By Floss Loder
A few weeks ago, I was sitting on a park bench with a friend, discussing our sex lives.
As you do.
Needless to say, this casual chit-chat about our sexual escapades, progressed pretty quickly to talking about whether we enjoyed bondage and if we would have an orgy. I began telling my pal about my most recent relationship and the kinkier parts of our sex; sex toys, a little S and M, and a lot of sex in public.
She looked at me like I was some kind of sexual maverick, hanging on to my every word as my stories got more elaborate and wilder.
I’m not sure that the family having a picnic behind us shared her enthusiasm… but hey, if you can’t discuss butt plugs with your pal on a Sunday afternoon in Hyde park, when can you. Am I right?
Afterward, we both sat for a moment digesting the information I had shared, until, finally, my friend let out a sigh and said, “wow, you must have been orgasming all the time.”
I contemplated this for a moment. No actually… I hadn’t orgasmed once during this rough, hot, sweaty sex. I’d always thought this was some of the best sex of my life. Ok, sure I didn’t cum from the sex, but I enjoyed it? Hadn’t I?…
And then it occurred to me, that perhaps I hadn’t enjoyed the sex itself. I had always gone along with the rough and kinky nature of each shag because I knew this is what my boyfriend enjoyed. Was I doing it just to please him? But no, there was something more to it than that.
Suddenly, it was as if a light bulb went off above my head, the penny dropped and the answer hit home. What I was ‘enjoying’ was the reflection I saw of myself in the boy’s eyes. A reflection in which I was hot. I was good at sex. I was the enabler of the boy’s pleasure. I was the fantasy. And weirdly that knowledge, that image of myself was what I was fucking; that’s what was turning me on.
This, my dear friends, leads me to the concept I will be exploring throughout this article. Can women develop sexual preferences, or create a completely false sexual identity, due to the satisfaction we get from being seen as ‘good’ by the person we have sex with? Ultimately, inhabiting our partners’ sexual preferences as our own, even though they may not be our true turn-ons. If so, where does this stem from, and how much of an issue is it?
To put it bluntly: do we women fancy the people we fuck? Or do we, on a subconscious level, fancy the perception of ourselves we see when fucking them?
Firstly, I feel it is important to state that my intention is not to generalise or victimise women. We all have different experiences with sex; what follows is largely based on my own experience and sexual history and in no way is this a ‘one size fits all’ analysis of female sexual behavior. What’s equally important to note, before we get into the nitty-gritty, is that this article is based around heterosexual sex, not in a tone of exclusion, simply because the concepts described are most prominent between male and female partners. Having said this, I hope that this article will continue to break down the barriers around discussions of sex, more specifically concerning the relationship between women and sex, therefore adding to the collective fight for equality between the sexes.
You may not be convinced by just my words, thoughts and experiences, so let me kick things off with some science. A 2019 study, published in The Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy, analyzed the main factors that trigger female desire. Sexuality researcher and study leader Sofia Prekatsounaki found that women in heterosexual relationships (long-term and casual) were predominantly aroused by being viewed as sexy and the object of desire.
Granted, this is no mind-blowing revelation, who doesn’t want to be seen as hot during sex? However, what I am interested in, is does this simply go as far as your partner telling you you’re sexy? Or does it go further into a subconscious need to perform during sex to feel desired? And where does this stem from?
For me, the biggest clue from the study is in the word ‘viewed’. That women not only enjoy feeling sexy but that we enjoyed being viewed as sexy.
In a second study I stumbled across in my search for answers, it came to my attention that this is a mutual turn-on between men and women. However, for men, the arousal comes from being the viewer, not being viewed.
In his article, ‘The Triggers of Sexual Desire: Men vs Women’, Dr. Leon Seltzer describes how men are inclined to feel aroused by watching the sexual objectification of women. Dr. Seltzer describes how the most prominent sexual stimulation for men derives from visual cues, such as stills of female body parts or videos of women moaning. In short, a voyeuristic and objectifying view of women.
When sizing up the findings next to each other, what became obvious to me is that both allude to a well-known media phenomenon in today’s society; the male gaze. The male gaze, a term coined by feminist Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay ‘Narrative Cinema and Visual Pleasure’, is the male perspective that informs portrayals of women in the media, a perspective which strips females from character, reducing them to an object of sex.
There are many scary things we watch on the TV. I remember the first time I watched The Ring; I was 13 and terrified. However, while lying awake in my bed the following night, worried that the little girl from the film was crawling out of a well and coming to get me, the thought that sent me to sleep was “it’s only on the TV, it’s not real life”.
If only this sentence could be true for the male gaze. However, what both studies convey, is that this worrying trope from the media is perhaps very much alive and breathing in our day-to-day lives, more specifically in our sexual encounters.
Not to discredit Dr. Seltzer’s findings, but it’s no shock that men find viewing women as objects of sex a turn-on. All you have to do is look at the booming porn industry, the legendary status of Playboy, or the rise of Only Fans. What is more allusive and hidden that Prekatsounaki’s study relays, is how the male gaze may also be adopted by women during sex. How we may be aroused by the reflection of ourselves in the eyes that are viewing us; a reflection that shows us being watched as an object of sex. That there is perhaps the subconscious need to be synonymous with the male gaze; to be viewed at the same level of ‘sexiness’ as Halle Berry being watched by Pierce Brosnan as she bursts out of the ocean, seductively shaking sea water off her body in ‘Die Another Day’. Or the slow-motion sequence of Cameron Diaz washing a car, the camera zooming in on her but, tits and flat stomach, in ‘Bad Teacher’. Or the bird’s eye view of Margot Robbie lying on a bed in sexy lingerie, rolling over as the camera focuses on her figure in ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’.
In brief, it may be that the male gaze has leaped off the screen and landed not only in the male psyche but also in the female.
At best, this idea conveys the steadfast and internal patriarchy we live in. So much so, that even in the privacy of a women’s sex life, her subconscious, the desire to be desired by men is present. Granted, this is not an appealing thought; that our sexual identity is a symptom of the patriarchy. The reason I say ‘at best’ is that compared to the alternative, I feel this is the lesser of two evils.
At worst, it suggests that we may be ‘performing’ sexual acts not for our pleasure but because of a standard set by a sexist perspective of women in society, of what being ‘viewed’ as desirable is. That, perhaps some of those wilder moments in your sex life, the ones that you have bragged about to your friends, that live in your memory as legendary or incredibly hot, weren’t yours. They were his. With that in mind, let me pose another question to you dear reader: is this truly consensual sex?
Let me put it another way, have you ever had sex and then been left with that empty, anxious feeling the day after? The lights come up, the act is over, and all the erotic make-believe of the night before comes crashing down around you. You feel a kind of emptiness. An emptiness that you can’t quite place in obvious reasoning? I am no stranger to this feeling. It mostly crops up after I have had sex for the wrong reason; feeling insecure, needing validation, or out of anger. However, there have been times when I have felt this uneasy oddness after sex and haven’t been able to place my finger on its roots.
One instance sticks out in my mind in particular; an ex-boyfriend who wanted to tie me up.
A year into the relationship, we both started thinking of ways to keep our sex life exciting. At which my boyfriend said that it would be ”really hot” if he tied me up. I could see from the look on his face, that this was no out-of-the-blue, spare-of-the-moment suggestion. It was a withheld fantasy. Knowing that this had been sitting in my boyfriend’s mind for the last year made me feel like I had been in some way failing. Like I was not the fit, dream girl fantasy, that he did not view me as an object of desire.
So, I said yes.
I’m sure there are lots of women who find being tied up fit as fuck and a completely valid turn-on regardless of a man’s wishes. In no way do I judge or dismiss these women, as of course we all have different preferences. However, for me, being tied up and fucked is not only something I don’t find sexy but something which makes me uncomfortable and triggers my anxiety.
But at that moment, I was willing, I practically handcuffed myself to the bed posts. The boy didn’t coerce, persist, or persuade me. It was consensual. Be that as it may, the next morning I felt like I had been pushed to do something I hadn’t wanted to, I felt like, deep in my core, I hadn’t been consenting. In hindsight, I can see that the thing pushing me, and making me want to comply, was the ingrained presence of the ‘object of desire’ standard in my head.
I had placed more importance on how I was being perceived during sex, than if I was truly enjoying the sex, according to my comfort and my standards of pleasure.
Of course, it’s no crime to want to give your partner pleasure during sex, just as you should expect to be given the same. A healthy scenario would be having a conversation of what each partner enjoys beforehand and having sex in a safe consensual space to express what you both enjoy.
The issue is when the longing to feel desired stems from that unattainable standard of sexiness planted in our minds by the male gaze. More so, when this standard pushes you to perform sexual acts for the sole purpose of attaining a boy’s desire. The world of turn ons is vast; whether your wildest kink is simply being spooned or whether you enjoy S &M orgies – both are completely valid. The only important thing to keep in mind, is to always be authentic to yourself in your sexual choices, never be afraid to say no and trust that you are enough, with or without the butt plugs and bondage.
