The female price of male pleasure

[DakiniTawa]

Lots of excellent points in here. It's not a new article so apologies if it's been shared already:

theweek.com/articles/749978/female-price-male-pleasure

It makes me so sad what straight women have to deal with.

Women are enculturated to be uncomfortable most of the time. And to ignore their discomfort

This, exactly, and this is the head fuck of it all. I was taught just to tolerate my discomfort, that it was unkind to say no. to be nice.

its taken years to challenge that and trust myself. I have the right to say no.

On the plus side the tide is turning. I'm late 30s and definitely of the era of tolerating discomfort.

I'm optimistic my daughter will have better experiences.

That’s really interesting and I hadn’t seen it before so thank you for sharing it.

It’s given me some uncomfortable thoughts about past relationships, thankfully very different to my marriage now, and I’m wondering when and why my expectations changed and I decided to want better for myself than I’d been putting up with. I really don’t know. My husband is everything that’s kind, thoughtful, considerate and civilised. Is life only different now because he’s one of the good ones or am I with him because I know what I want and expect?

That's a very good, if depressing article.

I remember going to the GP not long after I became sexually active, and mentioning (I think I'd gone to get the pill) that sex hurt. She suggested reading The Joy of Sex. It wasn't till years later that I stumbled upon the word "vaginismus". Fortunately (or fortuitously) I inadvertently cured myself; the pill did not agree with me, so after a protracted fight with the doctors (they don't like you not taking hormonal contraception) I managed to find a family planning clinic prepared to give me a diagphragm. In learning to insert it correctly, I learned to relax the relevant muscles - I had in fact done what is the normal first line of treatment for vaginismus, namely getting used to a set of dilators of varying sizes! The other thing in my favour was that having grown up yonks ago when sexual mores were rather more conservative, my first boyfriend and I "fooled around" for several months before trying PIV - so I knew what it was to orgasm, and knew that PIV wasn't meant to feel like this.

The other thing that occurs to me is that I have never liked giving oral - I did it because it was expected of me. It makes me gag, gives me a sore jaw, and I get no pleasure from it. I know other women say they like bringing pleasure to their partner, or that the feeling of power turns them on, but I'm completely "meh" about it - it lacks the reciprocity of a decent sexual encounter.

What makes me sad it I bet there are very few women who have only had pleasurable sex with men. At least some encounters would have been painful or unpleasant.

Friends joke to me and say 'you're so lucky being a lesbian' ... maybe it isn't a joke after all.

I suppose I put sex into the same box as smoking and drinking - none of these things are enjoyable to begin with, but you persevere as when you start liking them it shows you’re an adult.

I think women’s pain is trivialised regardless of where it comes from - the horrific way we’re treated in pregnancy, childbirth and the aftermath comes from a similar place I think as the attitude towards pain and sex. Maybe it’s simply because men don’t have the same reproductive organs and lack the imagination to think they might feel differently to what they have. We all have grown up with the knowledge of how sensitive a man’s tackle is and how easily hurt it can be but it seems impossible to then apply that knowledge to our bits.