Do you not like sex or do you just not like patriarchal sex?
"I wasn't saying no to sex WITH men, I was saying no to sex FOR men." Why so many married straight women assume they don't like sex.
Note: For our last book club we read The Flowering Wand by Sophie Strand. This Tuesday Jul 28 at 10:00am PT I have the great privilege of interviewing Sophie via Substack Live and you all can listen in here.
We are going to talk about the reaction to the book, any changing thoughts and the intersection between love and accountability. Sure to be an amazing discussion, I can’t wait! Join us.
A few years ago my friend told me that she always assumed she was asexual because she couldn’t be less interested in sex. But then she got divorced and promptly discovered she is… very much not asexual and is very interested in sex.
I thought that was an interesting story and went on my merry way.
Then I had another friend go through a divorce and watched in real time as she made this exact same discovery.
When a third friend mentioned she had always thought she was asexual until her divorce I thought, hold up a minute! Just how common is this story?!?!1
Why do so many married straight women not enjoy sex?
I kept chewing on it until eventually I decided to take it to my Instagram followers to help me dig a little deeper. I ended up calling and interviewing three willing participants to tell me their tale. You can read those interviews here.
One interviewee offered this very profound insight on why so many straight married women so often assume they just don’t like sex:
“[After my divorce] for nine months I didn’t date. I didn’t care about sex. I still thought I was asexual. Then I was listening to a podcast by Ester Perel called Where Do We Begin…
It was about this couple with a traditional upbringing in India. I related to the wife so much because she never wanted sex… just exactly how I felt.
And Ester Perel said, ‘You saying no to sex is actually you saying no to patriarchy because those things are inseparable in your mind.’ And I was running and I stopped when she said that and just started crying because that was life changing to me. That was totally it.
Then she was like, ‘You need to separate patriarchy from sex. Sex is not just for men. Sex is for you.’ And I was like, that’s it! I wasn’t saying no to sex WITH men. I was saying no to sex FOR men.
I was saying no to patriarchal sex, which is the only sex I knew.”
Fascinating.2
When asked specifically what was the catalyst to start liking sex, all my interviewees said some version of the same thing:
“Interestingly once sex was off the table in our relationship, it made this space for me to think about it for myself. I was so busy thinking about him I never felt like I had the space to think about sex for me in my life- ‘do even like this? Do I want this? Is this an important part of my life FOR ME? Apart from him?’”
“Having time all to myself is key. When I start liking a guy, I start thinking of them a lot. I want to take care of them. It’s hard to think of myself because I am thinking of them so much, but when I’m not dating anyone, I think of myself easily. For me this has been the main thing- time to think about myself without thinking of a man.”
“I’m exhausted and burnt out at the end of the day just by living my life. My life revolved around obligation, duty, work, expectation, everything that had to be done. There was no thought of ‘what do you want? What sounds fun to you? What sounds pleasurable to you?”
All of them said that the thing that made sex not pleasurable was when sex was 1. a duty or 2. just for her partner. The antidote was time and space just to herself, for herself to ponder and prioritize her own desires.
So… no big deal, just start centering women’s sexuality.
Wait why is it so hard to center women in heterosexual sex?
Sounds simple enough- just start prioritizing the woman’s experience. Bada bing bada boom. Problem solved.
Oh my dewy-eyed young doe, if only there weren’t one million invisible barriers in the way of prioritizing a woman’s sexuality.
I’ll focus on just three of them here, but please know I could mention 300.
1. The very definition of heterosexual sex is male penetration and orgasm.
Let’s say a gal comes home from a date and her friend asks her “Did you have sex?”
What she means isn’t “Did you orgasm?” What she means is “Did the man penetrate you?”
That’s what sex means. Merriam Webster defines heterosexual sex as “penetration of the vagina by the penis.” Wikipedia’s definition is “the insertion and thrusting of the male penis inside the female vagina.” This is also how sex is defined in our court system.
Here’s the issue with defining sex by penetration: Only 18.4% of women report that intercourse alone is sufficient for orgasm. Meanwhile 95% of men report that intercourse alone is sufficient for orgasm.
Our very definition of sex allows for 95% of men to climax, but only 18.4% of women.
The clitoris, an essential component for the vast majority of women to feel pleasured enough to orgasm is completely absent from any definition of sex.
“I ludicrously never noticed that almost all my sex was structured around male orgasm. As a young woman I invisibly learned that sex was a means to the end of male climax, a narrative arc of male arousal and ejaculation. Somewhere along the line, I and my sweet boyfriends absorbed the belief that it was all about them. Even later lovers, aware and critical of this, perhaps careful to ‘take turns,’ were still fundamentally programmed to need to orgasm every time.” - Rosaline Atkinson, The Awful Norm: What Patriarchy Has Done to Everyday Sex
Even with very considerate male partners who want to center and pleasure their women- many couples don’t consider the sexual encounter complete if the man does not orgasm. It’s expected. Female orgasm is not.
How are we supposed to just start centering women during sex when our very definition of sex is based on male pleasure?
This would be like saying “Hey women! Why don’t you start enjoying hobbies?!” but then defining a hobby exclusively as fantasy football. Then we all scratch our heads wondering why so many women find it hard to enjoy hobbies.
2. Female arousal is bypassed.
Sex in our culture is so deeply engrained as “for the man” that the male-centricness becomes invisible and we take it as normal.
Take something as common as lubricants for instance. We all know when men are aroused because of erections, but the female body also has a way of signaling arousal- natural lubrication.
Unfortunately natural lubrication is often ignored or rushed in favor of commercial lubricants3. Even worse- the time it takes for a woman to naturally lubricate is often assumed as a personal failure when she can’t become aroused as quickly as her partner. When really, it just takes longer.
“I now perceive normalisation of commercial lubrication products as a symptom of seriously insensitive man-centric sex. I understand that there are many other reasons that make them necessary, but I believe the majority of use is to cope with rushed and insensitive penetration, and serves to hide the aggression of this.” - Rosaline Atkinson
3. The fun part of sex is for men. The not fun consequences are for women.
When a man impregnates a woman who doesn’t want to be pregnant, we see it as entirely the woman’s responsibility to deal with the consequence of that man’s orgasm.
Women’s orgasms do not cause pregnancy. All pregnancies are caused by men’s orgasms, and we place the labor of dealing with male ejaculation squarely on women’s shoulders. We expect women to take the pill or get an IUD painfully inserted and deal with all of the subsequent costs and side effects of this hormonal treatment rather than expect men to occasionally wear a condom.
We are so culturally engrained to necessitate that sex be pleasurable for a man, that even a slight inconvenience to his pleasure is seen as unreasonable. When the much more considerable inconvenience to a woman of daily taking a pill or having a medical procedure is viewed as a normal and reasonable expectation.
So we define sex as male orgasm, we cater sex to allow men to orgasm as seamlessly as possible and then we shield men from facing the consequences of their orgasms.
We don’t consider female orgasms as a part of sex, we ignore the ways they are aroused and then place all responsibility for and consequences of male orgasm on the woman.
Real head scratcher why we have a hard time centering women in the bedroom.
And the picture gets even worse for married women
In the patriarchal waters we’re all swimming in, it’s hard enough to center women’s sexuality, but if you’re married? You have to be very savvy indeed to not be swept along in the swift current of hundreds of years of marriage norms.
While rape was considered a crime in this country as early as the 1700s4, marital rape wasn’t considered a crime in all 50 states until 1993!
Still today, many consider rape to be impossible where wedding rings are involved.
Take this from a 2018 survey of 1148 men:
“A full 77 percent of men said it's a must to get consent at every stage of a sexual encounter. But go deeper into our findings, especially about married or dating couples, and the data is a bit more...patriarchal. In fact, 59 percent of men agreed that husbands were "entitled to" sex with their wives (46 percent agreed that boyfriends were "entitled to" sex with their girlfriends).”
59% of men believe husbands are entitled to sex with their wives!
59%!
Most men believe that a marriage license entitles them to a woman’s body.
That alone solves the riddle of why so many women do not enjoy sex while married.
The assumption in the undercurrent here is that marriage means that a man holds some ownership over his wife and her body.
It’s crucial to understand why this is such a common assumption. We are not that far off from a time when men literally owned their wives as their property.
When you consider that husbands legally owned their wives as property for the past three centuries, things start making a lot more sense
The fact that most men believe that marital rape is not a thing points to the historical leftovers of coverture laws. Coverture laws held that husbands owned their wives- including all of their money, possessions, children and yes their bodies. How can you violate your own property? It’s your property.
These laws were set with the formation of our country and have very slowly eroded piece by piece mostly in the past few decades.
Under coverture laws, females did not have their own legal identity. When they were born, they were their father’s property. When they married, they were “covered” by their husband and became his property. Hence, a girl was born with her father’s last name, then switched to her husband’s. The married couple were considered “Mr. and Mrs. [husband’s name].” While now a married woman has her own legal identity, it is not hard to see the traces of this history today.
It is shocking how recent coverture laws were still in effect. A woman could not own her own property without a man until 1974. She couldn’t get a loan for a business without a man until 1988, and she couldn’t get a credit card in her name until 1974.
And this wasn’t just a short period of history that husbands owned their wives. The earliest written human laws express outrightly that women were the property of their husband’s. Middle Assyrian Laws, written around 1500 BCE, are full of outlining women as men’s property. Law 55 for instance states that if a virgin is raped, she is then owned by her rapist.
For all of recorded history save the past few decades, the pressure to please her husband wasn’t just a nice idea for a wife- it was literally her means to have access to food and shelter. If a woman left her husband, she lost everything- access to money, a home, the ability to earn money and her children. A woman’s very survival depended on pleasing her husband.
That pressure to please doesn’t just go away after a few measly decades of women being legally able to buy a house. History doesn’t change overnight.
Listen to what my interviewees had to say about the pressure they felt to please their husbands:
“We thought of sex as a reward for him. Like a sticker chart. He did the dishes, he took care of the kids, he bought me a massage for my birthday- he deserves a sticker…. Like going on vacation or date night and thinking "sex SHOULD be happening at the end of this."
“I think a lot of the frameworks we had around sexuality in my marriage made him entitled. Because he wanted sex, I should want sex with him. There was nothing on his part that needed to be done. When I told him I don’t like intercourse instead of asking ‘Well what DOES she like?’ We were both like ‘what is wrong with me?’”
“I was willing to have sex more often. I didn't enjoy it … I would clean up in the bathroom and start bawling. Like ‘Oh my gosh I hated that!’ But I thought it was just what I had to do because I didn't want to get divorced.”
But isn’t centering women during sex just as unfair as centering men?
If you knew nothing of the very long and very recent history of men owning women, if you never considered how male-centric our conceptions of sex are, then of course you would see centering a woman’s experience as inequitable.
Understanding patriarchy and women’s history is absolutely crucial to understanding why so many women don’t like sex.
Unfortunately, instead of being a rare occurrence, not understanding patriarchy or women’s history is the norm.
Neither is taught in schools. In an article in the Washington Post, one high school senior noted that in her AP US history textbook, despite 20+ page chapters dedicated to each of the wars the US has participated in, there is one paragraph, less than 100 words dedicated to “women,” mentioning they can now vote.
The word “coverture” is so foreign that my phone autocorrects it to “cover tired.”5
If you are a young man born 20 years ago and notice lots of “lets empower women” messages without understanding why those messages are necessary, of course you would think this is terribly unfair to empower women. “What about the men?” you would ask.
And in terms of sex, instead of understanding what makes sex so unenjoyable for so many women, it would be easy to blame the woman and wonder “what’s wrong with you?”
As always, let’s make sure we are crystal clear that patriarchy and men are not synonyms. When we say patriarchy we are talking about a system set in motion centuries ago that harms all men and women.
Unless you are Hammurabi who wrote the Code of Hammurabi asserting men’s right to rule over women, unless you are the author of the book of Genesis who claimed women were responsible for all of humanity’s sins, congratulations you are not responsible for patriarchy.
You were simply born into the system of patriarchy. However, it is all of our responsibility to understand this system we were born into and how it affects us.
One effect particularly notable for the men: you’d actually have way better sex lives if it wasn’t for patriarchy.
Good sex for women doesn’t mean bad sex for men. It means the opposite.
I actually think most men want to please their partner. I think most men really want to please their partner.
But because patriarchy shames men away from displaying qualities essential to deep intimacy like vulnerability and emotional connection - sex is over-emphasized as their only path to feel deep human connection and love:
“Men come to sex hoping that it will provide them with all of the emotional satisfaction that would have come from love. Most men think that sex will provide them with a sense of being alive, connected, that sex will offer closeness, intimacy, pleasure. And more often than not sex simply does not deliver the goods. This fact does not lead men to cease obsessing about sex; it intensifies their lust and their longing.” - bell hooks The Will to Change
Then like a circular domino effect from hell- this intensified longing for sex as love that patriarchy bequeaths to men pressures his partner, which makes her retreat further, which increases his longing, which increases the pressure, which causes her further retreat and so on and so forth until the space in the middle of the bed freezes over.
Adding to the mountainous heap of reasons patriarchy harms men, men in more gender equal societies report have better sex lives than those in less gender equal societies. In a study of American men- men with feminist partners reported greater sexual satisfaction.
A better sexual experience for the woman means a better sexual experience for the man.
What would non-patriarchal heterosexual sex even look like?
Can we even dream?
For starters, “having sex” wouldn’t by default mean penetration until the man orgasms.
When a gal comes home from a date and her friend asks, “Did you have sex?”
That question would mean “were you sexually pleasured?”
The phrase “having sex” would come to mean massage, cunnilingus, clitoral stimulation or orgasmic meditation with equal regularity as penetration.
Female orgasm and male orgasm would be equally valued and sought after. But there would never be any pressure to achieve either. Climax would be de-throned as the ultimate sign of successful sex, replaced by intimate adoration of the other person.
“If we free sex from the tyranny of the rule of the male orgasm, we get an immersive, erotic experience that is intimate adoration of the other person.” - Rosalind Atkinson
Because adoration is the goal, everyone’s desires matter immensely. Consent wouldn’t be something to get in the way, to roll your eyes at- it would be given a place of sacred honor. Checking in to make sure your partner, whether male or female, is feeling heard and attended to would be the norm.
Women would feel equal freedom to be the desirer rather than merely the desired. Men would be the receiver equally as often as he is the pursuer.
Your sexual desirability would not be determined by the degree to which you resemble a 16 year old with big boobs, a tiny waist and baby skin.
You would be deemed worthy of desirability simply because you are you.
You wouldn’t need to pluck, lose, fix, suck in, freshen up or alter anything about yourself to arrive at a sexual encounter and be seen as sexy and worthy of experiencing sexual pleasure.
There would be no pressure to perform, only to be present. Only to enjoy. Only to have fun. Only to rejoice in each other and yourself.
Can we even dream?
** This post was originally published on October 20, 2004
None of this is to say that asexuality isn’t real or valid, it very much is, just that it’s an interesting pattern of what happens to a woman’s sex drive in heterosexual marriage. If you want to dive into the difference between low sex drive and asexuality- asexuality.org is a great resource.
A big thanks to my interviewees and also thanks to the woman who messaged me recently that this article and specifically this part of the article totally changed her sex life and outlook on sex. You are the reason I’m writing this one- thank you.
Nothing wrong with commercial lubricants- there are many benefits and uses apart from rushing a woman’s arousal. Still, it’s interesting to consider the broader implications of its prevalence.
“Carnal knowledge of a woman 10 year or older, forcibly and against her will” was against the law in early US colonies. Sadly women of color were not included in these laws until the late 1800s and often not until much later.
which… close enough I guess.
I think masturbation needs to be part of this discussion. It was immensely freeing to discover I could give myself an orgasm. It helped me understand my body, what gets me excited and gets me off. Everyone should be gifted with a vibrator. It should be a rite of passage. A big part of why this doesn’t happen is patriarchal fears that women will center ourselves, assisted by vibrators, instead of men in our sex life.
This post made my day! I so enjoy how your writing really makes me think ”a-hah!” As a long time feminist who has lived through rape and many sexual encounters that could or may not have been consensual, I realized a few years ago that I had trouble identifying what was what. Being raped at 12 by a family member and raped at 19 by a so called friend, the very knowledge of orgasm completely escaped me, even though I experienced sexual self pleasure as a kid. A good friend had to force the issue of calling rape “rape”, so immersed was I in equating rape with sex. So immersed was I in giving up my power to define sex that I wanted.
Now 30 years into a wonderful marriage and 77 years old, my partner and I go into sexual pleasure with new acceptance and expectation. Much of his joy comes from pleasing me. We both want to continue to have sexual pleasure. Many people we know our age and younger don’t. Your article shined a light on how we still live in a patriarchal world that defines sex as Intercourse.
Thank you for being and writing.