Follow us on Instagram
Try our daily mini crossword
Play our latest news quiz
Download our new app on iOS/Android!

Let’s talk about sex, baby

How do men get off? I have no doubt that even those of us who are less sexually experienced can answer this question just fine. Friction, socks, lotion, or something of that nature. Furthermore, we all have something of an idea of what male genitalia is supposed to look like from the condom demo our woefully embarrassed health teachers gave us before prom.

How do women get off? Now this question is a little trickier. Porn suggests that a lot of penetration should do the trick. Something about penetration must be pleasurable enough for a woman to orgasm, right? As for what female genitalia looks like, I am at a slight advantage when it comes to visualizing it, but for the longest time (all throughout middle school actually) I couldn’t figure out which part of my body was supposed to give me pleasure. Certainly penetration would do it?

ADVERTISEMENT

There are also a great many other questions like: how do gay people do it? Or what type of genitalia does a sex change operation leave you with? Or how do you attain pleasure if your genitals don’t fit into the conventional gender binary?

In today’s world, we are one Google search away from discovering the answers to all of these questions and many more, but the only problem with that is the Internet is full of contradicting information that confuses more than it informs. When we enter puberty, these questions become more than just products of idle curiosity. The answers to these questions become crucial in order to enjoy ourselves safely if we choose to engage in sexual activity.

Yet, the words “sex” and “pleasure” in the same sentence make a taboo in our society. To enjoy sex is to be liberal. And even to learn about sex is to be liberal. Reeling from an election that has illuminated a deep chasm between the terms liberal and conservative, we see these two terms confine sexuality more and more. If we preserve this binary in the face of Trump’s own brand of sexist and ignorant conservatism, anyone who isn’t a heterosexual white male has a sexuality that is offensive to popular sensibilities.

This past October, Ellen Heed led workshops on the Princeton campus about male, female, and intersex genitalia. These workshops were an opportunity for students on campus to voluntarily gain sex education from a credible source and learn one of patriarchy’s best kept secrets: sex can be pleasurable to different people in different ways.

These workshops spawned many articles in The Daily Princetonian, including an article by Editorial Board. In the much-discussed article, the Board made statements about how the Women*s Center “over-emphasiz[es] issues related to sexuality at the expense of other valuable programming” and “has a long history of hosting politically charged and overwhelmingly liberal events.” While they may not have explicitly labelled sex education as liberal programming, the Board seems to link the two things together in their list of grievances against the Women*s Center. This is in line with which the media often depicts sex education as a liberal issue. It is well accepted that conservatives support abstinence-only education while liberals are more sex-positive.

I would like to argue that sex education is actually about equality between men and women. There is nothing liberal about teaching basic anatomy in a way so that it evens the playing field for men, women, and those who do not fit into the gender binary. The value of workshops like Heed’s is immense: they promote knowledge about pleasure which in turn can help foster healthy relationships between people who are aware of their own bodies. Up to 80 percent of women fake orgasms during intercourse. Even some men are known to fake their orgasms. I am not going to attempt to neatly fit non-conventional sex into such clean statistics. The underlying point is that, although most people know about condoms, IUDs, and HIV, pleasurable sex is still a big looming taboo when discussing “sex ed.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Why is pleasure considered so irrelevant in traditional sex education?

The president of the Anscombe Society, Thomas Clark ’18, inadvertently answers this question in his opinion article (the first response to Heed’s workshops to be featured on the Prince’s opinion column). According to his article, he believes sex to be something that should be treated as a special act associated with parenthood and not consumed entirely by the hunt for pleasure. This is a perfectly valid way to approach sex in one’s personal life and I champion everyone’s right to define what sex means to them. I even commend him for acknowledging that the workshops “provided an excellent opportunity to reflect on this [what constitutes good and bad sex].”

However, I think it’s problematic that the information divulged to high school and college students is controlled by people with similar beliefs to those of the Anscombe Society president. To clarify, I am not implying that he personally would choose to withhold the information — just that people who share his viewpoint do promote abstinence-only education. Because like-minded people believe that sex should be monogamous, heterosexual, and regarded as the prelude to pregnancy, many sexual education videos created by them demonize sex outside of the context of marriage.

In my own high school health class, I was explicitly told to “wait until marriage until you become sexually active…abstinence is the only option that is acceptable to your family, your school and your community.” In many other high schools across the nation in which this particular message is imparted, sexual education has become equated with knowledge about contraception and STD prevention. In these contexts, information about pleasure is entirely taboo.

Subscribe
Get the best of ‘the Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

The question to ask here is: who is at the bigger disadvantage when information about pleasure is not explicitly distributed?

In heterosexual relationships, one can imagine who experiences pleasure and who doesn’t. Boys aren’t discouraged by society from masturbating. Their anatomy is explained more thoroughly in health class. Their pleasure is more extensively discussed in popular media. They are more likely to know what feels good to them. On the other hand, for girls, it’s a wonder if we can manage to discover orgasms on our own. Even the act of masturbation is equated with “violating” our bodies.

For girls, it’s a wonder if we can manage to discover orgasms on our own, only if we choose to “violate” our bodies by holding a claim to our own pleasure. So many myths abound about different types of orgasms and pleasure spots that it becomes hard for even women to find pleasure in their own bodies. It is even harder for men to discover how to pleasure women in a way that doesn’t remind us of the iconic “When Harry Met Sally” diner scene.

It is extremely hypocritical for a man, any man, to state that pleasure is not the goal of sex when it is clear that men are much more likely to reach orgasm than women during intercourse (biologically speaking, there is no such thing as a vaginal orgasm — only a clitoral). Introducing sexual education into high schools and into college campuses in the form of workshops like Ellen Heed’s promotes female, male, and intersex pleasure. People should be armed with the knowledge to achieve pleasure. You can choose what you want to do with that knowledge — the knowledge itself is not inherently obscene. Sexual education merely puts men, women, and everyone else on an equal footing.

There is nothing liberal about sexual equality.

Bhaamati Borkhetaria is a sophomore from Jersey City, New Jersey. She can be reached at bhaamati@princeton.edu.