Women Appear: Sex and Vulnerability

There are some spaces and situations that demand intimacy. Funerals, weddings, curling up in bed with your sister on Christmas Eve. In these moments, you try to be the purest, most honest version of yourself because the situation demands it.

 Sex is, supposedly, one such situation. You are as physically close to another person as humanly possible. We’ve all had good sex and, unless you’re the luckiest person on earth, we’ve all had bad sex. I could be wrong, but I think men and women define bad sex very differently. Heterosexual sex seems to be physically designed to help men orgasm, and if they don’t, I think men feel as if they have failed in some way. Men also have to worry about getting it up, and I honestly can’t imagine how stressful that is.

 I find sex stressful because it feels like a performance. The worst sex I’ve had has been when I’ve felt like you could swap me out for another woman and nothing would be different; I’m just something to thrust into.

 My experiences of sex are shaped not only by gendered expectations, but also by my own person. I’m a fairly stereotypically attractive woman and I have a huge complex about men expecting me to be like a pornstar. I’m alright, but I don’t know that many fancy tricks. I feel a huge pressure to be a sexual object because I have been taught that this is where my value as a person lies. I am worthless if I am not beautiful, I am worthless if I’m too easy or too hard to fuck, I am worthless unless men tell me that I’m not.

 Even though I’m aware of these expectations and talk about them all the time, I still find myself playing into them again and again. I view myself in the same way that men view me.

 When I was younger, I wanted to be the kind of woman who walked into a bar and ordered whisky. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that I was defining myself against traditional femininity – ‘you’re just not like other girls.’ I trained myself to like whisky, and now I am the kind of woman who walks into a bar and drinks it straight. I genuinely like whisky, and to stop drinking it would be disingenuous, but it started out as a performance for the benefit of the baying male audience.

 There are things that I do before, during and after sex that fall into a similar category. Do I actually hate foreplay or did I just convince myself I do because it sounds sexy? Do I roll away from people because I need space or because I’m terrified of looking like I don’t?

The patriarchy is so embedded in my consciousness that it infects the moments when I should be able to be vulnerable and honest. I cast myself in the same role that men cast me in – the beautiful, mysterious, independent woman who needs nothing and will do anything. And when that still doesn’t work, and they don’t call you back, what are you left with? You don’t even have you anymore.

I want to learn to love myself more than I love the image of myself that men have created for me. If I can’t be myself when I’m naked, lying across another person like Venus on a sofa, when can I be?