Bad Sense

like the dishwasher dilemma, which is the source of endless and unresolvable conflict in the het partnership, the “sex” fight is one that can happen every day, all day without ever being resolved.  because its a clash of 2 realities, where women are saying that from their perspective, things look, sound, feel, taste and smell like shit, they dont like it, and they want it to change; and men disagree that anything should ever change, when the current arrangement is so obviously beneficial to men and supports male power.  thats what the sex fight is about: women dont like living in mens reality, where men make the rules to benefit themselves, at womens expense.  and men do like it, and they never, ever want it to change, and they will never do anything to change or disturb the current order, and they will do everything in their power to support it and perpetuate it forever.

and the sex-fight comes in 2 flavors, doesnt it?  we are all familiar with the one where women are sick and fucking tired of being pronged by men, where they have had enough of submitting to unwanted intercourse that is boring, painful, degrading, risky, dangerous, or terrifying.  otherwise known as the “frigid woman problem“.  you know, from mens perspective.  where NOT engaging in painful, terrifying or degrading intercourse is known as abstinence, because intercourse, no matter how terrible it is, is what sex is, and going without it is the same thing as abstinence.  according to language.

but theres also the problem of women wanting PIV too much, or more than their partners do.  theres a very clinical and very nasty-sounding name for women who actually desire all that PIV thats being done to them, and would be done to them anyway, whether they liked or wanted it or not: nymphomaniacs.  because men know that theres something very wrong with women who actually want intercourse.  you know, considering how dangerous it is for women, and how much it is clearly against womens best interests.  men know this, and they are naming their reality constantly: women would have to be literally insane to want PIV.  of course, since no women are free to opt-out of PIV completely, this also implies, doesnt it, that engaging in unwanted intercourse (as opposed to intercourse thats wanted) is actually the sane thing to do, and is what passes as sanity for women.  rape and rapeability as sanity, and evidence of good mental health, for women.  omg.  but i digress.

my point is that women wanting more PIV than their partners — and the frigid woman problem — are really manifestations of the same thing.  radical feminists are always bombarded with stomach-turning porntastic proclamations by both women and men, whenever we criticize PIV, where despite what we know about womens shared experience with PIV and how devastating it has proven to be to girls and women around the world, there are apparently some women who like it.  looooove it, even.  and i am sick of hearing about it, but its not because i dont understand it, and its not because it challenges my position and i dont like being challenged.  its because i dont like being bombarded by fucking porn, for one thing.  and its also because it doesnt challenge anything at all, and its actually completely consistent with a radfem analysis of dueling realities, and PIV.  and the stupid — combined with the porn — just really fucking burns, yannow?  it really does.

so lets put this one to bed.  some women want lots and lots of PIV because if they are going to engage in it at all, and take on the extreme risk of engaging in PIV at all, it makes perfect, nauseating sense that they would also want to do it a lot.

because once you have engaged in intercourse one time, there is no way of knowing for sure that you havent become impregnated against your will: you wont know that until you get your next period.  and this is terrifying.  youve jumped off a bridge, and theres no going back.  so doing it 10 more times really doesnt make anything better, but it doesnt really make it worse, either.  not really.  the first time is the worst, because it introduces terror into the equation for the first time.  and going from no-terror to some terror is more of a change, than going from one degree of terror to another.  or at least, going from none to some is objectively measurable, where going from one degree of terror to another is subjective at best, and dependant on many variables, like where you are in your cycle, birth-control failures, and the like.

this is what sexual “empowerment” looks like for women, under the PIV-as-sex paradigm.  taking an area of subjectivity and manipulating it the best they can, so that their interests are at least somewhat represented.  otherwise, they wouldnt be.  at all.

*i* was this woman once, and i was rendered absolutely mute when it came to articulating this, because there are no words for it.  i fought with nigel constantly about our “sex life” which consisted of infrequent PIV, just frequent enough to leave me wondering every (or every-other) month whether i was pregnant, and thats it.  the absolute most risk with the absolute least payout (for me).  it became just another repetitive bicker-fest and was never resolved, partly because in order to articulate this one, so that it can be addressed, you first need to understand the concept of reproductive harm, and that concept does not exist under patriarchy.  it is literally unutterable.  not that most men would be interested in addressing this one properly, even if most women could articulate it.  but that goes without saying, and demonstrates why this is actually a HUGE problem, and probably cannot be remedied.  because men dont want it remedied.  no, they like it the way it is.  now why might that be?

so anyway, assuming you have engaged in PIV that critical first time, you have already jumped off the bridge, and the “sexually empowered” woman wants to enjoy the fall, as much as she can.  note that the entire process *more or less* resets itself after you start your period: you start back at zero, with 100% confidence that you arent pregnant.  but even thats not really true, now is it?  in reality, youre never really sure.  but lets pretend we dont know that.

i believe this can be expressed in a simple graphic.  the first graph represents female confidence, and how that is diminished after the first fuck.  the second graph shows how, for the woman who likes PIV, both terror and pleasure are introduced into the equation at the same time — the time of the first fuck.  a womans net-pleasure can be manipulated in subsequent encounters (but not really in the first):

watch that first step -- its a doozy!

(click on image for full-size)

well, maybe its not *simple* but it is a graphic.  after the first fuck, the terror relating to risk of unwanted pregnancy appears.  and female net-pleasure can be manipulated after that first fuck, by increasing pleasure, or decreasing terror, based on many variables.  what you can never do though, is remove the terror once its there.  that stays, no matter what.  you can play with the levers a bit, thats all.  thats where women find their pleasure from PIV (the ones who get any from it, and many dont).  and that is just so completely fucked up, it makes me furious.

now, if you wanted to be really conspiratorial about it, you might think about whether the black areas, while indicating female terror, might *also* indicate male pleasure.  consider that they might be the same thing.  if they were, it would explain, wouldnt it, why men are so fond of fucking virgins, and having one-night stands.  because in both graphs, the woman’s terror arises after the first fuck, but doesnt really increase that much thereafter, or not in any way thats completely predictable, and in control of the man.  and whats in it for men, if they cant increase female terror/male pleasure any more than it already is, and control women in predictable ways?

anyway, i get that some women loooove PIV, and want a lot of it.  it doesnt make what radical feminists say about PIV wrong, or even challenge it at all.  not by a long shot.