Second-Hand Conversations

'hey we've been spying on you and tracking your every move. it's a culmination of state of the art technology and an unprecedented invasion of consumer privacy. a room full of men with made up jobs bent their will toward decades of constructing this system, defending it in court, and tirelessly innovating new ways to aggregate more data about you'

and the end result is

'yeah so uh we saw that you recently bought a car. so here's an ad for that car'

….But at the same time, she doesn’t tolerate being objectified against her wishes:

but then there’s also the time she just….built a functional AI?

Simone de Beauvoir, from Diary of a Philosophy Student: Volume 1, 1926-1927; May 21st, 1927

(part 2) Instead of repeatedly telling women that sex without orgasms is still good sex, why don’t they tell women that trying different things other than “normal” piv with minimum foreplay is still good sex?? Many women can orgasm easily on their own, so the excuse that “sometimes it’s just not happening” really rubs me up the wrong way :/ as does the emphasis on penetration. My friends says I’m being dramatic when i say there is a conspiracy but that’s how it looks to me.(part3) she says i’ve been brainwashed and that all my opinions on this stuff are anti-female. Someone who is mad about how mainstream sex advice doesn’t center female pleasure has been brainwashed, according to someone who thinks centering female pleasure is anti-female. I would laugh if I wasn’t so enraged.———————–The very idea of your opinion being “anti-female” makes absolutely and completely no sense. The only time that I think it really makes sense to tell a woman that she can have good sex without orgasming is when not being able to do so is a major stressor for her and is massively contributing to sexual anxiety. But the idea there is never to say that her orgasms don’t matter–it is to tell her that the pressure to orgasm is one she can release herself from. In fact, many guys will be extremely rude to a woman they think isn’t orgasming.

The truth of why these heteronormative guides are so defocused from women’s pleasure boils down to one word: “foreplay”. If you are defining sexual acts that result in orgasm as “foreplay”, especially the ones most likely to result in female orgasm, than the end goal of sex is by definition NOT mutual pleasure, but a man penetrating a woman. See how that sounds? I’m sure you do.

Men’s guides to sex often phrase cunnilingus as a duty a man must perform in order to lubricate a woman enough to penetrate her, and do not concentrate on the point of it–to provide her pleasure. And het women’s guides are complementary.

Here is the truth: if PIV is required for a sexual encounter to be considered “real sex”, then women’s pleasure is not a priority. Period. Most women cannot orgasm from internal sensation alone, and many women regardless of orientation find penetration pointless if not outright unpleasant. I know many lesbians who wouldn’t blink an eye at a partner who didn’t want to be penetrated (and many gay men as well), but I have never met one heterosexual man who would be okay with the intimacy of other types of sex being even the majority of his sex life.

Oral sex is not foreplay. It is sex. Manual sex is not foreplay. It is sex. Sex that universally prioritizes the reproductive capacity of the act over the pleasure of a woman is inherently patriarchal and anti-female.

Now, how do I know this to be true? Because women are statistically more likely to orgasm with another woman. We aren’t born better at sex. But we do tend to care about each other’s pleasure beyond shoving things into each other. The fact is, being critical of PIV isn’t even criticizing heterosexuality, it is questioning why one sex act should be given power and precedence over all others: one that is typically more pleasurable for men, one that gives women the stress of possibly being impregnated, and one that relies upon complete access to getting inside of a woman’s body.

Of course those sex guides are heteronormative and de-center women’s pleasure. Why do they think lesbians don’t read them? I promise, it sure isn’t because we’re missing out on fantastic sex.

Your friends say you’re being dramatic because sex that concentrates on their pleasure and wants has been made so alien to them that they can’t imagine it being important.

I’m a kid from a blue-collar, working-class background, doing my master’s degree at an Ivy League school. I’m incredibly grateful to be here, and I fully understand that this is an opportunity most people of my upbringing never get to have. Not everyone here is from a rich background - there are other working-class kids, getting by on loans, scholarships and part-time jobs. But for the most part, the people around me grew up very differently than I did, and although I love my friends, there are things about my life and my college experience that they’re just never going to get. Things like:

Money can buy good grades. My wealthier friends aren’t slipping the TAs a wink and a $100 bill on their way out of the midterm, but being wealthier does make it easier to earn better grades. I have to work a part-time job in order to afford my rent, while my rich friends are abstaining from work so they can focus on school. That’s 20 hours per week that they can spend on school, while I’m at my job. Our school is in a neighborhood in Manhattan that I can’t afford to live in - I’m spending at least ten hours per week commuting, while they live steps from campus. That’s all extra time that they can spend studying, or just relaxing and getting the sleep they need to be mentally alert. Many of my friends pay to have a laundry service pick up their dirty laundry and bring it back clean and folded (which is common in NYC). I can’t afford this, so instead I spend hours lugging laundry up and down five flights of stairs, because I can’t afford to live in a building with an elevator. I cook and prepare my own meals, they eat mostly takeout. And so on, and so forth. My life is filled with hours of work, chores and annoyances that they don’t have to deal with, and all of it cuts into my time. We may be taking the same classes and doing assignments that are the same difficulty, but I’m going in with a 40-hour per week handicap that they can afford not to have. 

“Follow your dreams” is a risk some of us can’t afford to take. My old roommate spent long hours agonizing over whether she wanted to major in art history or creative writing. For me, that would be like asking if I preferred a pet dragon or a unicorn. My biggest passion in life is fiction writing, but I can’t justify spending tens of thousands of dollars to study it - I’m paying for my education by myself, and I had to choose a field that would let me make enough money to pay back my student loans and afford my own rent after graduating. My friends can focus on the things that really interest them, without worrying about future career prospects. A lot of them are using their college years to “find themselves” and plan to take some time off to travel the world or work on their art after graduating. Many of them have parents with connections in hard-to-access industries like fashion, publishing, television, or the art world. They can take unpaid internships and go for their shot at a one-in-a-million dream job - if it doesn’t work out, they can move on to something else, no harm done. If I put tens of thousands of dollars into being an author and it doesn’t pan out for me right away, I’m in deep shit. I’m happy for people who are able to follow their true passions, and I wish more people were able to do so without fear, but I’m tired of the pitying looks and condescending lectures I get when I tell my friends why I’m not in school for my greatest passion. I didn’t make that decision because I’m boring, or because I don’t believe in myself hard enough - I made that decision because my parents co-signed on all my student loans, and they could lose their house if I can’t find a job. 

Your “funny mishap” is my “life-changing disaster”. My friends talk about the time that they accidentally got drunk and spent all their rent money at a strip club, or the time that they slept through their final and had to re-take a class. For them, these are funny stories. For me, this would be a life-defining catastrophe that could change the course of my 20s and beyond. If I blow all my rent money, I can’t call my parents to beg for more - I could get evicted, or ruin my credit score. Best-case scenario, I’d probably have to take on so many extra hours at work that I could barely finish my schoolwork. If I sleep through a final and fail a class, I will lose my scholarship and be unable to complete my degree. To my friends, I come across as uptight and overcautious, but I don’t have a choice. The same mistake carries much greater consequences for me than it does for them, and they have a hard time understanding that. I wish that I could be carefree about money, and laugh about accidentally getting drunk and spending $500 on Amazon, but I can’t. It can be hard to tell the difference between “oh shit, this really sucks” and “oh shit, I’m going to be dealing with the consequences of this for years” when you’ve never been on the latter end of the spectrum. Again, I love my friends, and I’m happy that they don’t have to have these stresses in their lives, but it’s hard when they attribute my cautiousness to a personality flaw, and not to the financial reality of my life.