My friend Monica sent me a link to this MSNBC story: Post-coital blues plague a third of young women. Based on a very small sample of 200 young Australians, researchers at the Queensland Institute of Technology found that 1 in 3 women had felt post-intercourse melancholy at least once, and 1 in 10 experienced it regularly.
It’s easy to point out the obvious problem with the study: the sample is very small, for instance, and the focus on intercourse to the exclusion of other forms of sexual activity is problematic. But the real impact of these studies is in how the mainstream media report them, and the danger here is that a small and relatively inconclusive project can get framed as “sex makes women sad.”
One of the cleverest techniques used by the religious right in recent years has been the deliberate co-opting of feminist language. One of the standard tropes used by many savvy social conservatives is that women have been misled by the language of feminist liberation. By downplaying women’s “natural” drive to bond monogamously with one man, by maligning women’s central role as nurturers, we feminists have (wittingly or no) led countless millions to unhappiness. Conservative theories of natural law and sexual complementarianism are depressing to read, but when one does read them, one learns that women are inclined to profound unhappiness when they pursue pleasure for its own sake rather than relationship. And by emphasizing women’s sexual, economic, and educational liberation — rather than their God-given role as wives and mothers — we have seduced women away from the source of their true fulfillment. From Kay Hymowitz to Phyllis Schlafly to Christina Hoff-Summers, a cottage industry of right-wing pundits has sprung up to drive home the point that pleasure-seeking feminism just makes women miserable.
But they don’t just drive home this message in op-eds and books. They drive it home in abstinence-only education. A student of mine told me that she was taught in a church youth group that masturbation would leave women depressed.
We were told (by a volunteer pastor who had some church-sponsored pamphlets) that when we orgasm, women’s brains release oxytocin, which is the ‘bonding hormone’. It’s meant to bond us with someone who will be with us for life. But if we orgasm by ourselves, our brains will flood us with feelings of loneliness. We were told that women who masturbate usually cry themselves to sleep. Masturbation made boys into sex addicts, my youth pastor said; it made girls clinically depressed.
I’ve asked her for a copy of the pamphlet, and she’s working on it. But I’m asking more out of curiosity than the need for proof. I’ve heard this sort of pseudo-scientific hooey before. And I wish that more young people could laugh it off for the lie it is.
The bit about lonely women masturbating in their beds and crying themselves to sleep has become a pop-culture joke; see this (work-safe) e-card and even this weird Goth video. A good friend of ours, poking fun at the cultural expectations about single women’s unhappiness, told us that she was headed home for the evening one Saturday. “Gonna watch reruns of Glee, pig out on ice cream, pull out the vibrator, and then cry myself to sleep. What single gals do these days, dontcha know?” She wasn’t serious — but she was using humor to jab at the cultural myth we have about the connection between sexuality and female melancholy,a myth reinforced by studies like this new Australian offering.
Both men and women can be sad after sex for any number of reasons. Thinking from my own experience, I’ve been sad after sex because the sex was disappointing; because I knew that I’d soon have to put my clothes on and go home and I didn’t want to leave; because I’d just had sex with someone I wasn’t supposed to and the guilt rushed in after the orgasm; because I was sleeping with someone with whom sex was the only good thing we had; because what had been intended to be make-up sex hadn’t erased the real hurt. I could go on. Lots of sexually experienced people of all genders can identify with that, I’m sure. It’s hardly a uniquely female phenomenon.
The problem is that the pop culture response to studies like these dovetails a bit too neatly with the conservative agenda to emphasize lifelong marriage as the only appropriate place for sexual pleasure. Many of us, perhaps especially women who can easily think of disappointing, abusive or otherwise depressing sexual experiences know that pleasure and happiness aren’t always perfectly correlated. Some people do cry themselves to sleep, and some do after they’ve had an orgasm. Usually, that’s because the orgasm didn’t make the pre-existing cause of sadness vanish — but not because the orgasm created the melancholy itself.
It’s not that sexual pleasure causes unhappiness; it’s that people are sometimes unhappy when they realize that even earthshakingly good sex doesn’t have the power by itself to heal the soul. We who advocate for a pleasure-based sexual ethic are realistic about that; we know that sex is a vital, joyful, important part of life. But we don’t see good sex (either with oneself or with partners) as a panacea. Orgasms are good and healthy, but they do not in and of themselves constitute a regimen for excellent mental well-being. No serious sex-positive writer suggests otherwise. The real misinformation comes from the folks on the other side of the political and cultural fence, who (as my student with her stories from youth group can attest) are quite willing to use half-truths and misrepresentations of physiology in order to promote a destructive lie about pleasure, sexuality, and joy.
UPDATE: My student may not have produced the pamphlet, but I remembered one of the places where I’d read this anti-masturbation rhetoric about women and loneliness: Dawn Eden’s celebrated story of turning to Catholicism and celibacy after a secular, “sinful” younger life, The Thrill of the Chaste. Eden writes:
…through masturbation, I was teaching myself to be a selfish and superficial sex partner — and for what? A few seconds of orgasm — after which I’d feel lonelier than I did before.
A little reading on biology revealed that the post-masturbation loneliness wasn’t all in my head. When a man or woman reaches orgasm, a hormone called oxytocin is released into their bloodstream. In women, oxytocin is known as the cuddle hormone… if the hormone is released during masturbation and there’s no one with whom to bond, then of course one is going to feel bereft. (p. 165)
So the fact that two-thirds of women don’t report post-orgasmic sadness, according to Eden’s theory, indicates… a severe lack of oxytocin?
Eden’s book was a big hit on the abstinence circuit a few years back. Because we have mutual good friends, I got a very sweet autographed and personalized copy of from Dawn; in her inscription, she encouraged me to “enjoy the thrill.” I honor her story, but have no patience with her insistence that either shared or solitary pre-marital pleasure is a guarantor of loneliness.
Very interesting post! The study you refer to matches the findings of the two American studies I refer to in my most recent post: http://www.lovesexfamily.com/2011/03/how-sex-affects-womens-body-image.html I think cultural context is crucial here; attitudes to sex and gender tend to be much more conservative in the US and Australia than in Norway, which has a long tradition of promoting gender equality and comprehensive human sexuality education. As scholars there point out, we are seeing a new generation of sexually empowered women. In Norway, marriage is not considered the ultimate expression of “love for life;” most Norwegians do not consider marriage to be a prerequisite before sex; and girls do not face cultural stigmatization for wanting sex.
In an essay I recently submitted for publication, I use the American studies to argue that while threatened by conservative politics and lingering cultural stereotypes about female sexuality, American girls are prevented ownership of their sexuality while the sexual female remains a target of judgment.
In contrast to the pamphlet your student told you about, high school students in Norway are given an illustrated brochure co-sponsored by the government, which asserts that sex is a human right, also for young women and men:
Your sexual rights: you have the right to a sexual life, determination over your own body, free birth control consultation, abortion within the twelfth week of pregnancy, free testing and treatment of STIs, help and treatment of sexual problems, and, for those between sixteen and nineteen, free birth control pills.
Your duties: to respect others’ boundaries for sexual intimacy and to consult a doctor if you have caught or given someone an STI. Keep in mind that the legal age of sexual consent is sixteen.
Thanks again for pinpointing how stereotypes are being used to discriminate against and disenfranchise women from being in charge of their sexuality.
Well there’s a framing issue involved here: another way to read reports like this is that the vast majority of young women don’t experience any post-coital “blues.” The fact that two-thirds of young women don’t report even one episode of sad feelings after sex is actually a pretty healthy statistic.
Of course, the headline belies that message… both by focusing on (and misrepresenting) the minority, and by using the term “plagued” – which implies it’s a problem that’s impacting their lives in general. Yet, it’s unclear from the article that this is the case.
FWIW, I’d be curious if the subjects of the study were screened for depression prior to the study – this is another point that’s fuzzy. Were the women college students? If so, it could explain a lot… college is a very high-stress environment.
Another interesting post Hugo.
Isn’t sex, either solo or with someone else, an emotional and cathartic experience? So a bit of crying or ‘blues’ occasionally seems perfectly ok and healthy to me.
I dug around and found the actual study. It’s entitled “The Prevalence and Correlates of Postcoital Dysphoria in Women” and was published in the International Journal of Sexual health.
To answer the above question, the young women were all university students.
But that also means that, in terms of sample size, and given the population make-up of Australia, it’s not too bad. At the 95% confidence level, and given the population of 18-22 year old women in Australia (about 580,000), a sample of 200 will give you an interval of ~7%. The researcher found that post coital depression existed in 32% of women, so even at the extreme low end of the confidence interval (-7%), 1/4 of women in that demographic are experiencing post coital depression to some degree, a still significant number to be sure.
As for the causes of the depression, Hugo is spot-on. Depression after sex can exist for a large number of reasons (one of which, childhoold abuse, is what the researcher was actually testing for). Concluding from a study such as this that “sex makes women sad” is fairly ridiculous, and a better conclusion is given by elly: sex DOES NOT make the overwhelming majority of women feel depressed.
First of all, what Elly said about framing. My guess is that a report saying two-thirds of all women feel good after intercourse — or even that two thirds don’t feel bad — would make an awful lot of people either uncomfortable or outright angry.
But let’s take the assertion as a given and spend even five seconds reflecting on the role “traditional” attitudes might affect women’s experience of intercourse. I can think of three right off the bat.
First: the traditionalist model of sex as transactional — women “sacrifice” sex, gratifying their husband’s “needs” in exchange for financial and even physical support. And since under that model women’s experience of sex is intended to fall somewhere on a spectrum from the obligation to pay rent and the chore of mopping the kitchen the surprise is not that a third would feel depressed but that two thirds wouldn’t! (And let’s not even talk about the letdown women are supposed to feel if the task of “pre-marital” intercourse doesn’t shorten the time to a marriage proposal.) Ugh!
Second: there’s not much margin for success in the traditionalist model of sex as romantic fulfillment of True Love wherein if bells don’t ring, especially the first time, then something’s wrong with the relationship.
Three: in the traditionalist model of sex women aren’t the “gatekeepers” of MRA mythology but goalies against which men may only win by “scoring” or at worst tie by not scoring whereas women may only lose by being “scored” against or at best tie by preventing a score. Thus in the traditional model the same act that leads a man to celebrate leads to women’s shame.
And yet in each case the conservative traditionalist’s proposal is more tradition — more sense of fee for service, more romantic idealism, and more shame and loss. No surprise then that their proposed solution for poverty is more privation.
Screw that!
figleaf
I wonder what percentage of men feel bad after intercourse? Folk wisdom indicates that it’s quite substantial, too.
Also what Thaddeus said.
And not just in a “what about the men” sense but in a narrative of gender sense. Continuing my previous metaphor nobody’s supposed to feel sad after “scoring” a goal any more than a goalie is supposed to feel satisfied after “giving up” a goal.
Of course outside the narrative people do feel those things. It just doesn’t fit so it’s disregarded.
figleaf
Post coitum omne animal triste est.
It’s been around a long time.
In my experience as a young woman, the degree and frequency of feelings of sadness or depression after sex have decreased precipitously as I’ve amassed sexual experience and confidence in my choices. It’s also gotten a lot better since my divorce. It seems to me that selecting such a young sample of women for this study could skew the results towards those whose lack of experience makes them more anxious and prone to errors of judgment.
I’d also like to mention that I feel as many complicated feelings after eating a good meal as I do after a roll in the hay. Women are taught (in part by sources such as you mention) to feel guilty about and suspicious of any kind of pleasure.
I am flabbergasted that a mainstream media article pointed out right away that a study was small and required further confirmation.
I also looked up the article, and according to the abstract, this is not about “healing the soul” or about whether women randomly regret their sluttery. It’s about whether there is a correlation between childhood sexual abuse and post-coital depression.
I can relate to lovesickrobot. As I’ve got a bit older and now am confident in my power to say no and set boundaries, I haven’t experienced sadness or regret (unless I’ve coupled with an ex, in which case just brings up old feelings/disappointments).
“Postcoital dysphoria” huh?
I agree with matey, I’m not sure a little sadness after sex needs to be framed as a problem. Sex is physically and psychically intense! Personally I’m a pretty vanilla girl, but I often find myself needing some postcoital “aftercare” of a kind. What’s so wrong with that?
Funny,I think that student of yours was a co-worker of mine, Hugo. I’m still waiting for the pamphlet, too. Been about two years now.
Don’t know if we’ll ever see the pamphlet, but I just remembered who else makes this argument: Dawn Eden, in her pro-abstinence book The Thrill of the Chaste, talks about this connection between her pre-conversion self-pleasuring and her unhappiness. I like Dawn’s writing, and I think she’s a winsome, compelling, interesting advocate for the wrong thing. Want insight into the pro-ab social conservative Christian mind? You could do worse than to read her book. Her own story is touching, her conclusions about sexuality and humanity are wildly off-base, but the story is genuinely moving.
And she’s very clear that touching yourself makes you (if you’re a woman) very sad.
Funny… it seems like an awful lot in the pop-psychology and pop-natural health media sectors, have been doing exactly that for years:
10 Surprising Health Benefits of Sex
50 Healthy Reasons to Have More Sex
Not just good, but good for you (MSNBC)
New Year’s Resolution: Have more sex
You read things like, “better immunity”, “lower levels of cortisol”, “better recovery from prostate cancer”, “oxytocin relieves pain”, and especially, in a country where half of us will die of heart disease and the half of us who don’t will die of cancer, “people who have frequent sex tend to live longer and have healthier hearts and lower rates of certain cancers”… and the message is clear: sex is presented as a panacea; not just for mental health, but for physical health too.
And most of these studies are coming not from conservatives, but from those on our side or sympathetic to it. Serious sex-positive writers, perhaps inadvertently, often DO say orgasms constitute a regimen for well-being, both mental and physical.
We can’t exactly call it disinformation, as the conservatives are doing… those studies and others are backed up with the heft of science and research. But it is imbuing sex with a host of high expectations, as well as scaring us with the (poor health) consequences of NOT having enough sex.
We Americans have a nasty little habit of turning desirable, enjoyable things into requirements pretty quickly. And the cultural pressure we’re getting from the medical, psychological, and natural-health media, as well as how it plays on our concerns for our health (especially in this era of uncertain health insurance!), feels like every bit as much as a requirement to have sex as if our doctors ordered it themselves.
What depresses me is how quickly something pleasurable and exciting becomes, through social pressure, something we MUST do or become unhealthy, unhappy people. There’s no pleasure in it if you feel no freedom to relax about it, and go at your own pace.
Both the misinformation campaign from the right and the inadvertent promotion of sex-as-health-regimen from the left can only increase our performance anxiety and self-blame. And that’s not happy or sex-positive in my book.
I’m starting to feel guilty for laying there with a blissful smile on my face afterwards, feeling happy and drained and like all’s right with the world.
Why do the right wingers want only themselves to be having sex anyway? (Aside from the utiliarian, outbreed-the-lefties theory of course…)
They are clever, Hugo, in this charm-and-caring-offensive approach to the matter, trying to appeal to our happiness and emotional health, to persuade us to give up pleasure. It’s just the next step one would take when scaring us about being “more likely to get killed by a terrorist than get married after 35″ just isn’t cutting it anymore.
Could it be than when you take out adverse consequences like STDs and unwanted pregnancy, sex is free? A form of pleasure that can be indulged in, without fear, by the unemployed and underprivileged? How dare those culturally-disadvantaged, not-like-us people get to enjoy their lives! How dare people get a free ride through self-pleasure? Don’t they realize nothing is free, and everything requires a payment or sacrifice?
Everything righties do is about protecting the already privileged. Hunkering down and looking after their own tribe. From beginning to end.
This was really interesting to hear because i was taught something very similar about sex makimg women bond intensly with their partner at church or somewhere. And they said if you had sex with your boyfriend and then y’all broke up, it would be harder on the girl because you had this chemical bond or something. The crazy thing is that it may have made some people i knew get more attatched to thier signficant others in high school then they would have if they hadnt been told these things. Like a plesibo effect if ya know what i mean. And i believed it til a cousin i trusted debunked it my senior year of high school.
“Chemical bonding” does happen and is a real thing, but the name can be misleading… Its just your body producing hormones that “promote” feeling of attachment. As you age you gain more mental control and are able to suppress the effect of many hormones.
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The thing your church didn’t mention to you is that you don’t have to have sex with someone for this to happen and that it occurs in both men and women. In other words, its possible for a man to be just as chemically depressed after a breakup even if he never had sex with the person.
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Similar hormones occur during pregnancy that help a mother attach to her child. I have also read that pheromones produced by the mother in late stage pregnancy help promote the chemical bonding in Men before and after the birth of a child.
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To ensure no misunderstanding remember that hormones ONLY assist us with our emotional states, they do not control them. They can be ignored, but that can be difficult for some people.
One last thing: if breaking up is supposed to be so hard on women why is it so often men who become so unreconciled to separation that they become obsessed? Yes, of course, women stalk and even commit violence, but so rarely that when it does it gets its own story in the newspapers. (As opposed to men where it’s so common it’s rarely mentioned outside the police reports.)
There’s a story here but it’s not the story we’re all talking about. We assume it’s hard for women (and sometimes it is) but the “hardening off” required of men before they can love ‘em and leave ‘em the way we’re “supposed” to is radically under-examined. Much hilarity does not ensue.
figleaf
Forgive me if this is a naive remark for me to make…but the consequence of releasing oxytocin during masturbation (with no partner for this bonding hormone to be released upon) seems obvious to me…that the bonding hormone would be released, perhaps in a figurative sense, upon yourself. This might be too much information, but figuring out how to…um…”bond with myself”…has been pivotal in shaping my self esteem as a young adult. I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with a woman expressing love towards herself. Could you imagine how awesome the world would be if more women could love themselves freely, without feeling that they are being sinfully self-indulgent or narcissistic? Men too!
Bingo, Rachel. Well said.
Just found this blog, and I’m really impressed with Mr. Schwyzer’s posts, particularly this one.
I’m very familiar with certain religious denominations apparent obsession with denunciating masturbation, pre-marital sex, and non-procreative “activity.” I realized many years ago that I simply could never follow any religious doctrine which proclaimed that female sexual pleasure was somehow sinful, as well as harmful to a woman’s psyche, etc.
And Rachel’s comment is absolutely correct. If women never experiment with what turns them on, and learn to trust their bodies “secrets,” then it may become more inhibiting to experiment with a lover later on. And, that IS very sad.
It strikes me as kind of… sad… to see folks write a story where it is so all-fired important not to have the experience of sadness.
The woman comes; the woman is sad. Okay. The woman is sad, supposedly, because her Woman Hormones tell her that she needs to be Emotionally Bonding with A Man (needless to say, alternatives exist), and there is no Man and therefore she is Lonely and this is Awful. And therefore, we are told, the woman should not come.
Question left (critically, IMHO) unasked and unanswered: Why is it so bad to experience the emotions of sadness or loneliness, that we must guard against our body chemistry entering into a state that may tip our mindset in that direction?