"No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor..." - Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique.
I have always been aware of the fact that, because I am a woman, my life is more difficult than that of a man’s. However, it was not until I read Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez, that my innocent eyes were truly opened to the extensive and systemically oppressive gap, that continues to affect our everyday lives. Before I was faced with Criado Perez’s plethora of data, I naively thought that I, on the most part, enjoyed equal opportunity… I could not have been more wrong. I quickly learnt that I live in a man’s world, one in which women in Britain are 50% more likely to be misdiagnosed following a heart attack, because heart failure trails typically use male participants. Where the average smartphone (5.5 inches long) is usually too big for most women’s hands, and will not even comfortably fit into our pockets. Where speech recognition devices are trained on recordings of male voices rather than female, meaning that Google’s version is 70% more likely to understand men. Where even snow ploughing seeks to oppress women, this book dedicates an entire chapter to explaining how in Sweden, roads were once cleared of snow before pavements, essentially prioritising commuters in cars over pedestrians ferrying children to school or doing shopping*. Arming her readers with this data, Caroline Criado Perez seeks to illuminate the holes in our knowledge, that helps the gender gap to remain as expansive as it is. We must reverse the way of thinking that has been embedded into our society for millennia. As Criado Perez explains, this way of thinking has been around for so long, that it has morphed into a kind of not thinking, “a double not thinking, even: men go without saying, and women don’t get said at all. Because when we say human, on the whole, we mean man.”
*All data is from Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, by Caroline Criado Perez.
Gaps in equality have consistently been an issue, the gender pay gap being one of them, and the gap between the classes being another. They serve to separate society, and are unmistakably malicious. It was only recently however, that I came to the realisation that another, and far more terrible, gap has been staring me in the face for years. The orgasm gap. It is a tale as old as time, a man and a woman have sex, he orgasms, she does not, and then he rolls over to go to sleep. This has become the toxic norm of most sexual encounters, essentially teaching women that their needs, desires and pleasure comes second to that of a man's… and most of the time, not at all. It is a widely accepted fact that the male orgasm is a fundamental part of sex, whilst pleasuring a cis woman has been branded more ‘difficult’ and ‘time consuming.’ Florence Given confidently questions in her book, Women Don’t Owe You Pretty, “it takes two to tango, so why is a women’s pleasure in heterosexual relationships still so rarely prioritised?” This ignorance of female pleasure is evidenced through the obvious privileging of male pleasure in most pornography, in which videos will end with the male orgasm ‘money shot,’ elevating the idea that female pleasure seen within porn is simply a secondary minor event, on the path to the destination that is a man’s, more important and more acknowledged, climax. As Criado Perez rightly states, “the result of this deeply male-dominated culture is that the male experience, the male perspective, has come to be seen as universal, while the female experience – that of half the global population, after all – is seen as, well, niche.”
Women are constantly discouraged from asking for what they want. We are labelled as too opinionated, intimidating, bossy, emotional, even ‘crazy feminists,’ for daring to speak up in all corners of society, this ranges from voicing our opinions in meetings at work, to speaking up for the pleasure that we desire in bed. Shame, guilt, embarrassment and even sin, are some of the few negative feelings that I have heard women themselves, attach to the idea of seeking female pleasure. We must challenge these toxic stigmas and allow ourselves the unapologetic freedom to explore our sexuality, that men are so privileged to already have, because “when we exist in a culture where women are ashamed to talk about their own pleasure this only further perpetuates the harmful narrative that we don’t enjoy sex.” (Florence Given, Women Don't Owe You Pretty.) We are so hell bent on pleasuring men and feeding their egos in all walks of life, that we diminish our innate need for a voice. Now, this is in no way our fault, or men’s for that matter, it is down to the toxic set of messages that we have been persistently taught in our culture. Let’s unpick those messages that are woven in into the fabrics of our society, and sew in new ones.
Communicate your need for pleasure and let's not allow the bedroom (or wherever you like to do your thing) to be another place where women are oppressed.
I came across this line of Nikita Gill’s poetry from Great Goddesses, and was instantly compelled to buy her collection, because I felt her representation of women, and their strength, was something very important… “Sometimes I watch Girl become Goddess and the metamorphosis is more magnificent than anything I have ever known.” (2. A Mortal Interlude, Great Goddesses, Nikita Gill.) I was struck by the realisation that we all have a Goddess inside of us, and I think that we have the ability to unlock her by releasing the fire within our bones, that has built up after years, upon years, of oppression. Do this by being confident in your communication, unapologetically explore your own body, talk about your pleasure without attaching a feel of shame to it, be fiercely outspoken in the workplace, embrace your opinions and don’t be scared to passionately share them… “ignore the salacious tongues inside our heads that threaten us not to be too full, too ferocious,” and release the fearless Goddess inside of you that has been dormant for far too long.
I am going to finish by leaving a powerful video, that provides an unflinching glimpse into the impossible standards forced upon women. This is Claire Rothstein's (a British photographer and publisher of fashion magazine Girls Girls Girls) fashion film Be a Lady They Said, featuring Cynthia Nixon. The poem read is a 2017 piece by Camille Rainville, from her blog Writings of a Furious Woman.
Voice your opinions, demand your right to pleasure and smash the patriarchy...
-AA.