Last Saturday, Jill @ Feministe wrote a post poking fun at an article in the New York Times about women who have lost interest in sex. She wrote:
I don’t want to problematize lack of sexual interest entirely, because there are people who are genuinely not interested in sex at all, and that’s fine. To each their own, the world is a big and diverse and interesting place, etc. And I don’t think that the problem is 100% on women who once enjoyed sex and no longer do; there shouldn’t be any guilt or shame in that, because it just is. Those women definitely exist; men like that exist too. If you were once interested in sex but no longer are, it’s not particularly helpful to think that it’s Your Fault And You Are Wrong.
But… it’s still less than ideal, isn’t it, to just give up on sex? I am working here from the basic position that, for sexual people, sex is a good and fun thing (or at least it can be and should be). It’s kind of like food — food can be really reallyawesome, and as someone who really enjoys food, it breaks my heart a little bit whenever I meet people who are just like, “Food is fuel, I eat it to stay alive, I don’t take any pleasure in it and I wouldn’t eat if I didn’t have to” or people who are like, “I only eat things that are white.” That is so beyond my experience that I can’t fully understand it and I admittedly feel sorry for people who take that position. I feel the same way about uncritical reporting on loss of sexual interest. If sex was fun once, but now it’s not fun anymore and you don’t really crave it or think about it, what is going on that has taken such a fundamental, great pleasure and moved it into the category of “meh, don’t need it”?
Obviously we should trust people to organize their own priorities and enjoy what they enjoy and structure their lives as they see fit. But I think we can also cast a critical eye on trend stories like this one, which are based on maybe some nugget of truth that gets dressed up in Me And My Friends anecdotes and culturally-acceptable stereotypes, and also on cultural mores that see women’s lack of sexual interest as (1) inevitable, (2) individual and (3) not problematic for women, but a pain in the ass for men.
While I think her critique of the original NYT article is insightful, and agree with much of what she says — particularly the final paragraph quoted above — what I find even more interesting is the comment thread, where conversation quickly grew heated. A few examples of the more negative reactions, drawn from a comment thread that, as of this writing, contains over 200 individual posts.
From prefer not to say:
But seriously, the idea that I need to examine my sexual exhaustion, unearth its roots in structural oppression, and then work on recapturing the glory of sex at its finest — it makes me hostile. Can’t I just let one damn thing slide?
From willa:
All I’m getting from your post, Jill, is that women who aren’t interested in sex need to suck it up and get interested in it pronto so the rest of the women out there can provide a united, FALSE front that we all love sex. And apparently you feel really sorry for me because I’m not interested in sex and don’t really enjoy it. Not cool. Really offensive. Stop throwing me under your goddamn bus. And I don’t want your pity, either.
From nico:
Maybe it’s because I’m still a fairly young woman, but I feel A LOT of pressure to be hungry for sex all the time. I feel like there’s something wrong with me because I’d often prefer to read a book, watch a movie, have a good conversation, go for a walk.
None of my friends would ever admit that they get bored with sex, don’t like it, or would sometimes just rather do something else. I wish they WOULD talk about it – I’d feel kind of relieved. I’m not asexual, I just don’t want sex very often. Isn’t that okay?
I think a lot of sex-positive feminists go too far in the other direction and put way too much emphasis on sex as the be all and end all of everything. Feminism to me is about women having the sexuality they want, and not being shamed for being a “slut” OR “frigid”.
I recommend clicking through to read the whole threadif you’re interested in this sort of thing — though be prepared for a lot of really strongly-held and strongly-worded opinions, including some pretty harsh judgment by commenters about folks with sexual identities and desires different from their own.
Which brings me to my own observatio-of-the-day about conversations we have about sex. This picks up a little from where last week’s post on quantifying libido left off. Namely: Why do we always make it personal when talking about sex? I don’t necessarily think this is a bad thing, but it can often hamper discussions. We seem particularly prone to experience all critiques of sexual discourse or sexual experience as personal judgment. In other words, we grab all the arrows that fly by and plunge them into our own chests — even when they aren’t meant for us! Why is this?
I have a few theories. Please feel free to add your own in comments!
1) Sexuality is a site of personal morality. In our culture, we use peoples’ sexual lives — and often their supposed sexual lives — as a way of judging their morality. Ergo people are particularly protective of their sexual reputations and/or feel it is particularly important to ensure that other people understand their sexuality correctly.
2) Sexuality is a site of personal identity. And who wants their identity to be mis-construed or (worse) maligned? Because sex is a site of moral judgment, people are hyper-aware of being scrutinized by the world vis a vis their sexual identities and behaviors. It’s difficult, therefore, not to take every observation about sexual right/wrong or good/bad intensely personally.
3) Sex talk is almost always generalized. Perhaps because sexuality is such an intimate part of ourselves, we tend to speak in general terms rather than in specifics, but at the same time we conflate the general with the specific (see my previous post on libido).
Finally, 4) Sexual problems are almost always privatized.Scrolling through the comments over at Feministe, I was struck by how defensive many commenters were about their own sexual desires. They felt blamed for lack of desire, or low desire, for sex despite the fact that Jill was actually saying that we need to look outside individual people for explanations about differential desire (and then only differential desire that is making the individual person unhappy). Why do we — even feminists who should know the mantra “the personal is political” at this point in the game! — persist in turning sexual unhappiness inward and locating the problem in our own bodies, rather than in the larger culture?
I don’t really have any larger point to make, other than that I wish we could get beyond reading so much moral judgement and personal blame into talk about sex and instead see how these conversations can open us up to new ways of thinking about, and being, sexual (and asexual!) creatures.
I’ll add another theory: especially for women, we don’t have the medical knowledge to really be able to discuss things like level of sex drive and sexual dysfunction in women. I’m not saying this is necessarily a bad thing. However, in my view, if a guy says he’s having trouble with sex, the immediate assumption is that he’s dealing with either premature ejaculation or erectile dysfunction, not anything that’s primarily emotional of psychological (I would put this down partially to gendered expectations as well). We have medical treatments for both of those problems. For a woman, there are a couple of similar issues — vaginismus and insufficient lubrication come to mind — but if there’s no physical issue present, it’s really difficult to discuss loss of desire on any sort of population level. Hormones seem to play into it, obviously, but there are a lot of people who experience a loss of libido and don’t seem to have any hormonal imbalances. We still don’t understand enough to say something like “increased daily stress leads to loss of desire in x% of the population through the following mechanism”. I view it sort of like depression before it was understood that depression could be a legitimate medical issue as well as an emotional one — even if you can observe that a lot of other people have similar experiences, it’s very difficult to actually make a general statement when there’s no hard evidence to back it up.
(As a note, I guess I am sort of positing that there’s a medical reason or at least a mechanism through which many people experience a loss of desire as they get older or go through certain life changes, etc. But I would qualify this in the same way that Jill did — I think it’s mostly problematic if there was a loss as opposed to starting from a theoretically lower than average level.)
I fixed the typo, @baraqiel
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and I think you make a really good point about how, for women, it’s much harder to identify a specific physical issue and therefore we’re more likely to make the problem personal (“you’re doing it wrong!”) than we are, rightly or wrongly, with men.
@anna – Thank you! ^_^
Also, since you brought up the comments on that post and I’ve been reading the thread, I want to expand a little bit given something that I noticed in the comments that I find very distressing, which is people denying that it’s even important for them to be able to feel sexual pleasure or that sexual pleasure is an important (Jill’s word is “fundamental”) form a pleasure for humans. The reason I find this distressing is that it strikes me as contrafactual in a weird way. I really feel like people in that thread are missing the physical component of what Jill was arguing and focusing almost entirely on the emotional environment surrounding their sexual practice or lack thereof. From a solely physical point of view, it should be the case that some form of clitoral stimulation causes pleasure (not necessarily orgasm) in almost every woman. That is quite literally the way that we are built. If everything else about sex isn’t worth it, or it’s not important *to you*, or that you have no drive to seek it out, those are all to me somewhat different, but the inability to feel sexual pleasure is, it seems to me, likely indicative of a problem.
One thing I would bring in here is masturbation, and ask if people who’ve lost interest in partner sex still find masturbation to be fun and “worth it” (or if they ever did) as perhaps an easy way to tell whether, for any given individual, the issue is primarily one with how they’re engaging with their partner and/or monogamy (as some commenters on that thread suggested) or if there’s actually some roadblock to them enjoying sexual pleasure at all. I think it’s an important distinction! But perhaps in order for it to be useful, one would have to already have had an active masturbatory life at some point? Anyway, I find it interesting that I’ve yet to find a single comment (out of about 100 so far) that mentions masturbation.
I’d suggest it having something to do with a lack of actual knowledge apart from the personal… when you don’t know much at all about anyone’s sex life but your own (because it’s not really something one’s “supposed to” talk about unless one is agreeing with the cultural narrative of I love sex and have lots of it) it’s tough NOT to make it personal because that’s all it is to most of us.
I want to expand a little bit given something that I noticed in the comments that I find very distressing, which is people denying that it’s even important for them to be able to feel sexual pleasure or that sexual pleasure is an important (Jill’s word is “fundamental”) form a pleasure for humans.
I get what you’re saying, baraqiel, and I do think it’s possible to think of supporting sexual pleasure as … well, as sort of a human right …. as something we shouldn’t just dismiss as “unimportant” as a symptom or result of distress. I’ve definitely seen this happen with a lot of people in the medical professions, and as a result among women close to me who are unhappy with changes in their libido, but experience their healthcare providers as not interested in exploring possible causes.
This feeds into the cultural narrative that sexual pleasure, for women especially, is not really a central concern. And that you’re selfish, foolish, abnormal, etc., for feeling sad that you’ve stopped feeling spontaneous desire or whatever it is that you’re missing.
However, I feel compelled to point out that for people who identify as asexual, having (relational) sexual pleasure framed as fundamental to human experience is tricky because it seems to write them out of that human community, or somehow understand them as defective human beings. So it would be important to argue that sexual pleasure is a central pleasure, not frame it as something uniquely privileged and inherent to all human experience.
having (relational) sexual pleasure framed as fundamental to human experience
Well, right, but that’s sort of why I brought up masturbation. What I’m talking about is quite simply whether or not someone perceives a kind of nerve stimulation as pleasure signals. I want to draw a distinction between sexual attraction, sexual drive, and sexual pleasure as I believe these concepts to be mutually distinct albeit interconnected. There are people on AVEN who identify as asexual and masturbate and the Feministe thread has at least one person (Megan) who identifies as asexual but has a sexual partner with whom she is in a romantic and sexual relationship, and says that while she finds sex to be pleasant, she has no drive towards it, nor does she find anyone sexually attractive. I’ve also seen asexuality defined as the lack of feeling sexual attraction whatsoever. What I mean to say is that the loss of sexual drive independent of the ability to feel sexual pleasure is a different issue and should be addressed differently than the loss of the ability to feel sexual pleasure itself.
I would add that it can have something to do with body image, since patriarchy targets women’s bodies.
If I told a few friends I wasn’t interested in sex, I could be reasonably sure that at least one would ask me if it’s because of my body. Is it because I feel like I weigh too much, or weigh too little, or don’t like the shape of my breasts… or, worse, is it because my partner finds me sexually repulsive, so I’m shamed into not seeking sex?
It’s a common thing to fault women’s bodies in sexual situations.
And I think people get nervous because they don’t want to have to deal with that judgment on top of everything else. If I identified as asexual, I definitely wouldn’t want to explain and defend that identity while also countering well-meaning people who assumed I simply have an aversion to sex because I’m insecure about my weight (and in non-feminist circles — and even IN feminist circles, sometimes — that’s the cue for diet advice, exercise routines, etc.).
I think to a great extent sexual problems in a lot of women are personal and private, in the sense that they stem from the individual’s body rather than the cultural milieu around her.
For example–and this is just a situation I’m personally familiar with–women are much more likely to suffer from depression than men, which decreases libido (in every sense of the word). Treatments for depression decrease sexual drive. Culture comes into play when doctors and psychiatrists don’t consider loss of libido a significant side effect that has to be accounted for when designing treatment plans, but there are only so many antidepressants out there. Extrapolating from this, I’d expect that a lot of health effects on libido in women are ignored.
I mean, if lack of sex drive isn’t an issue for you, it isn’t an issue. But I personally miss my libido and I think that talking about that doesn’t denigrate women who aren’t bothered by decreased libido or lower than average libido. (Defining “average” in this case is, of course, problematic for the reasons that baraqiel covered.)
re: Baraqiel’s comment on masturbation
Ok, I’m totally being the epitome of the person this post is talking about, taking this personally – but really, I can only talk about my own personal experience when it comes to sex. I have a couple female friends I talk about sex with, but even so, I wouldn’t presume to speak for their experience.
Baraqiel makes an important distinction between losing interest in partner sex and masturbation. But, IME (n=1), it’s a package deal – when I lose interest in sex with my partner due to emotional and relationship issues, I lose interest in sex *period*. Not even masturbation interests me. Maybe it’s because the relationship issues sends me into depression (something I struggle with), and the depression then weakens my libido – it would be hard to disentangle these. But I’ve seen this happen multiple times now: relationship starts falling apart, I lose all interest in sex *or* masturbation, relationship finally ends, interest in masturbation slowly starts coming back, then I meet someone else and wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am it’s all back.
On another note, I think it’s VERY interesting that she brings up food as her analogy in this post. Food and sex are both very fraught areas for women, in that both are strongly moralized, and both are things that we’re both supposed to want and indulge in, yet at the same time are told from day 1 that “good girls” don’t indulge in. Witness the madonna/whore dichotomy, and – as but one example – any woman’s magazine, which devotes half the space to pictures of fattening food and the other half to diet talk.
As an obese woman who has fought my weight my entire life, I couldn’t help but catch myself snorting at the privilege she displays in saying she pities people who don’t enjoy food. Lucky her, that she gets to both enjoy food and maintain an acceptable body size. It’s taken me over 20 years to get to the point where I can enjoy food, and only after I realized I can’t obtain the acceptable body size even *when* I dramatically restrict food, so what the hay?
These are my internal, gut reactions, and I certainly recognize them for what they are and know better. I’m explaining them here only because I imagine a certain dynamic is playing out amongst some (many?) of the women responding to her sex comments. Women are constantly judged for being too sexual or not sexual enough, just as they’re constantly judged for eating too much or too little. I think it’s natural for women under such constant pressure to scoff at someone telling them it’s oh-so-easy to just ignore the intense societal pressure.
Don’t know that I have a bigger point here…just found it interesting.
Ok, I’m totally being the epitome of the person this post is talking about, taking this personally – but really, I can only talk about my own personal experience when it comes to sex.
I just want to say that, IMHO, there’s a world of difference between talking out of personal experience, and acknowledging it as such, and “taking this personally” … that is, experiencing someone else’s perspective as a judgment aimed at you or people you identify with.
Sometimes (often! in the case of sex) folks ARE totally judging you, which is why I get that we tend to feel defensive about our subjective experience when it comes to sex. Too often — WAY too often — we’re told that whatever our experience is is wrong or defective. Who we’re attracted to, what we like to do in bed, how we like to do it … all of those things get dragged out and critiqued politically, culturally, religiously, etc.
So it really isn’t that much of a mystery that we end up taking those arrows and stabbing ourselves. I think what I’m trying to figure out is how to change the conversation so that we can discuss the sexual narratives of our culture without folks feeling that they’re defective if they don’t match up with X or Y.
Anyway … long, rambling response here — but mostly I wanted to say, @viajera, that I don’t think you’re out of line here to speak from personal experience. It’s really only by sharing personal experience that we learn the variety of sexuality that’s out there.
@viajera – I take your point about the masturbation thing, that isn’t really something I’d considered, but I still find it curious that no one brought it up on Feministe. With regards to your second comment:
1) Okay, so she’s in a position of privilege by being able to observe from a relatively outside perspective that it’s sad that people can’t enjoy food, and “pity” is a charged term. I’m with you there. But the thing is — isn’t it sad? Isn’t that sort of the point? It’s sad that our culture robs many of us of the ability to enjoy things like food and sex? I understand that she might have come off as condescending but I think it’s valid to say “I feel sadness that people have to deal with this in their lives”. Maybe I’m missing something?
2) That said, I don’t see anywhere where Jill said or implied that it’s easy to ignore social pressure and just enjoy things. I read her much more as saying that she observes that some people can’t, that this is a problem, and that we should determine the causes so they can be fixed or at least ameliorated. I honestly didn’t see any “just get over it” implications at all. I agree with you, however, that that seems to be the reaction that many of the commenters had (as if she had said that it’s easy). I’m not sure exactly where that’s coming from but, again, maybe I’m missing something?
I too got a judgemental vibe off of Jill’s piece. Sure she put in some disclaimers but just re-reading your quoted section I think a lot of the objections come to the second paragraph. That paragraph does a good job of overriding the first one and distracts from the third IMO. If she’d omitted it, and the others like it, I think the reaction may have been different.
Sex is a very personal thing so it is hard to remove that aspect of it. At no time in my life would I have ever considered sex a “fundamental, great pleasure” and Jill kind of presents it as if it should be that way for everybody and if it isn’t that’s sad.
I feel like I should add that I obviously can’t write better, but I think part of some of the readers taking it personally was that very personal second paragraph in the quote.
We know that more women than men seem to experience lack of sexual desire. We know that this has social causes. We also know that, for the majority of people who do experience sexual desire, it is a positive experience. Therefore, it seems reasonable to conclude that at least some women out there who don’t experience much sexual desire have been deprived of a positive experience by social forces. However, it also seems clear that many women (and men) don’t experience sexual desire for more individual reasons, and it might be difficult to distinguish between those who have been denied an otherwise positive experience and those for whom it wouldn’t have been positive anyway.
To say “it’s sad that you, specifically, don’t experience sexual desire” would be judgmental and wrong, unless the “you” in the sentence also feels that way about it. However, the statement “it’s sad that so many women have been pushed into experiencing less sexual desire than they otherwise would” seems incontrovertible.
Is sex a “fundamental” pleasure? I don’t know – maybe it’s safest just to say that it is a fundamental pleasure for most people.
@baraqiel – no, I think you made a very good and valid point that I’m also surprised wasn’t raised earlier. I think it would likely be a valid test for many people, just not for me (YMMV).
As for your response to my second point…I’m still having a hard time articulating what exactly I found so interesting about that connection and my response to it. Re: #1 – yes, it is sad, I agree. Re: #2 – I don’t necessarily think she’s making a “just get over it” point. It’s more that, I can see how *other* people might get that impression from reading that post through the lenses of their own experiences. Just as I snorted “good for her that she can enjoy food and still be acceptable,” I can see others similarly snorting “good for her that she is in a relationship/position/wev where she can enjoy sex.” Doesn’t mean these responses are “right” (whatever that means), I recognize that both my own and these other responses are coming from an overly-personal interpretation. It just means I can see where they’re coming from, fwiw.
Finally, 4) Sexual problems are almost always privatized.Scrolling through the comments over at Feministe, I was struck by how defensive many commenters were about their own sexual desires. They felt blamed for lack of desire, or low desire, for sex despite the fact that Jill was actually saying that we need to look outside individual people for explanations about differential desire (and then only differential desire that is making the individual person unhappy). Why do we — even feminists who should know the mantra “the personal is political” at this point in the game! — persist in turning sexual unhappiness inward and locating the problem in our own bodies, rather than in the larger culture?
Actually, I’m much more used to seeing feminist perspectives which do exactly the opposite – perspectives on sex and especially sexual dysfunction that focus on external causes for sexual distress. External causes being stuff like, the sexual double-standards that encourage men to enjoy sex but discourage women to do the same (while ignoring people who do not fall somewhere on a gender binary,) and looking at poor lovers as a cause of sexual unhappiness, because they’re just that bad. Which feminists do I mean when I say this is the perspective I’m more used to? I’ve seen commenters on sex articles at Jezebel blame poor lovers and I’ve read a lot of Dr. Leonore Tiefer’s work on the social construction model of sex.
So from where I’m standing as someone with sexual dysfunction, it’s actually more unusual for me to see feminists look at bodily problems as the cause of sexual problems.
Which kind of sucks for me, seeing as that’s exactly the kind of sexual problem I have. Pain, I notice, tends to get glossed over whenever sexual problems are discussed. I still don’t know 100% why that is but I have a few ideas.
But what that means for me is that, I can’t find the outside explaination for my sexual problem. It’s not a problem of differential desire, though, at least not right now. It *was,* when I first noticed the problem, since pain crashed my libido.
(And even then I think the feminist critique would have been something like, “Well maybe your desire wouldn’t have crashed if we weren’t living in an intercourse-centric society. That way you would not have felt pressure to perform sexually and could enjoy stuff besides intercourse.” Well except for the fact that the pain I have makes it so that I wasn’t able to enjoy some forms of sex besides intercourse – I still have trouble masturbating solo with a dildo, for example, even when that is my desire. And the extension of this outside of sex means to this day I can’t wear tampons.)
I still find myself asking, well, if we’re supposed to look outside of ourselves for the cause of sexual problems – then where’s mine? Who do I turn to? Who can I blame for the chronic inflammation in my vulva? Who or what did this to me?
Nobody. It keeps coming back around to no one. There is no explaination. Or else there are multiple explainations and I can’t possibly pinpoint them all down. For me, it really *is* personal – there was something going on inside of my body that changed my very cells. To this day I doubt culture at large has the power to do that.
So, I stopped looking for an explaination.
So as a result of this, I’m more open to looking at changes in the body as causes of sexual distress or problems, because that’s what happened with me. And I don’t like upholding pain as somehow different from all other sexual problems, so it’s easy for me to imagine how frustrating it can be for some folks with sexual problems to be told (over and over again, even when seeking help) that there is no physical explaination for any other sex problem. I’m even willing to look towards physical changes as a possible cause for low desire in some cases.
At the same time though, I know that social forces can likewise impact sexual pleasure and problems. And also I know that not every sexual variation is a problem in the first place. I think low sex drive is probably the most commonly discussed sexual ‘problem’ in feminist circles, and yeah a lot of the time it’s not actually a problem in the first place – it’s just the way you are, so you don’t gotta do nothin’. The trick is then figuring out for each person who is feeling some kind of disruption in their sex life, whether that disruption is coming from social pressure (People who look down on you for not desiring and/or loving sex) or if the the disruption is strong enough to be considered a problem in and of itself by the individual. And even you do consider it a problem, then what exactly are you supposed to *do* about it?
@annajcook – I’ve been thinking this over during this extended break, because I admit I am sometimes ashamed to admit to any form of sexual desire (at least publicly) and so I hide it.
So it was speaking with my mum on personal intimate relationships that occur between consenting adults, that one aspect of our discussion kinda distilled for me the possible reasons for this – the act of having and not having sex is still taboo, and there are still so many cultural tropes around the fixed binary of gender that spill into sex and desire.
Further, that there is not a unitary and homogenous way to understand and discuss sex in which human beings engage and their associated desire/s (across the spectrum of gender and desire, along with the plethora of sex acts [and I don't just mean PiV!]).
So there are aspects of sex and desire that are public and private/ scholarly and medical (as in diagnotic for an individual)/ formal and informal/ and whole host of other ways in which sex and desire are discussed; a range of acts and types of desire, and it’s no wonder as annajcook says that there exists “so much moral judgement and personal blame into talk about sex”.
I do agree that having dialogue, and safe place to discuss these issues is important, especially where the discussion involves all participants practicing symmetry and good faith. I’ve seen some fantastic discussions on some pretty heavy issues on harpyness that do just that, so I’m hoping that these issues continue to be discussed. Thanks @annajcook for opening the floor.
In terms of sexual disfunction – given the difficulties with speaking about sex in multiple contexts (public and private etcc), there is no wonder the difficulties that exist with trying to find out what is going on especially where as K___ says “the disruption is strong enough to be considered a problem in and of itself by the individual”.