Transcript | Ep. 141: Shopping for Orgasms
When Harry Met Sally clip
<Meg Ryan moaning>
Lady in Katz’s: I’ll have what she’s having!
[theme music]
Caroline: Hey y’all. I’m Caroline.
Cristen: I’m Cristen. And today we’re bringing y'all an EXTRA Unladylike bonus episode from our Patreon.
Caroline: You may have heard us shouting out the Patreon at the end of every episode. But just to catch you up, patreon dot com slash unladylikemedia is where you can support Cristen and me directly. For 5 bucks a month, you get a new ad-free bonus episode every week and instant access to all 70+ previous bonus episodes.
Cristen: It’s a lot of content, people! Now, sometimes, we go deeper on main feed podcast conversations, like we did a deep dive into the Puerto Rico birth-control-pill trials that we discussed recently. Other times, we tackle listener advice requests that don’t make it to Ask Unladylike. And sometimes, we run across phrases like "Lean In sexuality" that we simply HAVE to discuss further.
Caroline: And boy does it get dirty at parts. This discussion gets into the surprising amount of time and money some folks will spend in the pursuit of more orgasms. And we thought the conversation was so fun and so Unladylike that we wanted to share it here with y'all on the main feed.
Cristen: That’s right - get ready for a lot of sexy talk, a lot of “pleasure pressure,” and the pursuit of the O. Oh no! Oh yes! Let’s go!
[stinger]
Caroline: So Cristen, I came across this article in the L.A. review of books called Lean in Sexuality and the Labor of Self-Discovery by Sarah Stoller. And listen, I'm going to be honest, like, if you put “lean in blank” in any headline, I am going to click on it so fast.
Cristen: Also, the concept of lean in sexuality, just to do a little improv for a moment, it makes me think of a woman in a business suit
Caroline: Yes
Cristen: who is.
Caroline: Bent over a desk?
Cristen: Oh, I was. I was going to say just like full on fucking on a boardroom table
Caroline: Oh yeah
Cristen: because she's not going to be bent over, Caroline.
Caroline: Well, I was just thinking that she's leaning in.
Cristen: Oh, she’s leaning in, you're right.
Caroline: Yeah. So I wasn't really sure what I was going to read, but Stoller's talking about basically the commodification of sexual pleasure. I just want to start out by saying that like throughout this conversation, we're going to be citing two pieces: Stoller's piece, Lean In Sexuality, and then a great one that she cites by Katharine Smyth over at the Atlantic, titled The Tyranny of the Female Orgasm Industrial Complex.
Cristen: Now that
Caroline: fuck
Cristen: That's a great term, the female orgasm industrial complex, I immediately know what she's talking about when she says that.
Caroline: Exactly. So that paired with lean in sexuality, y'all know where we're going. OK, so they're both talking about how the striving for an orgasm has become not just an issue of Are you enjoying yourself? Are you having a pleasurable experience? Are you getting off? No, the central question is around a phenomenon known as the orgasm gap. It’s a term coined by University of Florida professor Lori Mintz, and it's meant to describe the phenomenon in heterosexual relationships of women having fewer orgasms than men on average in those relationships. And according to a 2016 study from the Archives of Sexual Behavior, 95 percent of heterosexual men reported they usually or always orgasm during sex, compared to 65 percent of heterosexual women who were the least likely. And Mintz basically blames the orgasm gap on number one: the cultural ignorance of the clitoris. Number two: inequality in the bedroom, which, she says, stems from the way that sex is depicted in media, particularly porn, and a quote “cultural over privileging of male sexuality and a devaluing of female sexuality.” And so as part of this like orgasm-gap conversation, I'm pretty sure we even wrote about this in our book at one point, Cristen, in these studies of who's having orgasms when, how much, with whom, on what day of the week, lesbians tend to have the most in their sex lives, whereas women who are in sexual relationships with cis men have the fewest.
Cristen: Now. OK, I'm going to, throughout this conversation, I'm going to have some. Some kind of quibbles, I'm going to be a little bit of a naysayer in this.
Caroline: I I welcome it
Cristen: Because one of my initial side eyes to conversations that I have seen about the orgasm gap is that it also prioritizes partnered sex
Caroline: Yes
Cristen: and orgasms and delegitimizes solo-sex orgasms.
Caroline: Yeah.
Cristen: You know?!
Caroline: I do have to appreciate, though, like I appreciate the alarm bell that the coining of the term rings.
Cristen: Mm hmm.
Caroline: I appreciate someone pointing out what probably a lot of folks already sort of know in their hearts or in their private parts that like, “I'm not having as many orgasms as I would like” for whatever the reason is. So both Stoller and Smyth point out that there are a lot, a lot of efforts out there to help women reclaim their sexuality, get comfortable with their sexuality, to overcome any mental, emotional and physical barriers to sexual intimacy they might have, to orgasm they might have. Because we know over years of research, you know, having an orgasm is not just like snapping your fingers. There's a lot of like mental and emotional stuff that goes along with it. So, I mean, on its face, like, that's a good thing.
Cristen: Yeah.
Caroline: Right? Like, that's a good thing. Like, let's help people get in touch with their sexuality, communicate their desires, achieve those desires.
Cristen: Democratize pleasure. Absolutely.
Caroline: Yes, I love that. I love that that phrase. So like, yes, Smyth and Stoller are both like, This is a great thing until the pressure to orgasm becomes worse than not orgasming at all, until the pleasure pressure becomes so stressful and overwhelming that it sucks the joy right out of the process.
Cristen: Yes.
Caroline: And so through their writing, they're putting forth a couple of questions, which I think are important. So. In these efforts to close the orgasm gap, who is really being helped and who is really benefiting?
Cristen: Yeah, what what when we talk about female pleasure and women's sexuality, like what women are we really talking about?
Caroline: Are we trying to force the sex drives and preferences of women and non-binary folks to fit into a stereotypical cis het male model? Are we saying, “you are deficient if you are not horny X amount of time”?
Cristen: Well, also, though, don't conflate horniness and orgasms.
Caroline: Right. And are you deficient if you are not having an orgasm.
Cristen: Right.
Caroline: X number of times at least, you know, 95 percent of the time or whatever arbitrary amount. Also, where is the line between a healthy dose of like working on yourself, trying to accept your sexuality like, you know, grappling with your comfort level with yourself? And then just putting way too much pressure on yourself.
Cristen: Right, because nothing will just make a potential - really any kind of sexual pleasure and satisfaction, whether that includes an orgasm or not, nothing will suck that dry, no pun intended, like - like being overly goal oriented.
Caroline: Right. Yeah, exactly.
Cristen: Or maybe it's just me.
Caroline: No, it's true. It's true. And we'll get into it. But like Katharine Smyth in her writing has made it very clear that I don't think she ever wants to hear the words like, “just relax.”
Cristen: Oh God.
Caroline: Ever again.
Cristen: Who ever does, really?
Caroline: Another big question they raise in their writing: Are we putting the blame for less-than-ideal sex - orgasm or not - are we putting it too squarely on women's shoulders? Is this sort of female orgasm industrial complex, is the lean in sexuality, in its effort to quote unquote empower us, is it also putting too much of the blame, and is it assuming that something is wrong when really like spoiler, we're all different and all of our bodies are different.
Cristen: Yeah. I would also want to reframe that question rather than saying like “putting the blame for less than ideal sex on women's shoulders.” I also feel like what's baked into that is, we are trying to force a singular definition of sexual satisfaction onto everybody.
Caroline: Yeah, I agree. Then the key question underlying all of this - one of the key questions: Why does it all seem to cost so much?
Cristen: Yeah.
Caroline: Trying to get in touch with your body, with your orgasms, with what turns you on and gets you off, why is it so much money? And to me, it just feels like, it fits in with wellness culture like so hard.
Cristen: Yes.
Caroline: There's a lot of like. It is the sexual wellness equivalent of like “boss babe” to me.
Cristen: Mm hmm.
Caroline: And I mean, obviously, that's what Stoller's getting at by referring to “lean in sexuality.” But that's just another facet of the like putting so much pressure on yourself or feel- just internalizing so much pressure.
Cristen: It turns it into almost like a a type of invisible status symbol in a way, a status for your like self-actualization
Caroline: Exactly
Cristen: and liberation
Caroline Exactly
Cristen: like to be like multi orgasmic and you come every time, blah blah blah.
Caroline: Yeah and you're like squirting across the room because it's like, yeah
Cristen: And also nothing wrong with being multi orgasmic, coming every time and squirting across the room.
Caroline: Absolutely not. But I mean, if we're talking pleasure pressure, I think that's a lot of pressure to live up to.
Cristen: Exactly.
Caroline: But I mean, I think you make a good point because we are in a period where, like women's sexual empowerment is supposed to be like - we're just supposed to be living it, right? We are supposed to be so celebratory of women's sexuality, of like our sexual liberation and like, like we're supposed to be past the point where we're fighting for like equal time in the bedroom and we're supposed to be like, “Yes, I'm owning my sexuality. We're all Samanthas from Sex in the City. Like, this is this is great.”
CLIP: Sex and the City
Samantha: I will not be judged by you or society! I will wear whatever and blow whomever I want as long as I can breathe and kneel!
Caroline: And Stoller writes, “Were it not for ongoing reports of sexual harassment and abuse in the wake of MeToo, it might appear at a glance that we now live in a fully liberated era of sexuality for women. The culmination of decades of feminist progress.” Which to me, the subtext there is like kind of like that faux feminism, choice feminism, feels like it's all wrapped up in there of like, are we forgetting that like feminism it's not just about your sexuality, although I hope that you are empowered in your sexuality. And she points to a couple of things that are floating around in the ether right now to to start to establish her point. So she says, “In addition to popular new guides to women's sexual pleasure like OMGyes, recent years have seen the mainstreaming of porn by and for women by figures like Erika Lust, the popularization of sex therapy, the rise of posh ticketed women's-only sex parties, the ongoing proliferation of sex toys for women, and the diversification of sexual pleasure for lesbian, bi and trans women, all accompanied by an insistence that closing the so-called orgasm gap is now within reach.” In other words: At this point, y'all, you should be so empowered and so open and so liberated that like this just shouldn't be a problem.
Cristen: Yeah, yeah. It's like, hey, we we've accepted the fact that like, yes, women masturbate. We use vibrators, we can watch porn, we can pleasure ourselves. So the orgasm gap should be closed. But as I flagged, Caroline, to you, I find this argument overly broad.
Caroline: OK.
Cristen: Because I understand what she is getting at in terms of the overprioritizing of achieving an orgasm, you know, but by packing all of that, all of that in, like porn, sex toys, it feels like she's also collapsing the genuine importance of things like just normalizing sexual exploration.
Caroline: Yeah.
Cristen: Exploring queerness, kink, masturbation, like, I don't know, it felt a bit overly broad to me. But I think and maybe this is also where, like my critical reading skills should have clued me in quicker because I think what she's really getting at with this kind of laundry list of evidence is that things like, OMGyes, and well, sometimes porn, I mean, a lot of porn is free, but sex therapy, posh ticketed women’s only sex parties - it seems like what she's getting at is this kind of pay for play.
Caroline: Yeah.
Cristen: Aspect.
Caroline: Yeah. Pay for play and the use of the word posh. I mean, she's she's specifying too like what kind of pay for play we're also talking about here. And of course, she points out that like, you know, like, that's all great. But like, let us not forget that sexual empowerment and sexual pleasure is not the end goal of feminism. We still are contending with a lot of fuckery, things like - she mentioned Me Too. But like she also talks about how well, OK, like if women are sitting here trying to, like, own their sexuality and have all the orgasms, we're still penalized for being sexual. Queer and trans women still face discrimination and violence. We still don't always have access to safe legal abortions. And hello, the double shift. So many of us are still working at work, working at home, working, you know, taking care of the kids, cleaning the kitchen like, as she points out, the double shift is not an aphrodisiac.
Cristen: Yeah, yeah.
Caroline: But the thing is, like all of these sort of larger, systemic cultural issues aside, because they're being pushed aside by the idea that, well, ladies, ladies, ladies, the orgasm gap is your problem. Like, you need to fix it because clearly something's wrong here. Like, clearly like this is an issue that needs to be fixed, not potentially an issue of like, maybe you haven't discovered what works for you or maybe your body's just different, like there's a whole host of things that could actually be going on here. And so that idea of quote unquote like fixing yourself and paying to do it is part of Smyth's female orgasm industrial complex
Cristen: We’re gonna take a quick break
Caroline: When we come back, the sexual revolution will be monetized.
Cristen: Stick around!
[stinger]
Caroline: So Cristen, in Stoller’s piece, Lean In Sexuality and the Labor of Self-Discovery, still an amazing title, she talks about all the different products out there that can help women orgasm. One she mentioned is OMG Yes. And Cristen, by the way, I was not familiar with this website before reading this piece, but she says that OMG Yes is “an online curriculum aimed at helping users perfect the female orgasm for a one time only access fee. It's a series of instructional videos meant to bust taboos about sexual pleasure,” which sounds good. It's fifty nine bucks for one season or $118 for two, and the Times in London called it quote “nothing less than the next wave of an unfinished sexual revolution.”
Cristen: Yeah, I think - I don't know that I agree with Stoller or the Times of London, you know, because I'm sorry, anything that costs $59 to access is not is not going to be the next wave in an unfinished sexual revolution because only people who can afford that.
Caroline: Right.
Cristen: Will be able to join that revolution.
Caroline: Yeah.
Cristen: And my quibble with Stoller is that — so I'm familiar with OMG Yes. I have not ponied up the $59 to to access their instructional videos. But even just like taking a cursory glance around the website, I found her description to be overly, a little a little side eyeing, you know, because it's not just aimed at “helping users perfect the female orgasm.” I think the issue is just like, this is expensive. This is an expensive thing and people are making a lot of money off of it. You get celebrities like Emma Watson endorsing it
CLIP: Emma Watson at a panel
Emma: A friend of mine sent me a website called “Oh my god, yes”. And it’s based on research which is a complete study on female sexuality. And it’s an expensive subscription, but it’s… worth it.
Cristen: and like you said at the beginning of our conversation, it's the commodification.
Caroline: Yeah.
Cristen: Of pleasure that feels like the issue. But I. To me, when you peel back the onion and ask, well, why would we even need curriculum like this? It's like, Well, well, let's talk about sex ed then. I mean.
Caroline: Oh my god.
Cristen: Let's talk about like the generation that OMG Yes is reaching, which is, I would say, a little more geared towards millennials and older, where I think that even compared to Gen Z, we grew up in a more like sex-negative kind of environment. And I don't know that it's like necessarily a bad thing for this kind of.
Caroline: Yeah. Well.
Cristen: Stuff to exist.
Caroline: I agree and a sex-negative environment that was hypersexual.
Cristen: Yes! Yes!
Caroline: So like I'm not picking on Britney Spears, but like think of the early 2000s when we were coming of age and in our faces were people like Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, like young women, not that much older than us, who were forced to walk this bullshit line of being like super sexual, like being half naked all the time and like with lyrics that were about sex. But still expected to be like somehow like virginal and not having sex. And just like watching what happened to them when they did try to actually like get older and be humans with sex lives and boyfriends and like step outside of the bounds of that, like obviously, that's like a whole different conversation for another time. But yeah, no, I I totally agree, like we did grow up in a time where like. Yes, sex negative, but you're also supposed to be hypersexual as part of your like feminine duty.
Cristen: I just think if, if, if the issue is the capitalism and the money, then just talk about that.
Caroline: Yeah, yeah. And so.
Cristen: But like I said, I'm playing the naysayer in this conversation.
Caroline: and I love it. But but Katharine Smyth does. So her piece in the Atlantic. Just please read it. It is. She's such a good writer. It's the most unladylike article. And by that, I mean, it is like right up our alley as far as like, it weaves in personal experiences, sex, money, history, there's just a lot of great stuff in there. And so in her piece, she details her very time-consuming journey to try to address her quote unquote problem. And throughout her piece, you can tell that it is in quotes like the “problem” of being a woman in her late 30s who has never had an orgasm. And she also details why it is supposedly a problem. It's way less about her because, like, she's very clear that like, “I love sex, I love sex so much to the point where I think I'm pretty kinky. I have a solid sex drive. I just don't orgasm.” And it's way less about her and way more about the men that she has sex with in relationships or not, who are just so incredibly fucking offput. Men who either kind of hint at or explicitly tell her, like, “I can't do this with someone who's not going to cum. I I feel less masculine. I feel unsure about my performance. And I just I just can't do this.” Like she even talks about a guy who like she could have seen herself marrying.
Cristen: Mm hmm.
Caroline: And he tells her later, they've broken up. It's been like a year since they broke up, and they're hooking up.
Cristen: Mm hmm.
Caroline: And he is clear with her that, like, the lack-of-orgasm thing is why he ended it. Not. “I don't find you attractive.” Not “I don't think you're smart and funny.” “You can't orgasm and really like, I pride myself,” — and this is a version of what she's heard from a lot of men. — “I pride myself on being able to make women cum and like fast and hard and awesome, and the fact that you can't like that's not sustainable.”
Cristen: Well, and it's it's a mind fuck too because it is supposed to be kind of a more enlightened flavor of heterosexual masculinity for a man to be, for the whole she comes first, and she does address like the actual book She Comes First. We, as as cis women who are in relationships with cis men like the mark of a good man is that he wants you to cum first, right? Is that he will go down on you for like seven days and seven nights. And I can understand if you are a guy who was grown up too with like feeling kind of woke with just how important making your partner cum, like if that is the thing for you, I don't know. It's like a mind fuck all around. It's ehh.
Caroline: Yeah, because she does admit like - because she at one point has a sexual relationship with a guy who it's hard for him to achieve orgasm. And she's like. OK, like I see how this is frustrating from that perspective, because like I want to pleasure my partner. I want them to experience pleasure, but then that gets into the question we asked at the top, which is like, who is this for? Because she points out, is it that I'm pleasuring my partner, or it's that I'm able to pleasure my partner.
Cristen: Or is it just like we are all overprioritizing an orgasm and again, like trying to apply a benchmark of “this is what sexual pleasure looks like, and it is an orgasm, and to not achieve that is less than satisfactory.”
Caroline: Right? It's not “sex,” which I think. I'm making air quotes if you couldn't hear it in my voice. But I think that, you know, side note, I think that gets back to a lot of a Cristen just said about sex ed of like, we have all of these real fucked up ideas about what is sex and what is not sex.
Cristen: Mm hmm.
Caroline: And. In our large cultural mind, obviously, this is painting with the broadest brush like sex is penis in vagina long enough that you both cum.
Cristen: And preferably at the same time.
Caroline: At the same time with a big ol’ O face, and anything else is just somehow like, it’s not cutting the mustard. So I did want to share with you a couple of the things she spent money on. She also got a whole mess of suggestions from both friends of hers and sexperts that she talked to. But the ones that she actually tried out, she met with a sex therapist spent two hundred and fifty bucks on that. The therapist advised her, this is Katharine, to “eat more dark chocolate, stop taking birth control and sign up for Orgasm Camp, an immersive experience somewhere in the American Southwest that would have me masturbating all day long. She also sent me home with some female-centric 1980s porn, a list of recommended herbs and vitamins, and a prescription for Viagra that the pharmacist, alarmed by my gender, initially refused to fill.”
Cristen: I feel like the sex therapist was like the - was the person who came up with the Dove Chocolate commercials, just like “women in satin eating dark chocolate.”
CLIP: Dove Commercial
Narrator: Only a chocolate this pure can be this silky...
Caroline: Well, Catherine reports that she tried everything except the overpriced orgasm camp, but no dice. She just got bored because she felt like she was doing homework. She then makes an appointment with someone named Dr. M, who is a sensual touch therapist that she -
Cristen: He's also not an actual doctor.
Caroline: Not an actual doctor. Whom she'd read about in New York magazine, and the price listed was just optional donations appreciated. And then! And then. For 600 bucks, she gets two hours with a tantric healer. There was lots of like massaging and holding, tender holding, but but no orgasms. And then some of the recommendations she got, some of them like, I”m like, that tracks. I would expect that like somebody recommends hypnosis, someone recommends a Sex Educators Workshop. Somebody recommended an orgasmic meditation company whose classes run for 499 for a weekend course, up to 60 grand for a yearlong membership.
Cristen: And that place does not exist anymore.
Caroline: Doesn't exist anymore.
Cristen: Probably because they couldn't find people to pay 60 fucking thousand dollars.
Caroline: Jesus christ. There's there's also an elite New York City based sex club for millennials. I love it. I just picture that it looks like The Wing inside.
Cristen: Yeah, it's like Instagram ready.
Caroline: And let's let's talk about the price. It's $1,690, so 69 is baked into the price. That's for a year of unlimited access to the millennial sex club.
Cristen: Also, though, this description made me cringe so hard — that's the price for access to “cannabis friendly sex parties featuring fire performers —
Caroline: No.
Cristen: and domination by professionals.” Which, to me, sounds like a trip to Burning Man. And thank you, but no thank you.
Caroline: No, I when, when I'm at a party — we've all been to these parties — when I am at a party and someone with like the fire hoops shows up, I'm like, I'm out.
Cristen: Yeah, I gotta go.
Caroline: There's also a wellness clinic in New York called Maze Women's Sexual Health, and a trip there would include a 90-minute initial visit with a therapist and a gynecologist. That's $530 before insurance blood work included. Jesus Christ, you're taking my blood. And then, as Katharine points out, an indeterminate number of follow-up visits. It's $380 for the second visit, $250 for each appointment after that, before insurance, additional testing not included. And through these visits, you will get — I don't know if prescribed is the right word — but you will get prescribed various creams, sex toys, porn, testosterone replacement therapy, a prescription for Wellbutrin, which I was like,
Cristen: Hmm.
Caroline: Huh? Interesting. And something called the O-Shot, which I've heard about through Dr. Jen Gunter, former unladylike guest and internet gynecologist extraordinaire. It's a treatment where they take blood from your arm and then basically inject it into your vagina. And Dr. Jen Gunter says, please don't do that. And, you know, Katharine gets at her feelings that she's like experiencing through all of these various relationships, but also the process that she went through for the article of like going through all of these courses and classes and trying to figure out what to do. She wrote, “I felt guilty at the prospect of inaction, as if failing to part with a huge chunk of my savings, not to mention all my leisure time, were somehow an abrogation of my responsibilities as a woman.” So all of that pressure from like, “be empowered, own your sexuality, also, I'm a man and I'm telling you you're not enough for me because you can't cum,” like she ends up feeling like, “Oh, well, because I'm not spending my life savings, I guess I'm not working hard enough?” And then so she starts asking herself, of course, like, “fuck, who am I trying to have an orgasm for?”
Cristen: It's time for a quick break. When we come back, I take a stand … for faking orgasms??
Caroline: Ohhh yeah!
Cristen: Oh yeah! And the Kool Aid man. Stick around.
[stinger]
Cristen: So Caroline, for me, one of the most interesting parts of Katharine Smyth's article was about her faking orgasms.
Caroline: Yeah.
Cristen: Because as we've talked about, she she gets horny. She enjoys sex, It's not that she's not satisfied, she just doesn't have an orgasm. And so she talks about how she started faking orgasms and how it made the whole experience more pleasurable for her because it kind of gave her some power back.
Caroline: Yeah.
Cristen: And as someone who went through a faking-it phase when I was younger, and I would do it usually in like hook up scenarios when I was just like, OK, I'm ready, like I really don't want to have to like, stick around here. I've gotten what I need from this. Yeah, and so I'd like to go to bed now, you know? And I totally understood what she meant by that. Like, is faking orgasms a great idea? No, it's I mean, ultimately, no. And and I felt like a bad feminist for doing it.
Caroline: Yeah.
Cristen: But at the same time, if I knew I was not going to have an orgasm through vaginal penetration because that is how my body works and many bodies work and I didn't care for, you know, really, let's go ahead and admit it, like largely probably a stranger, just like having to spend a lot of time like, you know, sussing out my clit.
Caroline: Sussing out my clit.
Cristen: I'm so sorry.
Caroline: No, please don't apologize.
Cristen: Then faking an orgasm was like, it - tt gave me the control to be able to say, like, Hey, we're good, you feel good. I feel good. Like I wasn't. I wasn't going to sleep unsatisfied.
Caroline: Yeah.
Cristen: I was just ready to go to sleep.
Caroline: Yeah, and that's that's her thing. She talks about how it gave her a glimpse of what the dynamic would be like if she hadn't been fucking all these insecure men. Because she talked about how her her husband, whom she divorced, but her husband was like, so fucking full of himself.
Cristen: Yeah.
Caroline: And that made him ultimately a bad partner. But in bed, he was incredible. Because he took her at her word, You don't cum, but you're enjoying yourself? I'm great at sex. I'm going to do it to you. I'm going to get off and we're going to be happy. Yeah. And so he would just confidently fuck his wife, and they would both be happy. She would have gotten some good sex. He would have had his orgasm or whatever. And like, you know, I'm all massively oversimplifying someone's marital relationship, but you get the point. And so for her to leave that relationship and then have to face all of these men who are, like, too insecure to accept her truth on its face of like, no, I'm I'm fine. It finally just took all that bullshit off the table and let her just enjoy it and let them enjoy it as well and believe that they had gotten her off and they achieved their goal.
Cristen: Right. Because one thing that she said that made me say, “Oh yes, omg, Yes!” Was her frustration with men who would not believe her
Caroline: Right
Cristen: when she would say, Hey, I'm not going to have an orgasm. It's totally fine. I really enjoy everything that we're doing. So don't don't get hung up on that. And they get fuckin hung up on that.
Caroline: Yeah.
Cristen: Now, like I said, like I, I do think that in like relationship context and things like that like you can't necessarily fake it till you make it, because at some point someone's going to find out and then you have trust issues, whatever.
Caroline: Yeah it's like a weird Shakespearean comedy.
Cristen: It kind of is. But but I so appreciate. I think that goes for regardless of your identity, your anatomy, whatever. I do think collectively we might all be more satisfied if we started trusting people when they say that they do or don't enjoy something.
Caroline: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I appreciate she. She quotes Lux Alptraum - who is a sex educator, author, and podcaster, who says that for many men, the female orgasm has become quote “the primary, if not entire purpose for pursuing sex, a sentiment that suggests that anyone who isn't able or doesn't want to achieve orgasm is some kind of freak or failure.” And this is where, Cristen, the book She Comes First comes in. It was a book written by sex therapist Ian Kerner in 2004. And as Alptraum writes, “it established a new paradigm in which the female orgasm, once seen as mythic, was recast as compulsory.” And Alptraum says that it positions the female climax quote “as a badge of honor and proof of a man's virility, rendering women's actual needs, desires and authentic pleasures subordinate to the appeasement of the heterosexual male ego.”
Cristen: Yeah, it's still like you're ultimately like performing pleasure for a man. And I think at the same time, we were talking about this earlier, I can also see if you are like a cishet guy raised in in a She Comes First kind of culture how you might not even realize that that is what you are doing by being so insistent. Like you think that that that is you being a really good, progressive partner.
Caroline: Yeah. And if you take the woman in question at her word that like, No, I'm fine, that well, maybe she's being passive aggressive, maybe she's not telling me the truth. And if I don't give her an orgasm like that makes me a bad guy.
Cristen: And a bad lover.
Caroline: And a bad lover. And so like that is the, as she calls it, “wild goose chase” that Katharine Smyth went on in an effort to finally become someone who orgasms. And she just sort of reaches this point of like, “just fuck it. Like, Fuck it, I've always been happy with sex the way that I experience it.”
Caroline: Shoutout to Sarah Stoller and Katharine Smyth for their amazing work. We’re gonna link to both of their articles in the source post for this episode. They are both definitely worth a read!
Cristen: And we are so curious to know what Unladies think about the orgasm gap, the commodification of sex, faking it, all of this juicy stuff that we talked about this episode. You can let us knowon instagram, facebook and Twitter @unladylikemedia. Or you can drop us a line at hello@unladylike.co. And of course, you can support Caroline and me by joining our Patreon; you’ll get all 70+ sweet sweet bonus episodes, a new one every week, including our recent history of the fat liberation movement. So find it over at patreon.com/unladylikemedia.
Caroline: Nora Ritchie is the senior producer of Unladylike. Michele O’Brien is our associate producer. Gianna Palmer is our story editor. Shruti Marathe transcribes our tape. Our music is by Flamingo Shadow, Amit May Cohen and Sarah Tudzin. Mixing is by Andi Kristins. Sound design and additional music is by Casey Holford and Andi Kristins. Executive producers are Peter Clowney, Daisy Rosario and Unladylike Media.
Cristen: This podcast was created by your hosts, Cristen Conger
Caroline: And Caroline Ervin of Unladylike Media.
Cristen: Next week…
Lux Alptraum: So what's interesting in porn is that a lot of squirting in porn is faked So when you see, like squirting compilations a, they're often performers who don't necessarily squirt in other scenes and are using water or pee or whatever to just fake it. And it's often like done in this very like visually arresting way where it's like arcing stream of fluid. And that's not always everybody's experience. Like for me, it just feels more like this kind of like unfocused explosion. It's not arcing up beautifully, like a fountain it's just like, pssh, there it goes.
Cristen: We’ll be talking with writer and podcast host Lux Alptraum - and does that name ring a bell? Yes it does because she’s the sex educator we referenced in this Patreon episode! Lux is gonna set the record straight about squirting and what all the gush is about. Plus, we’ll talk to an Unladylike listener who is working through her shame around squirting - which is partly attributed to this podcast.
Caroline: You don’t want to miss this episode, y’all! So make sure you’re subscribed to Unladylike. Find us in stitcher, spotify, apple podcasts or wherever you like to listen.
Cristen: And remember, got a problem?
Caroline: Get Unladylike.
Cristen: Suss out that clit.
Caroline: Bend over the desk!
