The Big Tabo-O
- maemarie
- Aug 12, 2020
- 5 min read
Updated: Dec 11, 2020
“The stigma around female pleasure (particularly when it is not catered towards a man) is really baffling. It implies that we as a society want to shame women for enjoying sex.".(1)
Why is female masturbation taboo?
Having just finished Laurie Nunn’s series Sex Education, I felt I had to write about my personal journey of understanding surrounding female pleasure. Watching the character Aimee Gibbs realise she had never considered what she found enjoyable during sex but instead had focused solely on what she perceived to be her partner’s desires, resonated with a tendency I had experienced and noticed other women had adopted growing up. We were not brought up with a feeling that sexual pleasure was ours for the taking. During sex Aimee instead objectifies herself, making loud noises of appreciation (disconnected from actual enjoyment) and asking him things like “do you want to cum on my face?” - surely stemming from male fantasies of women portrayed in porn. Her focus is on making herself as appealing to him - rather than on what she herself enjoys. When given the advice of experimenting with masturbation to discover what she actually likes, her response is one of instant disgust: “ugh I don’t do that”.
This notion of women wanking as something abnormal and shameful was instilled in me from early experiences in secondary school. Masturbation was an acceptable topic of conversation and source of banter between boys: they would often joke about wanking and which pornstars they watched. However, this transparency was not gifted to the opposite sex - the idea of a girl pleasuring herself was absolutely shameful. There would be rumours flying around that a girl had masturbated and she would be mercilessly gossiped about and have abusive jokes hurled at her. No girl would admit to doing it if she wanted social acceptance. It was not even discussed privately among us (not until much later at university).
Instead we were knowledgeable in what male wanking consisted of - it was viewed as a rite of passage. A friend recently told me during a sex education class at school she had been taught what male wanking was but not the female equivalent - as if it didn’t exist. Alongside this and the jokes at school there were many examples on TV: American pie, The Inbetweeners, There's Something About Mary, American beauty, Psycho, The Dictator. It was completely normalised and cemented in our psyches as something that teenage boys and men just did. Whereas there were few if any depictions of women pleasuring themselves on screen. TV has very recently departed from this norm, which is why Fleabag and The Shape of Water are so revolutionary: they depict women casually pleasuring themselves, bringing it into the realm of normalcy. Growing up it was instead shrouded in mystery and shame; we were ignorant as to what actual female pleasure consisted of, and did not feel entitled to it. Instead it was unrealistically depicted in porn and tv with the male gaze in mind, as a titillating act, done in order to pleasure men, not for the benefit of women themselves. This normalisation of male masturbation and denial of female masturbation, means men feel entitled to pleasure while women do not.
This ignorance is reinforced by the fact that sex has been defined as penetration when in fact only men reliably orgasm this way. The now immortalised “I’ll have what she’s having” scene in When Harry met Sally, in which Sally fakes an orgasm in a diner to prove how easy it is for women to do. It’s popularity is indicative of a truth, as only 25% of women experience orgasm during intercourse, making faking it a desirable option for some. The problems with the definition of sex as penetrative was expressed by Anne Koedt in the Myth of The Vaginal Orgasm published in 1970:
‘Women have thus been defined sexually in terms of what pleases men; our own biology has not been properly analyzed’.(2)
She argues for a reassessment of ‘normal’ sex, one which encompasses mutual pleasure for both parties. As the clitoris is the equivalent of a penis in terms of sensitivity, penetration should not be the definition of sex. Since this ignores female pleasure, perpetuating the idea of women being seen “only in terms of how they benefited men’s lives”(3), and ignoring their own desires, which was epitomized in the scene in Sex Education mentioned earlier.
This is clearly still an issue today, as we can see the emergence of websites like OMG yes which aims to reveal ‘ what science says about female pleasure’. These websites highlight why people are still so ignorant, and refer to ‘The Hollywood Myth’ as one factor - how the media often portrays women as reaching orgasm after missionary sex, (which we know isn’t the norm).
Why has this myth been sustained for so long? Delving into Freud- in the 20th century female sexual problems became topics of debate and research among American physiatrists. Many drew on Freud's teachings, and reached the conclusion that the failure of the vaginal orgasm equated to a condition called ‘frigidity’(4). Frigidity was viewed as an illness and women facing this ‘illness’ were sent for psychiatric treatment. Women who wanted clitoral stimulation to reach orgasm, as opposed to vaginal intercourse ‘became representative of women who behaved like men and denied their maternal obligations - behaviour that led to neurosis, isolation, and social disintegration’(5). So basically women who couldn’t reach orgasm via penetration were deemed as ill/degenerate and in need of medical help. The term ‘denied their maternal obligations’ is particularly interesting as it suggests that women are selfish/unfeminine if they seek other ways to orgasm apart from penetration. Why did society uphold this narrative that penetrative sex was the only acceptable form of sexual pleasure and pathologise women for not adhering to it?
Scottie Hale Buehler argues that “The clitoris embodies many misogynistic fears about sexual pleasure: that penetration and penises may not even be necessary for orgasm.”(6)
One answer concluded that its basis is a fear that women can be pleasured IRRESPECTIVE of whether there is a man present or not. This was a dangerous thought - that men are in fact expendable when it comes to female sexual pleasure.
This ideology has been perpetuated throughout history, meaning that womens pleasure has been purposefully ignored or controlled and stigmatized. Also the word 'foreplay' is interesting, because it implies that it is not the main event, although most women orgasm during this rather than sex. Rather penetrative sex has been upheld as the superior form of pleasure. Of course we know that biologically, penetrative sex is necessary for conception, but if we are focusing purely on pleasure this is not the end goal. Sex should be redefined based on mutual female and male pleasure, and women should feel liberated and entitled to discuss and discover what they find pleasurable, without shame or stigma.
2. John McMillian, Timothy McCarthy. In: The Radical Reader: A History of the American Radical Tradition. 2003, p. 429
3.Ibid, p. 429.
4.Hitschmann E, Bergler E. In: Frigidity in women: its characteristics and treatment. Weil PL, translator. Nervous and Mental Disease Publications; Washington: 1936.
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