The Awful Norm: What Patriarchy Has Done to Everyday Sex

Artwork: James Jean

Wouldn’t it be great to be able to fight injustice how they slay dragons in fairy tales — find the bad thing, wipe it out, job done. Wouldn’t that be a relief, rather than dealing with the complex internal-external web of power we call patriarchy? Wouldn’t it be a relief for the worst assholes to mysteriously go missing and for everything to be magically all okay?

I know I’d rather take on a dragon anyday (given proper training and equipment) than face the painful work of undermining toxic actions and thinking in not just the ‘bad guys,’ but in myself and my dearest ones. It turns out the dragons are virus-sized, and we’re all infected.

The bravest voices in the ongoing ‘big reveal’ of male violence against women are those daring to examine how when it comes to sexual experiences, as blogger KatyKatiKate describes, “Our normal is awful.”” Because frank discussion of actual sex remains largely taboo despite our otherwise explicit culture, the virus of misogyny thrives here. In the darkness of tabooland, our expectations for what sex should and could be — a profoundly tender, utterly erotic whole-body communication of besotted love — are terribly low.

Do we even recognise what the age-old privileging of the masculine engrained in us all has done to everyday sex? I offer you my haphazard reseach, so we can start to see a cultural continuum of toxicity, rather than just extremely awful individual failures. We know what outright abuse looks like (well, we don’t, but moving on) — what about the everyday?

Field Notes From the Trenches

So, some things I’ve noticed about ‘normal’ heterosexual sex.

First, the cultural gender-brainwashing of guys to ‘harden up,’ and the pervasive example of hard’n’fast porn, has totally normalised the expectation that sex should be hard, deep penetration that is more-or-less aggressive.

I was watching a film the other day with my sister, who’s on the autistic spectrum, is completely uninterested in sex, and has never experienced it. When we got to the sex scene, she thought it was an attack and that the woman was in pain.

“Leave her alone!” she yelled at the guy on screen.

To me it looked like a pretty regular movie sex scene — polite and mild, even. But I realised she wasn’t too far off. The norm we’ve all seen a thousand times, the one we come together to try and act out, is of men fucking hard and women taking it, and looking happy about it.

I tried getting into porn, but I found it too hard to find any women who seemed to be actually enjoying themselves, rather than pretending to in order to prop up an unobservant male ego. And I confess I’ve done this: pretended to enjoy various scenarios ranging from boring to abusive, because ‘that’s how it goes’ and I didn’t want to hurt the guy’s feelings. Can we fess up to this without shame or self-blame? This is socialisation: it’s no one’s fault.

Second, I’ve noticed that it’s continually naturalised that women are just ‘less into’ sex (‘naturally’, some say — always an alarm-bell word). I’ve experienced zoning out, boredom, random thoughts, ‘spectatoring’ (feeling like a detached observer) and other forms of dissociation and loss of spontaneous flow.

I always felt bad about this as a personal sexual failure. I felt confused about my lesser enthusiasm for sex, because I loved, liked, and lusted my partner. What was wrong? “It must be me,” I assumed.

I now believe all of this is a normal response to trauma — the trauma of ‘normal,’ more-or-less aggressive sex. And yes, I’m talking about innocent teenage relationships with lovely men, right through.

Women aren’t ‘less into sex.’ We’re just less into sex that is really not that great for us — and not really even about us.

What grieves me now is to realise that none of my past partners actually noticed when I was not really feeling present. Their socialisation had profoundly numbed the full-body awareness of a partner’s feelings that is possible.

Third, 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.

I’m glad to see progressive guys start to question this engrained patterning to hurriedly end their own desire rather than taking full-body pleasure in their partner’s pleasure. Most men in our culture aren’t given the education to be present with desire instead of urgently trying to get rid of it. Using a partner for tension release in this way is basically masturbation in another person. If we free sex from the tyranny of the male orgasm, we get an immersive, erotic experience that is intimate adoration of the other person, not using another to feel something. You know, all that stuff about “the journey not the destination.” But this is only possible in a feeling body, and masculinity as proscribed has a disasterous numbing effect on the male emotional-sexual system.

Forth, I hardly even noticed the pervasive sense of being on display, the disembodied sense of ‘performing’ sex rather than participating in it. Sex was always to some degree a performance, an attempt to look or act sexy, with the goal of turning on my partner. I’d imbibed culture’s belief in woman as object, and valiantly tried to be the best object I could be. And this has its meagre reward — a sense of power I mistook for pleasure and empowerment — which makes it hard to see we’re begging for scraps.

Performing sex is is so dreadfully unsexy for the performer, as it takes you out of your feeling body and into the strategic mind. It’s an imposition on the natural flow, an essentially fearful activity born of centuries of women’s disempowerment. When you’re habitually in a threatened or less powerful position, you try to act in the best way to keep safe — by pleasing those in power. The tragedy is that without receptivity — the quality systematically trained out of men — I’ve found that most males don’t even notice the difference between a spontaneous gesture and a contrived performance. It’s a lonely feeling acting one thing and feeling another, and the person you’re meant to be in intimate communion with not even noticing. This shouldn’t be pleasureable for anyone, regardless of genital friction experience.

Furthermore, socialisation as a passive, secondary being made me settle for nice partners who desired me, rather than who I really desired. It made me dissociate from my own lust and settle for the self-esteem boost of being ‘wanted’. Backed up by neoliberal spirituality, I felt all this was a personal failure, rather than logical coping mechanisms.

We have a word for the socialisation that women are less important: patriarchy.

The patriarch is the one who consciously or unconsciously takes the position of the ‘knower,’ who then explicitly or implicitly demands certain behaviour to fit their idea of how things should go, rather than receiving and loving their partner’s natural flow. This may be pornographic exaggeration, such as aggressive, painful anal sex. Or it may be expectation of a certain look: hairless, teenage, skinny, large breasts. Or it may be withdrawn prudishness (religious, insecure, or otherwise) that makes a woman feel bad for radiant sexuality.

The demonisation and backgrounding of female desire made me not even aware until well into my twenties that my body could signal desire as clearly as any male erection, through its natural lubrication process. I accepted the need for commercial lubrication sometimes as normal personal failure, rather than a sign my partners were too hasty and profoundly unsensitive to my body and its subtle messages.

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.

It’s another subject in itself, but to see the engrained patriarchy in ‘normal’ sex, consider how collectively we place the burden of contraceptive responsibility on women. That’s because men can’t be trusted with it, some argue — aka the “If I don’t do it, no one will’, housework situation. Of course we embrace contraceptive technology such as the Pill as a more empowering option than constant unplanned pregnancies, but the side effects women then cope with are normalised as the price to pay for total male ejaculatory irresponsibility. We need more choices than nine babies versus a fucked up hormonal system.

Is it so outrageous to ask that men either wear a condom (far fewer side effects than any female birth control method), bypass orgasm, or learn to orgasm without ejaculation, completely controlling their own semen and relieving women of the burden of responsibility? (If anti-abortionists really wanted to prevent abortion, they’d be campaigning hard for male responsibility for his own ejaculation.) Driving your partner to the pharmacy so she can fill her body with artificial hormones is not ‘shared responsibility.’ At some stage we’ll look back on the burden of phamaceutical/surgical interventions into women’s reproductive function as an obvious act of oppression.

In saying all this, I’m not blaming anyone. We’re all affected by social thought-structures, and individual moral accusations are a way of protecting these structures. But when we recognise the awful norms embodied in our own beloved, will we recourse to this understanding? Or will we berate them as an individual moral failure, who ‘should be better.’ How many women are silently or unconsciously resenting their partner for things that are commonly felt, commonly experienced, and must be addressed commonly. I wish I’d known sooner that my negative and dysfunctional sexual experiences were confessions of numbness and dissociation from men, not evidence of my own inadequacy.

It takes courage to admit something isn’t working. As blogger KatyKatiKate wrote in the post mentioned above, “If we begin to call all sexual assault what it is, we will have to voluntarily admit more pain into our lives, pain that we have up to this point refused to let in the door.” But the pain is already in the house — in the basement perhaps, making a terrible noise — and denying it isn’t helping.

I’ve found it painful to admit the depth of dysfunction we’re all born into and that I innocently played out in my life. I so wanted to believe I was the free pixie dreamgirl, wafting through my happy life story with completely autonomy, unaffected by society’s bullshit. We want to believe we’re autonomous operators, ‘the one that got away.’ It’s scary to confess our real experience, knowing the pain we all carry might trigger those committed to denial of their own to say, “I’m not like that — you’re just particularly dumb.”

If any of this rings true to you, you are not alone, and it doesn’t have to be like this. It’s scary to open our eyes to toxic conditioning, and nowhere more so than in ourselves and in the very people we look to for love, support, and sanctuary from society’s bullshit. But anything less than honesty here is a form of despair, as radical transformation of sexuality IS possible, for men and women. To do so we need to rediscover intimacy — within ourselves and with another — start talking about real sex and what is possible, and chuck out the rubbish thought-structures of our bullshit society.

The other crucial thing I feel moved to add to this post is to note how our old systems of punishment and criminalisation are not going to work any more as we widen the definition of what constitutes invasive/abusive sexuality. We can no longer just try to point out the bad guys and slay them. A different approach is called for, that educates men to soften their nervous system and actually tune into what their partner (of any sex) is feeling, and that gives women the confidence, self-regard, and fearlessness to be clear on what they want, to take responsibility for what they allow in their lives, and to also soften and learn how to move with the body’s intelligence, rather than overriding it in any kind of performance.