Ditz

Issue date: 3/18/08 Section: Inside the Bubble

Is it really better to give than to receive?
When it comes to oral sex, I would say hell no.

Are gender differences as prominent as those crazy feminists say they are? I would emphatically say yes (but that could be because I am one of those revolting "f" words). In fellow Ditz contributor Caroline Heldman's Gender and Politics class last term, we were assigned to do a gender-focused research project. I decided to study how gender defines oral sex practices at Oxy, an idea that came from a lot of interesting experiences and conversations. I was talking to some of my lady friends about their sexual escapades and was shocked by how much gender dictated their experiences. A few of them talked to me about never orgasming from sex. Really?! I was confident that my guy friends would not have said the same.

When heterosexual sex is largely defined as ending when the guy ejaculates, it's no wonder that female pleasure gets pushed aside. The woman orgasming is not considered a requisite for sex to have taken place, yet we wait until the guy ejaculates to signal that sex is complete. This was made clear when another friend of mine said she wasn't sure if she had had sex the other night because the guy did not ejaculate. She went on to explain that they were going at it for close to an hour, kissing, touching, thrusting - sounds like sex to me! But she doubted it because the guy did not "finish." I asked if she orgasmed and she said that she had not, but that it didn't make much of a difference because she never does. Then we got onto the subject of oral sex. My female friends talked about how they almost never had oral sex performed on them when hooking up with a guy, but would perform it on their partners from time to time. We talked about why we were giving so much more than we were getting in return. Our reasoning was mostly that we didn't enjoy oral sex that much and that it made us feel uncomfortable. Again, I thought it would be incredibly rare to hear a guy say that he just didn't like receiving sexual favors and that it made him feel uncomfortable. Why is this the case?

I started thinking more about oral sex and was reminded of an experience another one of my Oxy friends had at hallspread. We were playing "hot seat" - you know, the game where someone is asked to sit in a chair and is grilled with questions for about a minute. So she was put in the hot seat and asked the craziest place she had sex. She told her eagerly awaiting audience about a time when her boyfriend performed oral sex on her in a bathroom at Applebee's. They seemed confused as to how it worked so she explained details to them. She told me she got comments about her story from other students for weeks and that her RAs never seemed to look at her the same. She was pleased to be so amusing but wondered why there was such a stir over her story. I started to think about what it would have been like if one of the guys in my dorm had told a similar story. I don't think people would have been so giggly and amazed to hear another story about a woman doing the work while some guy laid back and enjoyed.

Thinking about all these instances, things started to make sense for me. Oral sex, more so than sexual intercourse, seems to be loaded with power. Oral sex focuses the pleasure only on one party. Women are thought to be much less interested in sexual pleasure than guys so the idea of focusing on female satisfaction seems foreign to us - not just to men, but to women themselves. This also contributes to the whole comfort idea. My friends and I talked about being uncomfortable with receiving oral sex because we have internalized the idea that women are supposed to be passive pleasure-givers. In my online research, most women expressed that their partner went down on them because the male wanted to, not them. Even something that is seemingly all about female pleasure somehow gets turned into satisfying the man. The last issue that seemed to contribute to the gendering of oral sex was positioning. The power in oral sex is stressed even more by the dominant and submissive positions involved.

As socially aware as we are, the Occidental campus basically confirmed all my beliefs about how gender plays into oral sex. The results of my questionnaire showed that women rarely orgasm, while guys rarely don't, women are much less comfortable than guys with oral sex altogether and particularly in any position where they are dominant. I also found out that many students, women and men alike, believe that feminists are making unreasonable demands of men. I so wanted to ask these respondents - what are these unreasonable demands you speak of? Equality? The opportunity to feel comfortable with one's sexuality? More orgasms?! For shame, feminists! How could you make such unreasonable demands?

My research shows just one of the many ways that gender inequality is still alive and well. It also inadvertently helped me to challenge the ways gender scripts have influenced how I conduct myself in the bedroom. Why do I feel uncomfortable with receiving oral sex and how could I unteach myself what I have internalized about my own sexuality? Realizing that gender has such a strong impact on our interactions has been disconcerting for me. It is shocking to learn how much being a woman or man affects so many facets of our lives. But what is even more surprising for me is that, despite this blatant discrimination, so many people, women and men, can deny the existence of sexism; and further, find demands for equality outrageous. It is a hard thing to be comfortable with transforming our age-old power structure. But I find it even more challenging to sit back and let it continue.

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