The Gendered Double Standard I Hate Most
For men, orgasm is considered a necessity.
For women, orgasm is considered a bonus.
You see this represented in the orgasm gap.
The orgasm gap is even greater in casual hook ups, during which men report they do not feel responsible for their partners’ orgasms.
Women, by contrast, report feeling like it is expected that they make partners orgasm even in casual hook ups.
Women who get men aroused and leave them with blue balls are shamed for being teases. Yet this literally is what men do to women in most casual hook ups.
There are countless excuses for this double standard. One is that it takes more time and effort to get a woman to orgasm. But this isn’t actually true.
Contrary to what men are already posting in the comments, it is not physiologically more difficult for women to orgasm. However, slut shaming and sex negativity can make it psychologically harder for some women until they overcome any mental blocks created by the exact double standard I am talking about.
Women are seen as less sexual in general. They are seen to engage in sex for reasons other than sexual pleasure itself, like validation, for example. But this is not supported by research on why humans have sex.
Slut shaming further contributes to women being less able to express their sexual needs and demand they be met. The impetus to suppress and control female sexuality in order to ensure paternity certainty in hierarchal human society has led to the denigration of female sexual needs.
Imagine if, culturally, sex was just as framed around female orgasm as it is around male. Imagine if clitoral stimulation is what defined sex as an act, and if it were simply understood that penetration should not occur without it.
Often people, especially doctors, point to reproductive purpose legitimizing the need of male orgasm. But this is ludicrous for two reasons:
- Most sex is not reproductive.
- Female pleasure and orgasm undeniably provides incentive to engage in reproductive activity.
Female humans are only actually fertile about 20% of the time. Pair bonding appears to be every bit as important a function of sex as conception. This is especially true if you consider how important sexual health has been shown to be beyond reproductive age.
In addition, we often deny the importance of female sexual pleasure and orgasm, as if female mate choice and romantic love were not essential for healthy human families throughout human evolution. Female sexual pleasure and orgasm helps women bond with their partners and provides incentive to engage in reproductive activity. To consider the clitoris and female orgasm as having no reproductive purpose is fundamentally rapey. How would consensual reproduction occur as frequently as we need it to, with all the havoc pregnancy wrecks on a woman’s body, without female pleasure?
Yet medically, female orgasm is not considered anywhere near as important as male orgasm. Risks to female sexual function are left out of standardized consent forms, while risks to male sexual function are always listed. My plastic surgeon father noticed this when he requested consent forms for all pelvic surgeries done at Baylor Hospital in Dallas.
While the anatomy, physiology, and biomechanics of the penis have been thoroughly documented, similar details are lacking for vulvar anatomy. Even when studies are done, though researchers note the gap in coverage, the information does not get disseminated due to a lack of interest.
In OB/GYN textbooks, women are represented as reproductive, not sexual. They discuss the “female role of giving pleasure.” They omit detailed vulvar anatomy, even from surgery textbooks. The clitoris is often illustrated and described incorrectly. And female sexual function and dysfunction are described in chapters on “psychosocial issues.” In one major OB/GYN textbook, more text is devoted to describing male sexual function than female, though OB/GYNs don’t treat men.
Since I have been active on social media, I have been getting stories like this one.
I hope to one day figure out how to put these together in a way that is meaningful. But they have been hard to keep track of, and most women have a desire to stay extremely private. Contacts I made while raising awareness on Twitter were lost when I got permanently suspended. It is so frustrating, because I know what I have to say is important, and I wish I could figure out how.
I believe a lot of 20th century evasion of the clitoris are attributable to Freud, who considered the clitoris a problem. Prior to his theories of vaginal orgasm, even the church encouraged female orgasm via stimulation of the clitoris. Detailed clitoral anatomy was furthermore illustrated in medical textbooks as of 1844.
Even the way we refer to vulvas as vaginas denies the importance of female pleasure and orgasm. This amounts to linguistic clitorectomy. It is a linguistic deletion of all erectile tissue responsible for female sexual response and orgasm. It occurs for the very same reason that actual clitorectomy occurs to millions of women in Africa. The fundamental incentive is the oppression and denial of female sexuality. And it leads to pervasive ignorance among both women and men.
Imagine if, culturally, we taught little girls accurate anatomy from day one instead of linguistically denying the existence of any erectile tissue in women. Imagine if there was as great awareness around female genital anatomy as there is around male. Imagine if the image of vulva, in art and in other media, were as common as the penis. And imagine if representations of the vulva did not consistently minimize the size of the clitoris and exaggerate the size of the vagina. Imagine more images like this, which I drew to show the nerves missing from medical illustrations.
There is so much to be said about why this double standard exists and how to solve it. But it’s so important that we do. Women deserve orgasm equality.
I’ve tried to link to a lot of articles concerning this double standard. Please click on those linked throughout this answer. But here are some more.
Women deserve orgasm equality | Jessica Valenti
The ‘orgasm gap’: Why it exists and what women can do about it
Is The Orgasm Gap Real? — O.school
How to close the female orgasm gap | Shannon Bledsoe
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org...