The Obsession With Penetrative Sex Needs to Stop
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Recently, during an impromptu Zoom session with old friends, the conversation veered towards partners and exes. “Did I really lose my ‘virginity’ then?” one of them wondered aloud, recalling their college crush, before finally deciding in the negative. Why? “Because there was no penetration involved, and so it wasn’t ‘real sex’!” It was said in jest, of course, but as the only queer woman in that space, something about that comment sat with me awkwardly.
I came into my queerness quite late — well into my late 20s. I know now that this is not unusual, but it meant that I had spent at least a decade of my adult life riding the heterosexual dating wave. I went through the motions, performing love and pleasure for my partners and myself, like an elaborate act even I wasn’t aware of. All the while, I struggled to articulate what made sex pleasurable for me. In a heterosexual setting, the cultural tropes of a heteronormative world were that much harder to escape. In one of these tropes I had inadvertently internalized, penetrative sex always came on top in an imagined hierarchy. And so, for a long time, I tried to train and cajole my body into finding pleasure in it. Each time, it was at best unsatisfying and at worst painful. It would be more than a few years before I learnt to acknowledge and explore my pansexuality, rethink how I engaged with sex and pleasure, and come to terms with my own unconscious biases—namely, what kind of sex I prioritized at the cost of my own pleasure.
It is a process I am still grappling with, and this is perhaps why an offhand remark had felt so unsettling. Unwittingly, this remark had vocalized a cultural construct that I had experienced as deeply harmful. It did not just remind me of the biases I had lived with until very recently, it also undermined a part of my lived experience and sense of self I had worked hard to build since then. This construct is our general obsession with penetrative sex that, in centring a certain kind of sex, ignores a whole gamut of sexual experiences that lie outside the straight heteronormative framework. It excludes and alienates a vast majority of cisgender women and queer, trans, and non-binary folk who may have radically different approaches to pleasure. This is not to say that penetration is outside of queer sex. It can be satisfying (with or without orgasm) for some queer folk. But for many others, it is actively uncomfortable or impossible. People with gender dysphoria around their genitals may find penetration discomfiting and people with vaginismus are physically unable to engage in penetrative sex. Prioritizing penetration over everything else explicitly sidelines people who can’t, won’t, or don’t want to have anything to do with it.
Of course, this is not surprising in a society that privileges male sexual pleasure and straight sexual experiences above all else. Laurie Mintz, who teaches the psychology of human sexuality at the University of Florida, blames this “inequality in the bedroom” on “media images of sex,” including but not limited to pornography, and a “cultural over-privileging of male sexuality and a devaluing of female sexuality.” Most of this imagery, she says, is still limited to “women having these fast and fabulous orgasms from intercourse alone”, despite several studies to the contrary. This imagery is true not just of straight porn but lesbian-categorized porn as well. Leaving aside an emerging category of ethical and feminist porn and “porn for women,” mainstream lesbian porn is the product of heterosexual men’s uninspired minds, aimed at other heterosexual men.
“Prioritizing penetration over everything else explicitly sidelines people who can’t, won’t, or don’t want to have anything to do with it. ”
I am reminded of what Carmen Maria Machado says in her powerful memoir The Dream House: “Heterosexuals have never known what to do with queer people, if they think of their existence at all”, resulting in confused ruminations of “with no penis how do they, you know, do it?” Machado cites the example of two 18th century Scottish schoolmistresses who were accused of being lovers, leading the judge to insist that their genitals “were not so formed as to penetrate each other, and without penetration, the venereal orgasm could not possibly follow.” We may have moved beyond this heterosexual innocence (or ignorance), but even now, our cultural imaginations and representations of sex — and especially queer sex — remain deeply heteronormative.
But the cultural obsession with penetrative sex is not troubling for me just as a queer person. Irrespective of where we find ourselves on the spectrum of gender and sexuality, sex is a form of communication that expresses what one wants or doesn’t want. It is a process of trial and error to figure out what one likes and how to please others. It creates intimacy. By consciously or unconsciously privileging a certain sex act over others, we lose out on this gradual, confusing, but pleasurable discovery of our sexual selves.
