What Having Sex Feels Like For A Woman
There's a reason it all seems so mysterious.
Landovan on Unsplash Sex, they say, is like chocolate. Even bad sex is still sex.
Me, I look at things a little bit differently. Sure, sex is great and it feels good, but so does sticking your entire arm into a vat of cool yogurt on a hot day — and that's a goddamn mess, so if you expect me to keep doing it there better be something in it for me ... And that, ladies and gentleman, should be an orgasm.
It's crazy that some women are still content to pat their spent male partners on the back and say, "It's okay. That felt nice anyway," while if a man doesn't climax, women are expected to grit their teeth, break out the lube and pray they don't get motion sickness from all the jack hammering that follows until he "finishes".
Combine that kind of passive sexual behavior with the sad truth of the orgasm gap — the scientific finding that 95 percent of heterosexual men report they usually or always orgasm during sex, compared to 65 percent of heterosexual women — and it's enough to make one start asking all kinds of questions about the female libido.
What does sex feel like for a woman?
Do women like it as much as men? What makes sex feel good for them when it does?
The answers, both generally and historically speaking, are complicated, as detailed in this illuminating video produced by the folks at Crave, aptly titled "This Is About The History Of Women's Pleasure."
Society has always had a warped relationship with women's bodies.
As the people behind Crave's legendary luxury sex toys explain:
"A few months ago, we started kicking around the idea of making a video documenting the history of women’s pleasure. It was meant to be an interesting take for women's history month -- the type of women's history we don't hear about very often.
But something strange happened. The more we dug, the more we learned that the history of women’s pleasure is mostly a story about how society has sought to negate women’s pleasure and control women's bodies for centuries."
Even the ancient Greeks were baffled by what was going on in between our legs.
They didn't look at the clitoris and see its splendor. Instead, they saw a mad, busted up, wrong-looking penis. And thus, a tradition of women's bodies being perceived as inexplicable, broken and not as important as the male body began!
Ah, such an age.
And when it comes to embracing women's sexual pleasure, we haven't really evolved.
In 1947, the clitoris was removed from Gray's Anatomy, the consummate anatomical tome, to which it had only just been added in 1901, leaving people to assume the clit was just some little "got your nose" lookin' nubbin between the legs.
It was almost half a century later when someone (read: women, obviously) decided to dig a little deeper.
As reported in The Atlantic, "It wasn’t until 1981 that the Federation of Feminist Women's Health Clinics created anatomically correct images of the clitoris. Published in A New View of a Woman’s Body, the images were part of a wider attempt to provide thorough, accurate information to women to support their health. Decades later, in 2009, the first 3-D sonography of the stimulated clitoris was completed by French Researchers."
And research conducted by Australian urologist Helen O'Connell found that "the volume of clitoral erectile tissue is ten times that which is shown in doctors' offices and in anatomy text books."
So suck it Sigmund Freud, with your talk of clitoral orgasms being "immature." True science has proven you wrong, and I couldn't be more delighted.
While this is all true, it's also not common knowledge.
You know what else isn't common knowledge? The fact that the clitoris exists solely to give pleasure.
You know whose bodies aren't designed with an organ solely intended to make sexual activity feel amazing? Men.
That's right, penises serve several different functions, and yet we all are expected to roll out the red carpet every time one comes our way (in every sense of the word).
If anything, it should be the clit that gets the red carpet treatment.
Every time a woman parts her legs, those lucky enough to be present should fall to their knees and bow their heads in reverence: pleasure incarnate!
For women, having an orgasm during sex is something we're taught not to expect, let alone demand.
Of course, there are other things about partnered sex that are true.
It does feel good (sometimes) even if you don't have an orgasm. Sometimes having sex isn't about having orgasms, per say, it's about connection.
While these things are facts, that doesn't make it any less of a fact that women are as entitled as men are to seek out orgasms not only from masturbation, but every single time they pair up with a sexual partner.
In many ways, the female body has always seemed to me as if it was specifically designed to promote conversations with male partners.
When a guy has an erection, he's got one goal: putting that erection inside of something and waggling it around until he has an orgasm and makes a face like John Mayer wailing on his guitar.
But if you are educated about a woman's body, you know that somewhere between 50-75 percent of women claim to be capable of experiencing an orgasm from penetrative sex alone.
That's right, 25-50 percent of the female population needs you to pay a little bit more attention to the erectile tissue living directly above their favorite underground domain.
It's BS that women are made to feel like they have low sex drives, no libido to speak of, or that they don't like sex simply because the sex they are having just doesn't feel that great.
Well, there are certainly people who feel this way in the world, they aren't just women.
I'd bet you the apartment I don't actually own that many, many women who think they have a faulty sex drive or that sex simply doesn't feel as good for women as it does for men actually do have normal libidos and are a perfectly physiologically capable of having orgasms — they just don't know how their body works, or how to talk to their partners in order to ask for what they need, or they have been made to believe the quality of their experiences in the bedroom comes in last in the universal list of sexual priorities.
While on one hand sex is something primal and primitive, something we all innately can do, it is also something of an art as well.
Let's face it, the first time you have sex, you aren't going to have the same wealth of experience you'll have the tenth time you have sex.
Women have been made to fear enjoying sex for long enough.
We're made to fear pregnancy, diseases and negative social repercussions of being sexually active.
The campaign of terror needs to end.
So, how does sex feel for a woman?
It can feel absolutely amazing ... or it can be the absolute worst.
Not only does having sex as a woman have all the potential in the world to feel just as great as it does for men, but experiencing sexual pleasure is something cis-female bodies are born with the ability to do.
Enjoying sex as a woman isn't a privilege, it's our biological right.
Now go out there and have really good sex, and don't you dare thank any sweaty male who suddenly dismounts post-ejaculation.
Break out the flags, give him directions and get yours.
Rebecca Jane Stokes is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York with her cats, Batman and Margot. She's an experienced generalist with a passion for lifestyle, geek news, pop culture, and true crime.