Fucked Over: Theory for Understanding the Gender Orgasm Gap
The gender orgasm gap is exactly what it sounds like. We know from sex health research that in cis-gendered heterosexual relationships, men experience on average three times more orgasms than women. Studies also shows that woman with vulvas in relationships with other women with vulvas are much more likely to cum during intercourse than similar women in relationships with cis men. To some, it can feel petty to be keeping score in something like sex, which we feel ought to be generously spirited. Although sexual pleasure is about a lot more than who cums more, bringing up the orgasm gap helps quantify a qualitative issue that goes beyond actual orgasms. The real question is why do so many women with vulvas experience dissatisfaction when fucking cis men?
Unfortunately our society is overrun with a cis male-centric view of sexuality. Men are imagined as sexual agents who act out sexuality, whereas women are the objects onto which sexuality acts. Think of the difference in language we use around intercourse: men fuck and women get fucked. To fuck is to be doing sex, and to fuck is to penetrate, so men are the ones doing sex. Too often in intercourse, women are imagined as instrumental tools, and our agency, our desires, and even our physiology are rendered invisible at the societal, institutional, and personal level. This is what we can refer to as the erasure of women’s sexuality, and it’s pervasive in affecting the way our bodies move in the world, especially in the bedroom. With women’s sexuality invisible, cis men’s desires get to define sex itself. This is partly how we end up with vaginal penetration as THE standard sex act, imagined to please both partners, even when studies show only 30% of vulva owners report being able to achieve orgasm through vaginal penetration alone.
Before I continue, a quick word on language. The invisibility of women’s sexuality is not just about the invisibility of women or vulvas; the meanings placed on vulvas are intensely gendered and obviously there are implications here for all women and anyone with a vulva. I don’t include them here because I can’t personally speak to those experiences, and because the experiences of women with vulvas fighting their sexual invisibility is not the same as those of trans men, trans women, or NB people with and without vulvas. These identities and bodies need their own analysis and may relate to what I say here in some ways and not in others.
Going back to sexual erasure, one way to address the issue may be through proper sex education on vulvas and the bodies of people who have them. Go check out Holly’s article on orgasms to learn more about this! But I worry we will need more than an education in biology to resolve this issue. The erasure is not just of the science, but of our very selves. So I’d like to talk a bit about identity. The following theoretical articulations are my own, but I am drawing heavily from the continuing legacy of Queer and Black Philosophy on identity (a few of my favorite influences on this topic include Judith Butler, Charles Mills, and Susan Stryker).
We generally experience our desires, pleasures, and identities as things which come to us organically, but I’d like to introduce the idea that the process by which we become our fully authentic identities, and even experience our sensations requires a cultural dialogue. I argue that growing up, and throughout our whole lives, the process in which we experience and recognize our sexual/gendered feelings happens at the same time as, and transforms in response to, the learning of social meanings. This allows our natural inclinations to evolve and take shape in the form of something socially informed so that we can understand them in the cultural language which makes up our reality. We literally produce our intelligible feelings, identities, and selves. But we experience it as ‘discovery’, as coming to know something ‘real’ about ourselves. What is important to note here is that fundamental to being a human person, to having identity, is a need for social dialogue to construct ourselves.
For example, I was always hesitant to describe the process where I came to know my bisexuality as a bisexual “coming out”, and I wasn’t sure why. I remember feeling like I wasn’t lesbian or bisexual because I didin’t truly experience attraction to other woman. Rather I had this feeling of something stirring in me, some potential that made me restless. When I met another bisexual person for the first time I felt so instantly and intimately connected to him in a totally new way. That was when I was finally able to see something reflected back at me, and in that moment I felt myself taking shape. Slowly, I started experiencing stronger attractions to women and non-binary people. My feelings were transformed in response to the learning and experiencing of social meanings, meanings I learned as I was recognizing my feelings, building tangible desires and identities, a process that continues to this day. However, consciously it felt like ‘becoming who I really was all along’ even as my feelings and identities continue to shift over time. This is obviously not how all queer people experience how they come to know their feelings. Also, this analysis is largely retrospective, and I am simplifying things a lot. Still, I hope this personal example can show how our inclinations are shaped by ourselves and cultural dialogues into something comprehensible and personally/socially meaningful.
This is why erasure is so harmful. With the invisibility of women’s sexuality, we have been robbed of the essential tools to form our sexual selves and desires. Without cultural dialogue we don’t have access to the mirror we build ourselves in. So many women struggle to know their own desires or to even form an idea of their own sexuality. I cannot speak to the experiences of other women, but I have found that these ideas of identity have helped me understand why in my early relationships with men I struggled to finish and why I was so insecure about men going down on me (not that they made it any easier). One reason was I did not want my body, my pussy, my sexuality, and my experiencing of sex to be the focus. I self consciously struggled to center myself as a sexual agent who is doing sex, rather than being a vessle for someone else’s pleasure. My hope is that this understanding might help you too.
