the way they’ve been talked about both their sexual organs, as well as what they’ve been taught in their sex-ed classes.
“Because there has been a nearly exclusive focus on a sexual health model that is concerned with avoiding disease, we know little about helping young people develop sexual expectations for pleasure and satisfaction or how to measure these outcomes in research settings.”
Orenstein even goes as far as comparing young women in the United States with their peers in Holland, where teen pregnancy is much lower. What resulted from that comparison was realizing that the Dutch sexual education system focused on constructing positive relationships based on communication. Yes, there was talk about protection, but not in a way that only scared the students into believing that there is no room for enjoyment. And actually, there were plenty of differences between the two countries:
“The American girls had become sexually active at a younger age than the Dutch, had had more encounters with more partners, and were less likely to use birth control. They were more likely to say they’d had first intercourse because of ‘opportunity’ or pressure from friends or partners.”
In other words, quantity surpassed quality. The young women in the United States felt that they needed to “get it over with” by a certain age, based on what their peers or media in general made them believe was expected. Instead of focusing on protection, as well as finding someone they felt comfortable with, they found someone who was there and willing. But, it’s more than that, because as both Orenstein and McClelland explained, young women have a very different way of measuring sexual satisfaction when compared to men. Women expected their partners to be satisfied and reach orgasm as, even if they themselves did not, as their way of measuring their own enjoyment.
Orenstein has often spoken about how women are expected to give oral sex to their male partners, whereas they might not expect or ask for their partners to reciprocate. This alone changes the politics of the bedroom, because we’ve moved from attempting an egalitarian relationship into fully admitting that only one party requires their needs and satisfaction to be met. It also continues to tell women that their pleasure is not important, but only an optional elective. As Orenstein says,
“Girls have long been made the gatekeepers of male desire, charged with containing it, diverting it, controlling it.”
Eventually it all becomes a bit depressing and degrading, two words that happen to have been repeated by several women in a survey when talking about their own sexual encounters. What this tells us is that perhaps we as women are sometimes lying to ourselves when we say we are sexually satisfied, because we feel we cannot be open about our doubts or discomforts. In our effort to not feel left behind by the pleasure train, we’ve created a fantasy by believing that our sexual enjoyment is dependent on a set of elements, rather than on our own feelings and sensations.
“Listening to all of this and thinking about it, I began to realize that we performed a kind of psychological clitoridectomy on American girls.”
As Orenstein and McClelland explain, young women have been programmed to believe that their sexuality is not their own. This is specifically true for straight women. Because bisexual and gay women don’t necessarily use the same benchmarks, starting with the fact that the definition of virginity as being the first encounter including intercourse, does not apply to them. While interviewing a young gay woman, Orenstein asked her how she knew she wasn’t a virgin anymore. The interviewee said that her reference point was the first time she had an orgasm with a partner. This definition was not a quantitative one but rather a more complete idea where pleasure and enjoyment was at the center of the experience.
What if more women considered that same reference as their way of defining virginity? It would take away plenty of the shame. It would mean that less people would have a negative perspective of their first sexual encounters. It wouldn’t mean that the ones that happened before didn’t count. But instead it would mean that there was a higher bar to reach, a more open and positive experience to achieve, one that was not pressured but welcomed. Maybe if we focused on changing the way we talk about sexual experiences, more women would actually be able to have a more pleasurable sex life in general.
Images by Theresa Maria
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