Last week, Rachel Hills guest-posted an explosive piece at Feministe: But Women Don’t Rape. Rachel began by reflecting on this post at the Feministing Community which dealt with a woman’s sudden awareness that one of her female friends had coerced her boyfriend into having sex. The comment threads at both Feministing and Feministe are substantial and well worth a read.
Rachel and her commenters note the constellation of factors that make us believe that women cannot force men into unwanted sex: our misconceptions about male physiology (the “guys can’t have erections or ejaculate against their will” myth); our belief that men are more resistant to psychological pressure and invariably less eager to people-please: our notion that, as the Feministing post put it, “nice girls” (especially feminists) simply are incapable of forcing their boyfriends to do anything against their will.
Please join the great discussion at either site. I have posted a bit on the issue of men-as-victims, as well as on the notion that pleasure is not evidence of consent. In a 2005 post about Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau I wrote:
For too many of us, pleasure and orgasm are inconsistent with (being a victim of) sexual violation. But to assume that pleasure and orgasm are always acts of volition is to defy practically everything we know about adolescent development, sexuality, and power.
I’d amend that to say that the statement holds fairly well even if we remove the “adolescent” from it.
But there’s another issue that Rachel raised at Feministe that I’d like to tackle: the way in which we socialize women to believe that they ought never be the higher-desire partner in a heterosexual relationship. She writes:
…one of the interesting threads that has come through in my interviews is how very poorly many women take it when their male partners don’t want to have sex with them. They don’t like it at all. For these women, being turned down for sex – even if only occasionally, even if only once – is read as communicating a whole lot of nasty things about them and their relationship. That their partner doesn’t find them attractive anymore, that he’s cheating, that their relationship lacks passion, that they’re bad in bed, that he’s not into women at all.
(For more on Rachel’s research and to take her survey, visit here.
I think that Rachel’s right. The male sexual desire discourse tells us that men are always in the mood, invariably hornier than women. Indeed, our whole notion about the myth of male weakness is linked to assumptions about the overwhelming power of men’s libidos. But as countless women have discovered in relationships with heterosexual men, this discourse founders on the rocks of reality. As Rachel says, many women are confused when boyfriends or husbands evince less interest in sex than they themselves do. Rather than question the discourse, many choose to blame themselves, assuming that they are insufficiently attractive. Sometimes, they externalize that self-doubt, accusing their male partners of being gay or of having an affair.
As several of the commenters have pointed out, there’s an old axiom in marital therapy: the lower-desire partner has more power than the higher-desire partner. The one who has the power to please or disappoint by saying “yes” or “no” gains the upper hand. (I’ve posted about that a couple of times. Sorry to always link to myself, but here’s a post on that subject too.). And of course, one of our most traditional (and loathsome) discourses with which we raise young women is the one that teaches that a woman’s power comes from her ability to control men sexually. Sex is a bargaining chip, and its value is created by men’s impetuous libidos.
Though most younger women today, particularly young feminists, intellectually reject the “sex as leverage” trope, the idea continues to exert an uncomfortable hold on many. Many women don’t realize the degree to which they had “bought in” to the discourse until they find themselves in relationships with men whose desire for sex is less than their own. And while it’s never easy to be rejected, and never easy to deal with sexual frustration and self-doubt, men are more insulated than women from the effects of that rejection. That doesn’t mean men are less sensitive, or less vulnerable to hurt. But a man whose sex drive is higher than his female partner’s can comfort himself that theirs is “a normal relationship.” His frustration is par for the proverbial course; his masculinity is not called into question when his girlfriend is not in the mood.
We have many inanities that pass for common wisdom about men and women and their different attitudes towards sex. We say things like “Women need a reason; men just need a place” or, when describing the speed of arousal, that “Men are lightbulbs, women are ovens”. My readers can probably think of more. And while like all cliches, they prove true in some instances, the exceptions are sufficiently numerous as to disprove the rule altogether. The problem is, of course, the effect on the many for whom the opposite of these “truisms” is true. A woman who does “feel like a lightbulb” when it comes to arousal is made to feel abnormal, as is a man who is more “like an oven.” And while these bits of common nonsense comfort “higher desire men”, reassuring them that they are normal, they suggest that all sorts of things are wrong with a woman if she finds herself more easily and frequently turned on than her boyfriend.
It is axiomatic that the fewer freedoms women have, the more their beauty is valued. Some of the most repressive societies on earth value that beauty by concealing it from all but her husband, who is entitled to possess it as he pleases: others encourage young women to display their bodies (whether they want to or not) for men’s consumption. This isn’t about burqas and bikinis again. It’s about the idea that we raise our daughters to see their beauty as a particular source of power. And while most of us would like to be found attractive, our craving to be wanted sexually is often in inverse proportion to the amount of leverage we can achieve using our other talents.
A decade into the 21st century, and many of us still believe that a woman’s desirability is among her most valuable assets. And many women who don’t think that they believe that nasty old sexist notion discover that it still has a strange hold upon them –and they discover it at the moment that they find themselves in relationships with men whose desire for sex is less than their own.
I read most of the responses to the article to which you refer, and I think there is something overlooked in the general analysis.
As you may recall, there was a lot of discussion about power and who has it within sexual relationship. The consensus is that the person who has said “no” and let us call this person the “no-partner,” has the power unless the other person, and let us call this person the yes-partner, takes the power by some form of sexual coercion or assault. The abusive power of the continuous no(and we were talking years for some couples) was touched on. There also seemed to be some consensus that in relationships where the no-partner is clear about his or her reasons for the continual no, then patience is called for. In any case, the yes-partner has a choice to either leave or learn to live with it. Force or coercion are never reasonable tactics regardless of how disempowered the yes-person feels.
Here is the ground that I feel has been unexplored: this issue in the context of women’s historical sexual disadvantage. When a woman is the no-partner, then she has at her disposal what Arlie Hochschild called a “traditional emotional resource.” This resource has steadily been diminishing in value in recent years. As Hochschild points out, the sexual revolution “has made sexual contact less ‘valuable’ by lowering its bargaining power without promoting the advance of women into better paying jobs” (The Managed Heart). While admitting that those in a marriage have deep feelings of affection for each other, she nevertheless asserts that the hidden subjugation created by unequal economic opportunities is translated into a woman’s need to have assets not readily available to men. Mostly she believes that women do the “feeling work†of a relationship as a way of evening the balance. While this may be less true today, there is still a history of male-female relationships which is aptly described by the cow and milk metaphor once used to keep young women’s assets protected.
When men are the no-partner, it not only completely devaluates what Hochschild would call a traditional resource, it turns it into a liability. A woman’s libido now becomes yet another thing which she must bring under control so thoroughly that it seems to have never existed. It is not just about a woman’s feelings of desirability as related to her feelings of worth. It is also about her right to feel desire and her right to seek to have her desires fulfilled. Many women would feel dirty or slutty insisting if they acknowledged their sexual needs and would feel downright irredeemable if they terminated a long-term relationship to nurture their long-neglected sexuality. Women are conditioned not to honor their sexuality. Therefore, when a man in a long-term relationship says “no†consistently, a woman can feel powerless. She will likely find a need to put away her sexuality like a pretty dress from her youth that no longer quite fits, and this can lead to deep despair.
To compound the issue, sexuality is a sector in which few women have traditionally felt empowered. As the discussion pointed out, most of us have felt some fear at exercising our “no.” Most of us have, at one time or another, felt quite powerless in the arena of sexuality.
It would seem then, that we might be relieved when a man becomes the no-partner. Instead, it makes us even more powerless. In the first place, it introduces into the anxiety-laden world of sex yet another thing which we cannot predict or control. But more significantly, most of us will feel powerless to change the situation. We are ashamed to make a fuss about it. And most of us above a certain age were not trained to be good seducers. In fact, women skilled in seduction had scandalous reputations, so even our natural impulses to seduce might have been promptly stifled.
To summarize, the issue of men saying no is fraught with the baggage of generations of stark inequality. As you have said, Hugo, a woman’s value has been directly tied to her desirability, but so has her power. So in this time where women have one foot in equality and the other in patriarchy, the news that we are not be wanted renders us impotent, in all senses of the word.
NotSoSure, I think that’s a valid point, and you make it convincingly. Thank you.
In the long run, the feminist project will empower all of us to desire and be desired and to do both without connecting them to our deepest feelings of either worth or shame. I really believe that can happen, and I don’t think there’s much we can do that’s more valuable than work to bring that situation about.
Until then, those caught in the situation you describe will experience a painful and disconcerting kind of impotence that no pill can cure. We can acknowledge that reality while moving swiftly to build a different paradigm for sexual relationships.
A couple of preliminary thoughts:
1) Either partner can be the “no” partner, and can be so at different times. It’s probably less often the case, though obviously not impossible, that one or the other partner will be consistently “low-desire” so much as one or both of them will be “not tonight”. Anyone, including men, can have an off-night (and sex is probably even less productive and exciting for both when the man is the one having issues that night, for physical and biological reasons).
2) The “lightbulb vs. oven” myth about men’s sexual desire extends as well further to conceptualizing it as “on-off”. Men are often stereotyped as having an undifferentiating and very simple type of desire, in which either we like what we see or we don’t, and that we will want to do one thing or we won’t. Men can vary in our responses, in terms of “what” turns us on (as well as “where” and “how”) as much as “who” does.
3) As much as the idea that “sex = leverage” trope for women is out there, to an increasing degree it seems, an inverse trope for men of “attraction = leverage”, that women’s concerns about their own desirability can be used against them, has caught on to an extent. It’s largely the basis of the entire “game/pick-up-artist” subculture.
Hi Hugo, thanks so much for responding to my piece – I’m a big fan of your work, and have actually referred to one of your posts in the write-up of my research so far.
I think both you and the other commenters raise some really good points about the possibility of women unconsciously internalising the idea of “sex as leverage”: both in terms of desirability, and the socially scripted role as the “no-partner”.
While rejection hurts men as well (as Bettina Arndt illustrates in her somewhat problematic book, The Sex Diaries) – and I think this plays a larger than is usually acknowledged role in the cliche that men are uncontrollable sexual beasts – it’s also true that they have an explanation to fall back on. It fits the gender narrative.
A number of the women I’ve spoken to for my research, though, and a number of women I’ve spoken to socially, express a sense that they don’t feel “normal” though when they are the most desiring party. Several have said they feel “like a guy”. And even if they don’t personally feel abnormal, they do feel frustrated by the lack of conversation – or available narrative – about women being the more desiring, or “yes-partner”.
There was a SF novel (forget which) in which a female character confides to a friend, re: the sexual revolution, “we should never have admitted to men that we get horny like them”. Her reasoning was that women’s submerged, suppressed (even repressed) sexuality was a source of power in negotiation, not because it was lower or higher in a particular situation, but because their partners DIDN’T KNOW that they were horny.
While that isn’t a healthy model of relationship, I see the point. It is (often, not always) useful in any negotiation to have the other party laboring under a misconception as to your motivations and situation. When I’m trying to sell watermelons, I do not want you to know that I am *desperate* to get my hands on some money – you’ll be able to undercut me and give me much less than market value.
Obfuscation of actual motive and situation also plays a part in the evolution of our species’ sexuality. See: cryptic fertility. Male baboons know 100% of the time when prospective mates are fertile; it’s a much dicier estimate for humans. This is a subconscious form of information veiling; women didn’t decide “hey, let’s hide the cues to our fertility status!”, their biology did that on their behalf. But the phenomenon occurs at the conscious level as well, for both sexes.
I think “no means no” is as much as a misleading cliche as any of the others. Sometimes no means no, sometimes it means convince me, and sometimes it means yes but I’m afraid to say yes. Good communication between partners is crucial – and that’s something that has to be learned. It should be okay to ask for sex and okay to say no and okay to ask is there something I could do to get you in the mood. Sometimes the answer will be no and if you can’t deal with that reality then it seems to me the problem is yours, not your partner’s and not society’s. The idea that a woman would say to her boyfriend that he must be gay if he doesn’t have sex on demand is distasteful; it’s an attempt to use gender based shaming to get him to do what she wants.
I’m troubled by the implications of what NotSoSure is saying:
“So in this time where women have one foot in equality and the other in patriarchy, the news that we are not be wanted renders us impotent, in all senses of the word.”
Does that mean men should consent to sex they don’t want so women won’t feel impotent? That feels to me as if that’s what is implied in that statement and I wholeheartedly disagree with that implication. Certainly we wouldn’t tell women to consent to sex so their partners don’t feel impotent. As I read NotSoSure’s comment, I found myself thinking “That’s true. So what?” The moral standard should be consistent – what we expect of men we expect of women and vice versa. We have a moral standard or we don’t; if you are going to argue no means no and is unabmiguous, that goes for both men and women.
My covenant in my relationships is to love and honor my partner and I expect the same of them. That means recognizing that if I say no to sex, it is an honest expression of my emotional and/or physical state. If my partner is incapable of honoring and respecting that, what does it say about our relationship? A further part of that covenant includes being respectful when saying no to my partner; “I’m too tired” is a fair statement. “I’m not in the mood” is a fair statement. A partner who cajoles and tries to coerce and use emotional leverage to get me to do what they want is not respecting me or the relationship.
I want to push this further. Take the example of a same sex couple – doesn’t matter if it a male or female couple. The partners are not always going to be in the same place in terms of sexual desire and it really doesn’t help any one to read too much into it. Maybe, just maybe, straight people need to figure out the same thing.
Of course a man shouldn’t have sex just to lessen a woman’s feelings of impotence. I was in no way suggesting that. I was exploring the reasons why the issue is so emotionally volatile for some. To be clear, expressing distress or giving a convincing explanation for that distress does not obligate anyone else to changes. Acknowledging another person’s pain is empathy and that does not require one to fix the other person or the situation. Sometimes a simple “that sucks” is sufficient.
I think “no means no†is as much as a misleading cliche as any of the others.
Yes, but it’s an “err on the side of caution” type of deal, because the current societal message is “everything short of an outright no (and even then) is a yes”. Which takes away from the ability to say no at all. Which is very problematic.
But the “no means no” model is outdated anyway. I’ve heard the enthusiastic consent model being pushed instead.