Great Sexpectations
Thursday, January 22nd, 2009
My real ideal lover (see post below) and semi-silent blog partner, caught in a sort-of cubist iphone pic happy accident. Happy HNT!
Amidst the new beginnings this week, I’ve been thinking about expectations, and in particular the detriment that having unrealistic expectations can have on one’s satisfaction. In my personal life, I can think of one persistent, unrealistic fantasy that shaped much of my expectations about sex, and I think this fantasy is a fairly common one among women. When I was young, I imagined that the ideal lover would know exactly how to please me.
Even before I really knew what sex entailed, I imagined that sex was about me lying there while my sexual soulmate unlocked all the secrets of my body, like I was a friggin’ video game or something. [Insert lover here] would sweep me off my feet, arouse my hidden (shameful?) desires, and then give me perfectly executed orgasms until the sun rose and he made breakfast (I remember a similar description of first time sex on the sitcom Blossom - I love the 90s).
This fantasy, in all its permutations, informed my expectations on what sex was about. In my teens, when a partner was awkward or doing something in a way that wasn’t pleasing, I would just sit there and wonder why he didn’t know what he was doing. It never occurred to me that all I had to do was say, “go slower” or “be more gentle” and I’d get exactly what I wanted. He was supposed to know that. Instead, when sexual encounters didn’t match the fantasies in my head, I concluded that we were not compatible, and that my soulmate was still out there somewhere.
Over time, I suppose these expectations weren’t totally damaging to my sex life. My definition of sexual compatibility expanded and matured, and I learned to be more pro-active and engaged in my own pleasure. But, embarrassingly, this fantasy is not totally gone. For example, when a hot guy stands next to me in yoga class, I immediately start imagining that he knows all the ways of tantra and could show me how to have orgasms for hours. Like after all these years there’s still some secret sexual experience that I’m not having.
This fantasy, which I don’t believe is unique, shows two things: one, that women want/are conditioned to want to be passive in sexual relationships, and two, that our bodies are mysterious, even to ourselves often.
Figleaf over at Real Adult Sex often discusses the no-sex class, which basically encompasses all the notions that women don’t enjoy sex, and therefore are the gatekeepers of sex, which they dole out for the right economic exchange (my sloppy definition, not his). The fantasy of the all-knowing male lover fits right into this paradigm. The possible origins of this fantasy are many, including watching Dirty Dancing everyday when I was 10, but the outcome is the belief that women have no control or responsibility in their sexual pleasure, and that men are somehow supposed to have all the inside secrets because they like sex.
The other point is that our bodies are more mysterious than men’s. Part of that is biologically determined, and part of it is that as a society we’re so uncomfortable talking about sex, especially women’s sexuality. This isn’t to say that for all men sexual pleasure is easy, and for all women, complicated, but there is a lot of ignorance about female anatomy and how women experience pleasure. I learned where babies come from when I was 5, but I (seriously) didn’t have an accurate understanding of the terms vagina, vulva, clitoris, etc. until like 5 months ago. This ignorance creates a mythology about the female orgasm, and the men who can deliver it (heroes!) and the women who can achieve it (whores!).
I wonder if this fantasy (in whatever form) is as common as I think it is among women, and if there’s an equally common male fantasy shaped by gender norms that creates false expectations about sex. Please share if you have any thoughts.
