Rethinking sex
As we start a year fresh again, I’ve been thinking, of course, of all the things I want to change about myself, my relationships, the world. And inevitably I think about all of the influences of society and its structure. Sometimes it all feels a bit pointless, trying to tackle these enormous problems that feel impossible to budge. So I’ve turned to some of my favorite sociologists on one of my favorite subjects to understand what it might take to change things.
I would like to talk about how young women are socialized into their sexuality. Spoiler alert: most of their socializing centers men.
I’m going to pull a lot from sociologist Deborah Tolman’s 2016 article, “Adolescent girls’ sexuality: the more it changes, the more it stays the same,” and Lisa Wade’s 2017 book, American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus. Any statistic I use will be from the latter.
While the media declares girls have gone wild, Tolman disagrees: “they are still as vulnerable as ever to being labeled and scorned for evidencing real sexual feelings and more than ever under pressure to appear — but not actually be — sex kittens.” Girls are taught that sex is something to give or trade to boys. Boys are supposed to pursue sex, while girls must protect their sexuality.
When society constructs men as sexual and women as emotional, it becomes necessary to control boys’ sexuality through girls. The suppression of girls’ sexuality is necessary to keep boys in order, as boys have uncontrollable desires they are not accountable for. Here, women become sexual objects. They learn they are the object of others’ desires, they are to be looked at. So most sexual encounters are not about women’s desires or pleasure. The women’s role is to preform for men.
We can see this in the orgasm gap. Wade identifies the likelihood of a woman orgasming in a hookup with a man as varying from 15 to 63 percent, depending on the activities. In heterosexual monogamous relationships, the likelihood goes up to 92 percent. We can clearly see that this is an issue of care and culture. Not only are women’s sexualities constructed as subservient, their genitals are constructed as “gross” or “intimate.” If oral sex is only performed on one person in a straight hookup, two-thirds of the time it is performed on the man. Men in hookups tend to care much less about their partner’s orgasms and will often use oral only to gain access to penetrative sex.
These age-old stories have put girls’ sexuality under heavy surveillance. But there are contradictory demands put on girls’ sexuality. Girls should look sexy, but girls who wear too little are slutty. Girls should give boys sex, but if they do they’re a slut. So what does it take to meet these demands?
Tolman says that if girls want to be considered “good,” they should not really have sexual feelings of their own. But social ideas about race and class make it even harder for girls of color and poor girls to be considered “good.”
Today, young people think sex should be fun and frequent. Sometimes it is. But, contrary to popular belief, the average student hooks up up only eight times in their college career, and half of those will be with someone they’ve hooked up with before. A third will graduate without hooking up at all. Many hookups do not progress to sex. And when they do, they aren’t always fun for both people involved. A major culprit of this is the fog of rape culture that surrounds American society.
Both Tolman and Wade attribute a lot of these issues to media depictions of sex and women as sex objects. American ideas of sex and the rape culture that surrounds it leads to “situational rape.” A person will not rape until and unless they find themselves in an environment that elicits sexual assault. Good people will rape in situations that allow and reward it.
And all men are told they’re supposed to be sexually aggressive. They are supposed to want sex and always be seeking it. They are supposed to be red-blooded. Men must overcome women’s resistance. It’s not disinterest, but a challenge. In contrast, women are constructed as wanting relationships, which is “uncool” in hookup culture, thus putting them at a further disadvantage and giving men another reason to not take them at their word.
What can we do to change the culture? Tolman thinks we must consider the development of sexual well-being as something basic to be fostered. We must not categorize girls as “good” and “bad,” but rather allow them to have their own sexual feelings and change our demands of masculinity. As for Wade, she thinks fixing hookup culture will require fixing American culture. We’ve clearly got a busy year ahead.
