Cultural Exercises

Why women still can’t enjoy sex

I think feminists need to have some biological and evolutionary studies included in their education, to balance their outrage, and help focus on strategies that will actually make changes instead of assuming it is all a matter of ignorant (or malicious) male “sexism” that has produced the reproductive imbalance that exists in every human society.

This article online is a classic example of rant and rage. No reasonable person (male or female) questions that there is injustice. But where does it come from?

The article is well written and passionate, but fundamentally fails to grasp or even ask, “what is the point of sex?” Contrary to the writer’s assertion it is not “love” - it is babies. In the scheme of evolution it is pure coincidence that sex is pleasurable for humans - it certainly has been a happy coincidence and it definitely gets the main job done, which is to propagate genes.

Male praying mantises still can’t enjoy sex either, and never will.

Nature isn’t fair. Women of our species bear the reproductive burden, and contribute a vastly unbalanced amount to the biological outcome (9 months of pregnancy, up to 2 years of lactation, and up to 18 years of care). A male only needs to donate a teaspoon of sperm to have “succeeded” genetically. The whole game of “love and marriage” is the way women get to even the score somewhat. They can get males to contribute to the upbringing of those offspring by binding them in long term commitments called marriage, in which, (in a reductive analysis) males receive sex and affection and contribute resources to “their” family.

But this system depends on a woman being able to keep that man bound to the family, and “easy” sex outside that dramatically undermines that bond. In my experience, “slut” is more often applied by women to other women, because it is actually a defensive term used to “punish” other women who are perceived as threats to their own reproductive project.

This is a much more complex issue to resolve, therefore, than simply labelling men as sexist, and “embracing” the term slut. We are dealing with deep pressures in evolutionary terms, and political slogans are not going to change anything. It will require a deeper understanding of the “why” in reproductive terms, and then seeing if we can work as a society to create concrete structures and alternative arrangements to even the biological bias against women, if we really want all to have “free sex” for fun, not just babies.