Quote of the Day: The Female Price of Male Pleasure

Lili Loufbourow at The Week has written a piece that masterfully taps into, I believe, the female anger that is revitalizing the women's movement.

In the piece, she posits that while critics of anti-rape advocates claim that we simply don't acknowledge male biology, predominate narratives about rape and male-female sex are actually driven by almost nothing but. Within this framework, women are trained to ignore our own pain and discomfort in service of male pleasure. Female pleasure and libido is rendered invisible, non-existent, and unimportant.

Loufbourow writes:

"Women have spent decades politely ignoring their own discomfort and pain to give men maximal pleasure. They've gamely pursued love and sexual fulfillment despite tearing and bleeding and other symptoms of "bad sex." They've worked in industries where their objectification and harassment was normalized, and chased love and sexual fulfillment despite painful conditions no one, especially not their doctors, took seriously. Meanwhile, the gender for whom bad sex sometimes means being a little bored during orgasm, the gender whose sexual needs the medical community rushes to fulfill, the gender that walks around in sartorial comfort, with an entire society ordered so as to maximize his aesthetic and sexual pleasure — that gender, reeling from the revelation that women don't always feel quite as good as they've been pressured to pretend they do, and would appreciate some checking in — is telling women they're hypersensitive and overreacting to discomfort? Men's biological realities are insufficiently appreciated?

I wish we lived in a world that encouraged women to attend to their bodies' pain signals instead of powering through like endurance champs. It would be grand if women (and men) were taught to consider a woman's pain abnormal; better still if we understood a woman's discomfort to be reason enough to cut a man's pleasure short."

Read the whole thing. Really.