Legs Wide Shut: The Demands of Female Sexuality

By Emma Collins// University of Southern California

“That’s it, yes!” I panted. “Oh!” With that, he came. Unceremonious, really. I felt watered down relief wash over me as he flopped next to me in bed. He was sweaty.“So, that was good for you?” he asked. The words were meant to be a question, but produced a statement.

So that was good for you, period. I didn’t like this guy. My distaste had formed in the way he assumed we were going straight into sex. How he analyzed pieces of me as if they did not make a whole. Tits separate from an ass separate from a face. A narrative of our night had formed in his mind before we even kissed. Our bodies would entangle, but the act would not be collaborative. I was to perform my femininity. It’s not like I wanted rose petals and silk sheets. I didn’t even want romance. Just a little sexual decency. Hair pulling with intention. The chance to pull a pillow under my hips. Fuck me with a little care.

However, I didn’t voice my criticisms. Instead, I replied, “Oh my god, so good.” This response has been built into my DNA. I and countless other women have internalized the idea that our sexuality is not our own. My sexual subordination was taught to me before I even knew what sex was. Wielding, even possessing, sexuality is seen as inherently wrong for young women. Women are distanced from their sexuality because independent exploration of sexuality is not perceived as an option. Through society’s patriarchal pillars, this lack of knowing manifests into women valuing men’s sexual expression over their own. Women are demanded to be sexual participants, but shamed for being sexually active.

The hyper-sexualization of women and the pressure it places on girls to conform to sexualized narratives is tightly woven into the fabric of society. Take the silver screen for example. Directors, the majority of whom are male, claim and sell the female body to an audience of men and women. People of all genders and ages are susceptible to the messages of the media. Unfortunately, the media is a perpetrator of gendered sexual narratives. Underage girls and women are pitched to us as sex objects. Dr. Stacy Smith, a communications professor at the University of Southern California, found that 32% of female movie characters were shown wearing stereotypically sexy clothing compared to 7% of their male counterparts; beyond this, female characters between the ages of 13 and 20 were the most likely to be sexualized (Smith, Choueiti, Scofield, & Pieper, 2013). Portrayal is not stagnant - it is not something people passively observe. Rather, hyper-sexualization is being pushed onto developing girls who inevitably internalize this imagery. The message being fed to us is that our bodies are meant to be viewed within a sexual narrative and only that sexual narrative.

As a girl, I absorbed a set of prescribed expectations. My value was not what I could give, but what my body could portray, specifically how my body could entice the male eye. I felt a separation within myself, my mind versus my body. Both were able to contribute to the world around me, but in very different ways. My mind was creative and craved independence while my body and thoughts towards my body were funneled into insecurity over my looks due to an incessant need to be desired. My mind was my own, yet my body was something I shared with, well, I wasn’t sure what. Despite the uncertainty, I was aware that I did not wholly belong to myself. In a way, I was simply a sentient, sweater-clad Carl’s Jr. ad.

The disconnect between what was mine, my mind, and what was shared, my skin, came from the abstract expectations of men that were impressed upon me. No, not expectations all men hold. Yes, expectations most men carry. Here, the ‘expectations of men’ refers to the misogynistic concept that women are subordinate to men with sexual subordination being a subset. Similar to women, men internalize their own sexual narratives through media consumption as well as the immediate privilege paired with masculinity. However the narrative given to men is one of power. They are the protagonists of their own sexual becoming - if one could even call their journey a becoming. Heterosexual, cisgender men simply are the standard. Our horny shepherds. Women are left to be the supporting role to the penile protagonist. Men are allowed to consume the female body without considering the context of the female individual. Women’s bodies have been served to men for decades. This is a power dynamic that has ingrained a sense of domain for men. A woman’s pleasure becomes a tool to feed a man’s superior sexual pleasure.

Women are often boiled down to their performative value with complete ignorance to sexual independence, a notion that presents itself best through good ole masturbation. The belief that men masturbate more than women is commonplace. Women masturbating? They could never! Men masturbating? Boys will be boys. The actual habits of men and women tell another story: “22% of women ages 25-29 and 25% of men in that same age group” report masturbating multiple times a month (Chalabi, 2014). Men fly solo more often than women but not by much. So why are we assuming women are avoiding their own bodies? One of many reasons is the belief that the female body is a vessel for male pleasure. The subordination of feminine eroticism is simultaneously pervasive and subtle. Women are hyper-sexualized relentlessly, creating both a mystique for the male gaze to unwrap as well as a sense of public ownership for the female body. As a woman, my sexuality is expected to sit on a shelf gathering dust until a guy wants to utilize it. I am not expected to be a sexual creature when I am under only my own gaze.

Unfortunately, there is a chance that I do not recognize the full wait of my sexual potential. Modern brain scans refute societal perceptions that sexual nature is gendered; they also point out the dissonance in women’s feelings towards their own sexuality. Doctor Hamid R. Noori and his team showed pornographic photos and videos to men, women, and gender fluid people of various sexual orientations and studied their brain activity. They found that “when men and women viewed [sexual] imagery, the way their brains responded [...] was largely the same” and that “women often (and far more often than men) experience a disconnect between their physiological arousal - measured by genital temperature, wetness and swelling - and what they describe feeling” (Tingley, 2019). Women did not perceive themselves to be turned on, despite the sexual sirens their bodies were sounding. Historically, women have been shamed for their sexuality. Perhaps internalized shame is rooted so deep that we are subconsciously denying ourselves. Societal ideals have rewired our thought patterns to the extent that we may not realize our own sexual agency even when our bodies present it to us.

Mainstream porn is another mechanism perpetuating women’s sexuality as a functional entity for men. Sexual imagery of women, and by extension women themselves, are meant to supplement the male experience. Women are pigeonholed into whatever men need them to be. Michael Castleman, a psychologist and writer, exemplifies this: “I’m (almost) ready to believe that women comprise around 25 percent of PornHub’s audience. I’m guessing that a significant proportion of PornHub’s [female] audience is bisexual or lesbian. Among women, “lesbian” is the #1 search category” (Castleman, 2018). Castleman shoves PorbHub’s statistics into a male narrative, one in which pornography is a space exclusively for those that are sexually attracted to the female body. Women’s sexuality is claimed by adopting the mindset that women could not be consuming porn, could not own their sexual autonomy, unless they were somehow analogous to men. To Castleman, consumers of porn can only include heterosexual men and gay women. This conception is troubling because it assumes that straight women lack an innate sexual nature while simultaneously insisting that possession of sexuality can be defined as an attraction towards women. Women are porn, but porn is not for women.

Consumption of the female body by men occurs even in spaces that exclude males by design because some men feel they have such a strong domain over women’s bodies. For example, male sexualization of queer women is commonplace. On an episode of Friends, Chandler and Joey give up their apartment - their apartment in Manhattan - to watch their female friends kiss for less than a minute. Canonization of these stereotypes happens in the real world as well. “Lesbian” was the most searched term on PornHub in 2018 (“Can you guess 2018’s most-viewed categories on the largest porn site?” 2019). Men are most aroused by visual cues. Thus lesbian porn “doubles up” visual stimuli (Khazan, 2016). Two personality-free women for the price of one! Lesbian fantasies often extend beyond the digital world and into real-life interaction. Many of my queer friends have experienced harassment from men attempting to‘reclaim’ the female body, their reason being a sense of ownership. At my homecoming dance, a boy slurred demands for my girlfriend and I to kiss. He saw us as two bodies that could give him masturbation material for the week, not as two individuals that, by the very nature of our same-sex relationship, were uninterested.

On the other hand, many women enjoy watching porn that features only women because it provides a safe space separate from men. A genre we can trust. Traditional heterosexual porn feels isolating, despite womanly involvement. Ilana Glazer said it best:

I don't watch anything but solo porn because regular porn is like,‘Shut up, little girl, wash my feet!’ And she's like, ‘Uh, don't tell my dad, okay? Cause I'm just barely legal. I love shaved pubes and tan, crispy bellies and tits.’ Ew (Aniello, 2015).

Straight scenes are so male-centered that there is no chance for me to identify with the woman being portrayed. A male presence indicates a strong focus on male pleasure. Male-centered porn distorts female pleasure into a performance for that male audience, leaving female viewers with a sense of inauthenticity. I recognize that heteronormative porn is not synonymous with areal-world, raw sexual experience. I’ve never left a dick appointment with the same palpable discomfort that some porn instills in me. The inauthenticity of it makes sense - porn is a recreation of an incredibly intimate activity, an activity that producers simply are not trying to get right. However, porn presents us with expectations applied to the real world as well as one another.

Whether it's the media we grow up consuming, ownership of masturbation, or portrayal of sex in porn, women repeatedly come face to face with the reality that our bodies do not belong to us. We are pushed to perform our gendered roles in sex and in society. Men are the standard from which ideals of sex are built around, thus they are allowed to be self-centric during sex. Am I enjoying this? How am I feeling? Conversely, women are supplemental to men’s pleasure in pornography, media, and societally prescribed roles. Many women prioritize male pleasure during sex, reducing their own value to performative properties. Is he enjoying it? How is he feeling? I’ve had these thoughts. Am I fuckable? I’ve thought this both with a man on top of me and alone with a mirror. Ingrained sexual ideals surpass not only society’s relationship with my sexuality, but also my own. Even alone, I must remind myself that women are not meant to belong to the surrounding world, to the men in our lives, nor to societal expectations we have been set to fulfill since childhood.

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References

Smith, S. L., Choueiti, M., Scofield, E., and Pieper, K. (2013). Gender inequality in 500 popular films: Examining on-screen portrayals and behind-the-scenes employment patterns in motion pictures released between 2007-2012. Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism.

Chalabi, Mona. (2014). Dear Mona, I masturbate more than once a day. Am I normal?FiveThirtyEight.

Tingley, Kim. (2019). What can brain scans tell us about sex? The New York Times.

Castleman, Michael. (2018). Surprising new data from the world’s most popular porn site.Psychology Today.

Can you guess 2018’S most-viewed categories on the largest porn site? (2019). Fight the NewDrug.

Olga Khazan. (2016). Why straight men gaze at gay women. The Atlantic.

Aniello, Lucia (Director) & Ekperigin, N., Glazer, I., Jacobson, A., King, A., and Statsky, J. (Writers). (2015). Kirk Steele. [Television series episode] Broad City. New york: Comedy Central.