Charlotte Raven
BODY LANGUAGE
The first boy I ever had sex with was called Dave. He carried a flick knife – which impressed me – and every Friday evening when we went to the youth club disco, he threw himself off the balcony like Jimmy in Quadrophenia. We’d seen the film 25 times. One night when he did it, he cracked his head so badly that we had to make a bandage from the Union Jack off Vicki’s parka.
The way he looked made me literally weak at the knees. I loved him so much for being so stupid that I could no longer see the wisdom of going through the usual pantomime of “stop” and “no, you mustn’t”. So when we got back to my house, I said “yes” and “go on” instead.
And when we’d finished, Dave, quite the gent, surprisingly, asked me if I was all right. I said I was, yes, thank you. “Didja come?” he wondered. I said no, I didn’t think so. “Don’t worry,” he said, “It doesn’t matter.” Which was funny, when you think about it now.
Then, I was simply pleased to hear that what I felt had been important could not be judged any less so because “that” hadn’t happened. I knew about orgasms, of course, but didn’t yet know that one was meant to demand them – as a right. Or that I should have been condemning Dave’s selfishness and explaining why penetration offered “insufficient stimulation” to bring me, and almost 70% of my sisters if Shere Hite was to be believed, to climax.
I can’t help feeling he got off lightly. In these more enlightened times, Dave would doubtless be thought a “crap” lover. The penance for his crimes against womanhood might now involve compulsory “guidance” sessions with an expert.
In the latest example, BBC2’s recent Adult Lives series, a group of Margi Clarke blondes with strange, spunk-thickened voices discussed anal sex, vibrators and blow-job techniques to the point where I felt physically sick.
According to my zeitgeist handbook, women like this are meant to be celebrating the not unremarkable fact that the spin-the- bottle lottery deciding which gender’s needs/whims define the terms of sexual engagement has finally spun round from men to them. As a piece in Shine magazine puts it, “sexual satisfaction for women is finally top priority”. Henceforth anyone found to be inadequate or inept in the service of our squealing libidos can expect to be lampooned.
As a feminist, it seems churlish to complain about this state of affairs. We have moved far from the situation where most men thought the clitoris was an “immature” and frankly forgettable organ. “Satisfy Me Now” is the cover line on Shine, suggesting the time for polite discussion is over and men must submit or be damned.
Serve them right, I would have thought, until it occurred to me that the problem with sex wasn’t simply that men came and we didn’t but something far more subtle – to do with the whole goal-driven model. It isn’t any use simply exchanging the penis for the clitoris if sex is still logged on a score card. Just because we have joined men in defining the race to the finish, it doesn’t mean that anyone is freer than we were when they were calling the shots.
Then, as now, “foreplay” was seen as some ghastly preamble. Now that we are stars of the show, we are more inclined to forget that there was a time when women hoped that sex would become more fluent and less hierarchically arranged – with the distinctions between “foreplay” and sex eventually becoming meaningless.
The early feminist dream that the phallic sexual model would one day be replaced with a more nuanced idea which recognised the possibility that sex is less an aptitude test than a physical conversation appears to have gone by the board. “Didja come?” is all that counts now and any suggestion that this brave new order is as functionalist and mechanistic as the one it replaced is met with incomprehension.
When Shere Hite published the Hite Report into Female Sexuality in 1976, it was easy to see why she had to emphasise the “right” to orgasm. Until that point, many women believed “proper” sex was penetration – with everything else coming in second. Hite’s achievement was to make these women feel that their orgasm was an entitlement.
Where she falls down, I think, is in her somewhat absolutist urge to elevate the clitoral orgasm to the point where it was not as much an option as a must. Coming became the only way of asserting your independence, your mastery over your body and your refusal to be in men’s “service”. Any other types of pleasure were downgraded and the many voices in Hite’s survey who thought her “emphasis on orgasm excessive” were ignored or underplayed. As a result her book, while indisputably a pivotal text, sowed the seeds of our current conviction that satisfaction rather than pleasure is the point.
Exactly what this is doing to the way we relate to each other is probably hard to judge. Certainly, if you take men’s magazines at all seriously, men are strung up like never before about when, with what and how they should go about “pleasing” women. To say their mood is neurotic would be a serious understatement. The fear of being laughed at or lampooned is translated in FHM magazine into a pull-out guide to “miserable sex” – anything where your lady leaves the bedroom feeling less than totally blissed out.
First person female anecdotesare offered as cautionary tales. The reader is invited to imagine what would happen if, due to alcohol-induced slip-ups or simple lack of vigilance, your woman were to write, as Colette (24) does: “The way I see it, a man has got to do things to keep a woman interested. And I think one of the worst things a guy can ever do is try to fuck you with a semi-erect penis. I just can’t forgive that.” Quite.
The point of all this, allegedly, is to stop men from making “mistakes”. Of course, it has the opposite effect. The more they are told by us and other sources that their value as human beings is linked to this mundane skill, the less chance we have of getting them where we want them.
And if that is not a good enough reason to pipe down a bit about our “needs” and just listen for a couple of minutes, we might do well to remember one of the most fundamental sexual truths. The more you try and think about coming, the more weight you place on it happening, the less likely you are to ever arrive.