(sex)uality: what no man wants to hear
Without wanting to get Lily Allen on you all and divulge details of not only my own sex life, but also that of the men I’ve, ahem, ‘known’, I feel it’s time to right some wrongs often proliferated by both the media and feminists (which, to be fair, are both groups I technically belong to).
It has generally come to be understood that we all have different sexual tastes. An erogenous zone for one person makes someone else feel squeamish. Some want to be cuddled while others want to be ravaged. Just fast enough for some feels like being uncomfortably pounded for others.
Having sexual relations with someone new is often rife with confusion and uncertain experimenting, because a different body invariably means you’ll have to change something about your existing repertoire (and those who don’t believe this are probably the worst lovers of all). And yet, somewhere along the way, the belief that a woman has to orgasm in order to feel sexually satisfied has entered our collective psyche.
Certainly, this is an outcome that is important to some, but I can confidently say that you would be hard pressed to find a girl who wants to be rubbed raw in the quest to satisfy a partner’s ego. Unfortunately though, this is what 90-minute pursuits of female climax are generally about.
To be clear, I don’t blame dudes for this widely-held belief. With the multitude of female characters and personalities in various outlets of the media who have professed that men don’t care about their sexual pleasure, or that sex without an orgasm isn’t worth the effort, or that a man who doesn’t “make” them climax is a dud root, it’s hardly surprising that this idea has become so convincingly embedded in our culture.
Although it is important that sex came to be recognised as something that could and should be enjoyed by both parties rather than pursued with the mere goal of insemination or male relief, it has nonetheless given way to a converse problem.
Assurances that sex feels good often fall on deaf ears unless accompanied by a climactic scream/sigh/whatever and being fiddled with to excess out of sheer frustration is not all that stimulating. Worse yet, I’ve heard of countless situations in which a girl was made to feel that there was something wrong with her when an orgasm did not come to fruition, and countless attempts by yours truly to debunk this myth have generally been met with cocky sneers that my previous sexual partners must have been rubbish in the sack (which has only been true once) because they have allegedly unblemished track records. And yet, many, if not most, of my female friends have faked it at one point or another, which just serves to reinforce the notion that an orgasm is imperative to sexual satisfaction. And what this unfortunately means for the rest of you is that likely many, if not most, girls in the general population fake it at one point or another.
That, or I hang out with a bunch of liars.
It’s been claimed that Marilyn Monroe never had an orgasm, but it seems rather unlikely that the sexiest bomb of the 20th Century never enjoyed a single encounter with a male companion, and even those of us with a less desirable waist to hip ratio are capable of enjoying the slam dance even without a pinnacle of joy.
Sexual pleasure, whether in the form of a climax or otherwise, is a shared responsibility rather than one that should be exclusively placed on the shoulders of a partner. Maybe it’s just my schooling in psychology that makes me so certain that communication is key, but it’s more likely that I’m right. If an orgasm is necessary to your sexual experience, then you should be able to say that, but saying that it’s not important is equally valid and not always indicative of someone just trying to make you feel better.
Not achieving orgasm shouldn’t be taken to mean that there’s something wrong with a girl, and girls likewise shouldn’t use this as reason to claim someone is bad in bed.
Unless he’s a douchebag, in which case say what you want.
(Image credit: 1.)
