SEX, PLEASURE AND EMPOWERMENT: WHY ‘THOU SHALT ORGASM’ IS A FLAWED COMMANDMENT
By Archer Magazine
Have you ever had sex that was just kind of meh? The kind of sex where there wasn’t anything particularly wrong with it, there just wasn’t anything great about it either? Maybe even the kind of sex that you completely forget about after the fact?
We tend to see these types of sex as ‘bad’ because they lack the right kind of meaning, particularly, though not exclusively, for women. If it was forgettable, why would you bother? If it wasn’t pleasurable, maybe you were coerced! There is this idea that women are empowered through their sexual pleasure, giving pleasurable sex a kind of moralistic imperative – thou shalt orgasm!
Personally, I think that the idea of women’s sexual empowerment is not particularly useful for feminism. There is an extensive body of feminist research detailing how ‘empowerment’ through sexual expression gets packaged and sold to women in ways that re-inforce male privilege.
In a 2012 article, feminist scholar Nicola Gavey argued that we stop focusing on empowerment as a concept for understanding (young) women’s sexuality because how young women negotiate their sexuality is necessarily too individual to produce a broader empowerment for women. Instead, she suggested we focus on understanding the politics of our personal lives, and how we can work together to develop ways of negotiating this with more awareness of how our choices are constrained…