In which, well, why don’t we just stop having it?

Another angry hot-take about how bad sex is always the man’s fault:

On the Ansari/#metoo front, nobody seems to be willing to say that maybe, just maybe, women don’t typically enjoy meaningless sexual encounters.

It’s the elephant in the room. Because clearly, we don’t. We have millions of testimonials that prove that we just… don’t.

If #metoo tells us anything, it’s not that men are pigs. It’s that sexual encounters are distressing to women more often than not. Because the vast majority of these stories are not about legal harassment or assault or abuse, they’re stories about unfulfilling hookups, catcalls, and bad sex.

There’s an implication that (most straight) women want and enjoy sex on the same terms (most straight) men do, which is to say: sex that is contextless and meaningless. But clearly, we don’t.

I suspect this is what we really need to be talking about.

And yet, all we get are hot-takes about how men are creeps for taking the sex we’re deliberately giving them, because we’re victims of the patriarchy and have no agency.

It’s somehow not our fault when the sex we enter into willingly is bad and we don’t stop it. (And, per the article, this mysteriously has something to do with uncomfortable fashion, which we literally create and perpetuate ourselves, and endometriosis, which, as far as I know, men don’t actually cause.)

Nobody’s saying, ‘Oh, hey, look, women apparently aren’t liking random sexual encounters, maybe let’s talk about how to enable ourselves to stop having them, rather than blaming men.’

And I think someone should.

Maybe we should say, ‘You’re not frigid if you don’t want to have sex under conditions unfavorable to your needs.’ Maybe we should say, ‘Many men are capable of liking mediocre sex with no real emotional context and it’s okay if you don’t.’ Maybe we should say, ‘You can be a fully authentic woman without having context-free sexual encounters you don’t enjoy.’ Maybe we could say, ‘Fucking around isn’t feminism.’

Maybe we could say, ‘While gender may be a spectrum, there are actual verifiable differences between the sexes that inform motivation and behavior and even sexual enjoyment parameters, and acknowledging these facts can be done intelligently and in a celebratory fashion without resorting to blaming men for taking what you’re giving to them.’

(I can’t speak to the pain topic; I don’t find sex painful, beyond a few random experiences that I immediately halted. I do realize it’s a real issue for many, though.)