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| Book cover for "Girls & Sex" by Peggy Orenstein |
[content note: discussion of porn, discussion of oral sex]
Here's my review of the book Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape by Peggy Orenstein. Overall, I enjoyed it, and I feel like it helped me understand some things about the way people talk about sex.
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Overview
This book is about the culture ("hookup culture") surrounding high school and college girls, in regards to sexual relationships. It's about what's expected, what's seen as normal, what they want, how they feel about it, what kinds of expectations they are facing from boys, how girls' knowledge of feminism doesn't necessarily stop their behavior from being dictated by these societal pressures, etc.
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Porn is not sex, it's a male-centered form of sex specifically made for a male audience
The book talked about how the boys that these girls are interacting with have been heavily influenced by porn. As a result, the boys have expectations for how sex should go, which come from porn, and it seems the girls don't really have expectations of their own, and they're just going along with what the boys tell them is supposed to happen.
I had this big realization while reading this book:
I've heard people say, many times, "porn is unrealistic" or "it's a problem that kids are getting their sex ed from porn because it's unrealistic" or "porn depicts violence against women like it's a normal part of sex." But I realized, the issue is not just that it's "unrealistic." When I hear "porn is unrealistic," I imagine "unrealistic" in the same way movies are an unrealistic representation of real life. Like, in movies, nobody accidentally mispronounces a word or whatever (unless it's important to the plot). A movie has a story it wants to tell, and sort of presents a streamlined version of that story, leaving out every minor thing that presumably might have happened in the characters' lives but is unrelated to the plot. That's unrealistic. And also, in Star Trek you always have situations where they're like "oh no, our ship is in danger! We have a wild plan to escape, but there's only a 1 in 100 chance we'll succeed!" and then of course it works. That's unrealistic.
Or maybe porn is unrealistic because it makes it look like sex and/or orgasm are easier than they are in reality. Or maybe porn is unrealistic because of the body types of the actors- apparently men in porn have bigger penises than average.
Yeah, sure, all of those things may be aspects of how "porn is unrealistic." But here's the important thing that ties it all together: Porn is not just a video of people having sex. Porn is made for a specific purpose. And for most mainstream porn, according to this book, the purpose is for straight men to watch it and have an orgasm fast.
I'm not that familiar with whatever the "mainstream porn" is that people are always decrying, so I had never realized this before. Don't think of porn as "a video of people having sex", as if it's a typical instance of people having sex but maybe with all these individual components happening in a more "ideal" way than what's "realistic." No no no, that's not what it is at all. That's not how we should think of it. Porn- the mainstream porn that people are always saying is a problem- is made for straight men, and it's made to be watched. It's not just sex, in the generalized sense of what sex is- it's a specific, very narrow subcategory. Sex that looks good to straight male viewers. (And weighted toward those viewers who are so into porn that they are paying money for it- not necessarily the typical viewer.) NOT sex that feels good for the people actually doing it. NOT sex that women would want.
THAT is the problem with mainstream porn.
When I was reading this book and I realized this, wow. Thinking of it in terms of "what is the purpose of this porn and what audience was it made for" clarifies the "porn is bad because it's unrealistic" issue SO MUCH. There are lots of ways that media can be "unrealistic" and it's not necessarily a bad thing- so when I always heard "porn is unrealistic," yeah sure I agree that sounds like a problem, but it was never clear to me what exactly the problem *was*. But framing it this way- that teenage boys are watching this porn and conceptualizing it as a depiction of what "sex" is in a general sense, when actually it's NOT that at all, it's sex that has been optimized to be viewed by a male audience, to make them efficiently have orgasms. !!! That's what it's designed for. It's NOT sex that feels good to *do*, and it's NOT sex that women would want. (I mean, maybe it could be, sometimes, to some extent, but that would pretty much just happen by coincidence because that's not what it's made for.)
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Oral sex
Orenstein says that the girls she interviewed for this book viewed oral sex as not really a big deal. [If you don't know what that is, here is a link to scarleteen. NSFW!] Apparently in this subculture of whatever sexual things teenagers are getting up to, oral sex is now something that a boy is expecting a girl to do, just because they're on a date. And the girls prefer doing oral sex rather than vaginal intercourse because they consider oral sex to be less intimate.
Or, if I may phrase that differently: It sounds to me like the girls don't want to do oral sex *or* vaginal sex, and they're agreeing to oral sex because it's the less-bad option. And, importantly, this is about a girl doing oral sex to a boy. The opposite direction- a boy doing oral sex to a girl- is seen as a completely different thing, much more intimate and awkward for the girl.
When I first read about how they're all doing oral sex to boys and it's no big deal, it was shocking to me. But then after I thought about it, I kind of came to this understanding: After you get past the grossness (and yes, some girls in the book described it as gross), you could view it as "This is just a task. I can do this task. I can be good at it." [This is my own description, not something directly stated in the book.] Girls in the book talked about it like, their motivation for doing oral sex on a guy is related to how he will feel about her. Being seen as good at it. Feeling like she has power over the guy because he is dependent on her for "pleasure." That sort of thing.
This "it's just a task" framing is incompatible with emotional intimacy. What the girl is getting out of it is so incredibly different from what the guy is getting out of it, and I think that's unsustainable if you want to have a long-term relationship. If you're doing this with someone that you're not interested in really knowing and being emotionally intimate with, then this is not an issue- that's fine if that's what you want. But the book talked about how girls report all these different complicated reasons for agreeing to do oral sex on a boy- reasons about how she sees herself, how the boy sees her, how other people will see her, what she wants from the relationship, etc- none of which were about physical pleasure- while the majority of boys reported that they participated in oral sex simply for physical pleasure.
I don't generally like when people say "sex is supposed to be...", but sex is supposed to be emotionally intimate, and I think it's a problem if there is such a huge disconnect between how the 2 partners are experiencing it. Again, if you don't want to be in a long-term relationship where you really know and care about each other, then it's okay to have this kind of disconnect- but at least be aware of it. One partner is having very simple thoughts about liking it because it feels good, and the other partner does not like the actual experience of it, but has higher-level intellectual reasons to choose to do it. I would say this is not great. This is not sustainable long-term.
And if your earliest sexual experiences are about performing a role that another person wants you to perform, with nobody caring about whether it feels good for you, but you just do it because eh whatever it's not that bad- this is very much NOT going to set you up to have a healthy sex life in the long term. It's very much NOT going to give you a healthy framework for thinking about sex, where it's about two partners caring about each other's pleasure, and making deliberate decisions, and genuinely enjoying it. Like sure, maybe at this point in your life you're fine with viewing these sex acts as "just a task" and it doesn't need to feel good for you- but at some point, will you switch over to valuing your own wants and desires and making deliberate choices in pursuit of them? Or will you always view sex as a chore that you need to do for someone else?
And also, a big part of it is, girls are doing this as sort of a compromise- the boy wants to have PIV (penis-in-vagina) sex, and the girl does not, and if she agrees to do oral sex, at least he won't try to pressure her into PIV. !!!!! OMG, what is going on here? This is all kinds of wrong. If you don't want to have sex, you should be able to just not have sex. You're not obligated to do some different kind of sex act which is slightly less unpleasant.
Boys are taught that it's wrong to coerce a girl into having sex. But since oral sex is seen as not really "counting" as "sex", they are coercing girls into oral sex instead. Apparently it's common that when they're in the middle of kissing/ making out, the boy will push the girl's shoulder to indicate that she should go down there and do oral sex. I feel like, wtf, seems really disrespectful.
And I want to say, I don't think most boys are doing this. #NotAllMen, etc. I think for a lot of boys, they're in a situation where, he likes 1 specific girl, and he's very nervous around her, and if he finally gets to go on a date with her, he's not going to try to push her into anything that she doesn't want, because there's the risk that she won't like it and he'll completely lose his chance with her. Or, even if he's not thinking about it with that kind of calculation, if he's generally a good person who doesn't want to pressure people into things, then he won't try to pressure a girl into anything.
Boys who act like they're "entitled" to oral sex are probably in the situation where, he doesn't have any particular feelings about this specific girl, if she dislikes him because he is pressuring her, it doesn't matter because there are plenty of other girls out there, so it's okay to take that risk.
So I don't think most boys are doing this- *but* the girls who are participating in "hookup culture" have all encountered a lot of boys like this, frequently enough that it defines the landscape of what they have to deal with.
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Lesbian and bi girls
Orenstein interviewed lesbian and bi girls for this book too. Seems like, for girls who are having sex with girls, the dynamics are totally different. They're not in stuck in this paradigm where boys' desires dictate what the girl is supposed to do, and the girl is judged on whether she did a good enough job by society's standards, but nobody thinks about if it feels good for her. It's totally different, once you get away from this male-centered ideology. Instead it's like, during sex, both of them care about if it feels good for the other, and both of them get physical pleasure from it. Good for them!
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Is this really so different from "obligation sex" ideology?
I come from a conservative Christian/ purity culture/ complementarian background, and one of the things that is taught in that subculture is that a wife is required to have sex with her husband, even if she doesn't want to, even if it hurts, because men are so manly and have manly needs. (Sheila Gregoire calls this "obligation sex.")
Initially, one might think that what's described in "Girls & Sex" is the complete opposite of that. Conservative Christians teach that unmarried people should NEVER EVER have sex, shouldn't even really know the details of what sex is, and then when you're married you have to be monogamous and have no experience whatsoever outside of your spouse. In contrast, "Girls & Sex" talks about middle-school and high-school girls knowing what oral sex is, having experience with it, trying to get drunk and "lose their virginity" because they think it's embarrassing to be a "virgin", having lots of sexual partners... It seems totally different, right?
Well, no, actually- because in both cases, there's this idea that sex is something a woman does for a man. That it's supposed to be all about what the man wants, and the woman's pleasure is an afterthought. In both cases, girls/women don't have access to good enough sex ed information about women's orgasms and how to stand up for yourself rather than getting pushed into things you don't want, and so on.
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Girls need better sex ed
This book really demonstrates that it's not good enough, to have a lot of experience with sex, if it's within this framework that you learned from boys who learned it from porn. Just because these girls have lots of experience with sex and feel like they're good at it, doesn't mean it feels good or is really worth doing.
There were statistics in the book about how a lot of these girls had never had an orgasm before. [scarleteen link if you don't know what that is] In some of the interviews, the girls talked about being confused about what female orgasm even is.
It's common for parents to feel like if they give kids more information about sex, that will lead to them making bad choices. But actually, it's kind of the opposite. The girls in this book *don't* have a good understanding of what their own desires are, how it's possible to have sex that actually feels good for them, how they have the right to stand up for themselves and say no, etc. If they knew how good sex *could* be, then they wouldn't settle for this mediocre, one-sided sex that boys are telling them they have to participate in. They can insist on being treated better than that.
The book talked about surveys which compared the US with countries in Europe (I think one of the main examples was the Netherlands). Respondents were asked questions about whether they feel that their early sexual experiences were good for them, in terms of the timing and the choices that they made. In countries where kids get more comprehensive sex ed than the US, they delay sex and they are more likely to say that their early sexual experiences were good for them.
Imagine having a mediocre experience of sex, and getting persuaded by a high school boy that that's just the way it is.
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I have some asexual thoughts about this
There was one point in the book where Orenstein mentioned that she interviewed an asexual girl, who said that her life is just fine without having sex or participating in "hookup culture." Orenstein said it felt a bit weird talking to an asexual for a book about sex.
But, I feel like looking at all of this through an asexual lens *is* very useful. A lot of what's described in this book is girls consenting to sex acts because of all sorts of reasons- how they want their partner to feel about them, expectations from society, etc- these reasons don't appear to me to be related to sexual attraction. To put it bluntly, where is the evidence that these girls are allosexual? (ie, not on the asexual spectrum) I'm not sure that there were any interviewees in the book who said they liked to have sex because they liked to have sex. Having sex for all these reasons that aren't about the sex but about the societal construct surrounding sex- that reads as very ace, to me.
I don't literally think these girls, who are giving oral sex for complicated reasons, etc, are asexual. What's more likely is, they're not really interested in these sex acts that they are doing, but if given more time and more information, if they are allowed to figure out their own desires, then they *would* be interested in having sex, on their own terms. I think the concept of asexuality *is* very helpful, even for people who end up not being ace, because it says that you don't have to participate in this. You can, instead, figure out what you want, on your own terms.
See also, my blog series on the book "The Great Sex Rescue," where I had a lot to say about the idea of having sex you don't like for higher-level complicated reasons, and how I don't think that's a good idea, and how asexuality plays into that.
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Conclusion
Plenty of people want to clutch their pearls over the amount of sex that teenagers are having- but reading this book, I see that that's not the important thing. Questions like how much sexual experience these girls have, and how many partners they have had- those don't really tell you if they're having sex in a way that's good for them or not. What actually matters is, do you know what you want (or don't want), and are you free and empowered to make choices to get what you want and avoid getting pressured into things you don't want?
Do they actually enjoy it? Do they look back on these experiences and feel that they made good choices? Do they have enough information to know not to just go along with whatever unpleasant thing a high school boy tells them is normal?
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