“The problem with outrage about women and sex is we get a good old binary representation of women”
BY AMITA MURRAY
When I was on an author panel called Let’s Talk About Sex for a Feminist Book Society event in 2019, we asked the sell-out audience a simple question. How many women felt comfortable telling their sexual partner(s) what they liked to do in bed? Out of a diverse crowd of a hundred Londoners, one woman raised her hand.
Let me say this again. Only one woman in the crowd was comfortable giving her partner what in my mind is spectacularly useful information – what would keep her coming back for more.
Did your jaw just drop? Mine did at the time. It carries on dropping every time I think of this horrifying statistic.
A casual look at sex in the news in dailies like the Independent and the Guardian on any given day reveals top stories about the latest #MeToo allegations, sex crimes in the war in Ukraine, the latest in Prince Andrew’s evergreen saga of sexual misconduct cases, the backlash against Taylor Swift’s openness about sex, and various actors talking about being asked to keep their homosexuality private.
Of course, people like clickbait. There’s not much clickbait in women having a roaring good time in bed. Where’s the fun in that? Much more interesting if you spark outrage. Social media especially is prone to outrage. You can’t post something on social media that doesn’t spark indignation because what you said was too happy, not happy enough, or just the wrong kind of happy for a few or a lot of people. You might be excused for thinking that a lot of people go on social media to be pretty darn anti-social. To get het up about something and chuck their anger at someone in a way that’s safe for the writer and emotionally fraught for the receiver.
The problem with outrage about women and sex is we get a good old binary representation of women. On one side women are represented as victims of abuse and on the other we are objectified and our sexuality is turned into images that are fun for other people but a bit rubbish for us.
Olivia Petter says in her recent article Mind The Pleasure Gap that girls in school are still mainly taught about the dangers of sex, or maybe how to have safe sex that doesn’t lead to an unwanted pregnancy or an STD and not about pleasure. In fact, in a recent Sex Ed workshop I was a part of where the written material suggested that women may have a “tingling vagina” when they are aroused (shockingly squeamish and bashful language), a parent complained that young girls didn’t need to know about arousal. Petter cites Katherine Rowland’s work to say that most discourse about sex for women is still about sex as leading to reproduction, sex pathology, or sex as a service. As Petter says, “Sex positivity feels like it is everywhere, just apparently not in our bedrooms.”
My question is: when do women get to have fun in the bedroom?
There are some hopeful signs from the latest YA romantasy sensation Fourth Wing, the exploits of the Bridgerton siblings as reimagined by Shonda Rhimes, Gillian Anderson continually proving to be a sex-positive feminist icon and a few other books that dive deep – no pun intended – into female pleasure.
When Bridgerton first came out a couple of years ago, it was like a revelation. Rhimes made it seem like we’d been doing two things all along: racial diversity in historical fiction and women getting to have a really good time in the bedroom (and sometimes the fun was had not in bed at all.) She made these two things seem trop de jour. We were on board right away and couldn’t wait for Bridgerton to return with their second season.
Yes, Bridgerton suffered from the tired trope that you are always confronted with in Regency fiction – the question of whether or not the female protagonist is a virgin, and if she isn’t, then a long-winded, tired explanation for exactly why not. Bridgerton had this problem too. It couldn’t get past the tiresome the man has sowed his wild oats and a woman shall get to do so once she’s safely married trope. But it did put female pleasure front and centre and we lapped it up.
Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros really heats things up in the bedroom. Here is a crash course on female anatomy, what to touch and with how much pressure, what to leave alone, how slow or fast to take things, sexual versus romantic politics, a very female point of view from which to see things – Yarros has got it covered.
The female protagonist has a disability. There are talking dragons who also have some wild sex. There’s good versus evil and some scary sort-of dead antagonists. There are casually queer and bisexual characters. And did I say there was a lot of explicit sex? If you want a 101 on the basics, look no further. Step aside Joy of Sex.
Yarros makes it okay for a woman not to be a virgin when she first encounters a hero. To want to have sex with him before she’s fallen in love with him. To think about and then have sex and for it to not have horrifying consequences for her. In a world where crime writers routinely serial-kill women and use female vaginas as a place to hide murder weapons – yes, I heard a male writer describe this mindboggling story idea in an author panel not too long ago – I say long live Yarros’s sex positive stories.
As Stephanie Theobald says in her memoir Sex Drive, whether it is Gwyneth Paltrow’s cabinet of sex toys in her Notting Hill pop-up store or women finding platforms to talk about their sexual desires, we need to make female sexual desire and pleasure mainstream. She suggests that news stories about #MeToo fuel anger, they make sex seem immoral and dangerous. I’d add to this the resurgence of the far right’s attitude towards abortion following the Roe vs Wade overturning. She calls for a ‘pleasure revolution’ that is firmly about women.
Last up is Gillian Anderson’s book that collates 174 women’s sexual fantasies. You’ve got to love Anderson and you might not be able to decide what you love her most for. Is it for making X-Files somewhat believable and dare I say, romantic? Is it for the lols in Sex Education or for having slightly erotically-charged sympathy for a detestable serial killer in The Fall? In my view, the woman can’t get it wrong. An understated feminist icon, if ever there was one.
And she’s working on a book called Want, coming out in September 2024. In a Guardian interview, Anderson says that editing the book was titillating and she and the female contributors got to write about sexual fantasies that are not always easy to be explicit about.
She says, “There’s a lot of yearning, for what women don’t have, or feel afraid to ask for.” And I guess that explains what happened in my anecdote from the Feminist Book Society author panel. It explains one of the biggest features of being a woman. We’re continually and increasingly aware of our deepest yearnings. We’re even becoming kind of okay with admitting these to ourselves. But we’re not yet at a point where we feel comfortable expressing our deepest desires to other people. Needs, after all, make us vulnerable. And vulnerability is not something we’re all that good at. Women often say that they are worried about hurting their partners’ ego by expressing their sexual preferences.
I guess then that’s the next step. Exploring our needs and vulnerabilities, and taking steps towards expressing our sexual desires. I do this through being more explicit with a partner, but I also experiment with it when I write female protagonists who are conscious and expressive of their sexual desires; who make consent critically important but who don’t stop at consent but ask for pleasure; who sometimes direct some of the action in the bedroom; and are okay with wanting sex and pleasure for their own sake, rather than as an outcome of falling in love.
For the sexually-curious, there are new apps like Feeld where you can hook up with people who are interested in exploring their desires outside the structures of a strictly-monogamous relationship. Or Bumble that promises deeper intimacy. All such apps come with a heads-up about actively finding ways to stay safe. And there are podcasts like The Sexual Happiness Podcast and Masala where you get to go a bit deeper.
In the meantime, sign me up for a pre-order of Anderson’s Want.
Unladylike Rules Of Attraction by Amita Murray is published by HarperCollins in paperback, £9.99
For media enquiries please email shona@edpr.co.uk at ed public relations.
DIVA magazine celebrates 30 years in print in 2024. If you like what we do, then get behind LGBTQIA media and keep us going for another generation. Your support is invaluable.