Sex is badly designed

[Mitara]

Does anyone else think that sex is badly designed.

I have gone off sex. Not the act of sex itself. But the threat of physical violence makes me scared of sex.

So many men have physically or mentally tried to force me to do things that i dont want to do in sex.

The last guy i had sex with for example, he tried to choke me, then he tried to film me. I said no to filming and he said "no we must agree on filming".

Why make one gender much physically bigger than the other. Of course many men are going to intimidate, bully (and in extreme circumstances) rape women.

A recent study showed that a third of men in the study would rape women if they could get away with it.

A male acquaintance once said to me "of course men abuse women. If you are going to choose someone to abuse you are going to abuse the people that are physically weaker than you"

It just all seems so badly designed.

The thread is about the power-imbalance between men and women. Conservative feminism, which (as your responses show) has done a slick job of selling itself, is not the answer that it believes itself to be. Not, at any rate, for women who have seen the ugly side of domestic life. Nor for their children.

And if the mere mention of being left without a breadwinner sends you running for cover, be glad you haven't seen it.

I suspect psychopathy is far more prevalent than you have realised. There are also billions of men on the planet.

If there was no such thing as sex men would still find plenty of ways to hurt women. After your recent experiences though op it wouldn't be surprising if you never bothered with sex (or men) again.

A recent study showed that a third of men in the study would rape women if they could get away with it

This was a study of 86 male US University students, many of who were believed to be answering purely in a manner to wind up and provoke. Far too small a sample size to mean anything, and also a cohort that can't credibly used to draw assumptions about the entirety of male humanity.

"Far too small a sample size"

You could say that about any study then.

Why is 86 too small a sample?

I remember when i was in University, we looked at research papers.

In the researcg papers, Studies were often done on sample sizes of 60, 80 or 100 people.

These studies were considered to be medically relevant, and were published in scientific journals.

Sadly I have come back to the thread despite myself.

Nothing I’ve said is particularly conservative (I’m a left wing feminist). I don’t think the risks of casual sex are the same for men and women- I’ve explained the reasons. You seem to have hooked onto my reference to LP for some reason, it’s odd. Maybe start another thread if you just want to talk about that. I’m trying to talk about the subject of this thread.

I work full time- very odd (quite sexist) assumption from you that being concerned about women being pressured into risky sex means I’m not a breadwinner. My whole point has been that one can be a feminist and believe in equality and still have concerns about the risks of casual sex for women. Assuming that not wanting casual sex means you don’t believe in equality is horribly misogynistic.

@Starlight1984 just because you don't know that it's happened, doesn't mean it hasn't.

My school friends and my family would all say I haven't. My wider circle of uni friends would say I have once or twice. Only my best best friend, knows it's happened to me 4 times.

Just because they haven't shared that information with you, does not mean it hasn't happened.

I don't think the OP sounds particularly unusual.

You are coming across as an extremely unpleasant person. Unempathetic, bullying and excessively pedantic.

"Traditional norms about avoiding sex outside a committed relationship may seem too constraining but actually provided women with protection against abusive men," - your words.

They did not.

They loaded enormous risk of violence, disease and unplanned pregnancy onto lower-ranking women (who had no choice but to sell their bodies), creating further risk for women in "committed relationships".

Rejecting casual sex culture should not mean embracing the flea-bitten corpse of "traditional norms".

Naomi Alderman 👍

Sex isn’t badly designed. The men you get involved with are dysfunctional. Sex should be fun and loving. 🤷‍♀️

I watch porn. Yes, I know, I'm a monster. But the stuff that's now 'recommended' on the home page of every porn site is hideous - choking, incest, scat, gang bangs, 'free use'. I have to put search terms in like 'gentle sex' or 'sensual husband and wife' to find what I'm looking for. It never used to be the case and is so damaging for younger people who have never known any different.

The solution to none of this is more casual sex. The notion that women should be sleeping with more men to prevent those men abusing lower-ranking women is appalling. It’s men who should change their behaviour.

I feel you are just trolling tbh. It’s not women’s job to control men by submitting to unwanted sex and there’s nothing remotely feminist about suggesting there is.

I don’t have much time for many traditional norms. I do have a lot of time for the idea that women shouldn’t feel social pressure to have unwanted and risky sex. Turns out some traditions are helpful and some aren’t- who knew?

Its a sad world. My mum was raped . And the way she talks about it is so sad.

I have four aunties. Three of them have talked to me about being raped when they were younger.
One was offered a lift home by a neighbour and he raped her in his car. Much later, This man became known around the area for raping women. He just seemed to get away with it. I think that he was from quite a wealthy powerful family in the area, and all of the women were scared that they wouldnt be believed.

One of my aunts has not said anything to me but i don't know if she has been or not.

I remember being at school and a friend told me that she was raped by her step dad. We were 13.
Then when i was at university, one of my new friends told me that she was sexually abused by her grandad. Another one told me that she was sexually abused by a friend of her dads.

Then when i went into my first job, i met a new woman. After a while we flatshared. One night she told me that she had been raped at a party. She did press charges and he was convicted of rape. Thats the only woman i know who actually got a conviction

Its a sad old world

Has the poster had ‘bad luck ‘ or are her experiences fairly mainstream now?

I was horrified at a very late night work night out to hear a young woman colleague say quietly that all of her friends - all - had been sexually assaulted or raped by young men, often their supposed boyfriends. My niece when at university told me her group of friends would only date boys they’d known since school such had been their respective appalling experiences in their first year.

Porn, Andrew Tate etc have a lot to answer for.

We can both agree, wholeheartedly, that pressuring women to have unwanted sex is a bad thing.

"Traditional" values, though, were never a shield against it, and I take issue with anyone who thinks that they were. Think of the women who were forced into marrying men simply as a means of survival. Think of the women who had to work in prostitution. Think, even now, of the peri-meno women who don't want sex, but don't want to be homeless either, and so roll over and close their eyes.

I can completely empathise with your revulsion at hook-up culture, but if you take a closer look at "tradition", it's a petri-dish of degradation.

It is an evil world that we live in now

I'm 41 and, knowing what I know now, my first time when I was 15 was absolutely rape.

I was so drunk I was nearly unconscious. We were on the freezing cold ground in a public park in December. He said he was "going for a piss" but came back wearing a condom ready to have sex with me. I said "no" many times and was so confused about what was happening, I called him by his friends name (as in "No Matt" but he was called Nick), at which point he called me a slag.

And this was a nice boy, also 15, and my boyfriend at the time. And he WAS a nice boy. These were the shady standards of that time - wasted girls were seen as fair game.

And I've shared this story on Reddit, on a thread with a similar theme, and was privately messaged by someone saying how much my story turned them on.

There also tends to be such a disconnect between some men and women.

I was reading about this woman called Thordis Elva.

She was raoed by her boyfriend at a young age, she confronted him later on, and they went on to do a ted talk about rape and forgiveness.

He said, later on looking back, that he had felt entitled to have sex with his girlfriend after a night out.

She said that she was so drunk that she wqs vomiting and nearly unconcious. She said that the rape psychologicaly damaged her for years.

The problem with both trad and hookup culture is that they take male sexual entitlement as a starting-point. "Men have needs"; proceed either to Tinder or to the marital bed/brothel.

How about: women have needs, too? Which, if not met, allow women to walk away?

Which, in turn, requires us to live in a world where men don't wield enormous financial power over women. That's the change that we really have to create. Until then, we're all dancing backwards.

Millions of years of evolution can't be unwound in a few hundred years. Why are women on average more likely to be attracted to muscular men who could physically protect if they still lived in a cave then than intelligent men who would provide better in the current world.

A third of men admitted they would rape women of they could get away with it?! I have 2 things to say about that:- My opinion of (most) men wasn't very high to start with. It's now taken another nose dive. Secondly,in my opinion most men DO seem to get away with rape. I read somewhere not long ago that the conviction rate is ridiculously low,less than 2%.

@Mitara you’re still talking about society. We have that. We have laws. We know what morals are. We know right from wrong. The part you (and everyone) can’t undo is the way nature wired creatures to have drives for sex. Where do you think the violent porn originates from? The urges of people which are driven by hormones and that “sex drive” that all animals have. So you can ban away but those thoughts and desires will still exist in people and they’ll still act on them.

And yes, science has come on to a point where we can create a foetus, but again, that doesn’t remove our sexual urges as an animal does it? We have contraception for goodness sake, surely if we only saw sex as a way to make a baby we wouldn’t need contraception, we’d just not have sex! But we enjoy it, we are programmed to want it.

Evolution and nature do not keep up with our technological advances as they’re too fast. Humans won’t sudden not have hormones or sex drive just because you don’t want them to because you can create your baby in a test tube.

We are too advanced intellectually, and our understanding and our expectations of behaviour do not align with the way nature designed us - in lots of ways.

I’m not defending men who rape or who force unwanted attention, I’m simply explaining a difference that you don’t appear to be able to understand.

I think what you’re saying OP is that the fact men are usually bigger and stronger than women makes women vulnerable during sex and knowing a man could overpower you if they wanted to and do what they want is a turn off?

I don’t think that’s an unreasonable thought tbh. We hear awful stories all the time so there’s obviously wronguns out there.

I agree with PPs that the power imbalance is probably part of the “design”. It’s not a romantic act for many species. Sex was “designed” for reproducing and it has succeeded in that.