Did anyone else see this article this weekend?
Do Lesbians Have Better Sex Than Straight Women
It's quite a typical broadsheet feature on sex - light reading, no deep research, a few light supporting interviews, etc. Just the sort of thing you'd expect to find in the features section, really.
It does come a bit of a cropper when it tries to be trans-inclusive in one of its supporting paragraphs, though. Not, I'd like to point out, BECAUSE it is trying to be inclusive, but because although I've read it several times I think the author's efforts to inclusivity have made her writing ambiguous and left her point unsupported.. (I can't imagine what it must be like to be a sub editor these days.)
^Jessica says that women tend to be better at listening and communicating in bed (and perhaps outside of the bedroom, too – it is not clear whether those abundant news stories about women speaking thousands more words a day than men stand up, but understanding and empathy are areas in which women excel). There is a strong emotional connection between women, too.
Alice Martin, a 20-year-old trans lesbian, says the same. “As a woman having sex with another woman, it’s a completely mind-bending experience. The mix of care, love, romance, pleasure, emotion and intensity is something that I never experienced with men.”^
So, the author is taking the position that women are more emotional and feel sex more emotionally than men do. (I personally disagree with this as it doesn't match up with my lived experience, but hey ho.)
The ambiguity is around Alice's situation, identify, context, and how it relates to the point that author is making about women being more emotionally connected in sex then men are.
- At first, I thought Alice was born male and identified as straight, and she transitioned to being a transwoman and then identified as lesbian. Then I realised that she was comparing her sexual experiences with men and with women.
- So then I thought that Alice was born male and identified as bi, but then transitioned to being a transwoman stopped being bi and became lesbian only. (This seems most likely to me, but it's not clear. And of course then I want to know Alice's story and why bi was okay, but then not, even if it's not the point of the article.)
And THEN I started wondering, if you're in a male body but you've only had emotional sex when you let yourself be emotional because you are thinking of yourself as a woman, is the emotional bit really attached to "being a woman" or is it attached "giving yourself permission to have emotionally connected sex with someone else who is emotionally connected?"
And then I started thinking that the author needed to have another quote to bolster her "women have more emotionally connected sex than men do" point, but from a natal female identifying as bi who enjoyed sex with men and women but who found her same sex experiences more emotionally connected. But that wasn't there.
And then I realised that the article starts off with links to a website full of drawings of different types of vulvas to help women feel better and more normalised about their female genitals so they can have better female orgasms, and then my headed exploded with the contradictions and I stopped reading.