My body is very attracted to your body, but when you speak my brain gets angry.
— The Mindy Project
Birth control was democratized during the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. The widespread popularity of the pill and the condom made it possible to have “traditional” penis-in-vagina sex with a much lower risk of getting pregnant. As a result, sex became an activity with fewer repercussions, opening up a range of possibilities.
It was also during the sexual revolution that the institution of marriage began to flounder. Up to that point, institutionalized monogamy had been the only acceptable option — men and women had to be married in order to have sex — and this model endured for centuries.
Sex, previously synonymous with “marital duty” and “baby-making,” became recreational. Since the sexual revolution, we can now consider sex to be an end in itself, an act dissociated from a relationship, a family, and love.
Today, we can sleep with someone without envisioning a future together. No marriage, no kids. We don’t have to be in love to have sex. And if we want, we can even have sex and never see the person again. The once-unthinkable possibility of recreational sex is now a well-entrenched trope in today’s pop culture: Sex and the City. Girl power. Fuck buddies. Just “seeing” each other. Booty calls. Open relationships. One-night stands. Tinder.
Today, separating sex from feelings is not only possible, but also desirable. It’s a sign of women’s liberation: “If I can sleep with a man without getting attached, it means I’m strong. I’m in control of my future, of my body.” Having sex with no strings attached is, for many women, proof of independence.
To be sure, the romantic relationship remains an ideal. Whether it involves marriage or not, society is still built on the institution of the couple.
Thus, we don’t think of these two goals — having sex without getting involved and searching for love — as being at odds with one another.
In fact, we generally assume that one precedes the other. We see both one-night stands and romantic relationships as different life stages. Everyone is expected to experiment with multiple partners as we actively search for “the one,” the perfect person with whom to build a relationship and start a family. And if we miscalculate, if we realize we’ve chosen the wrong partner, we break up and start sleeping with other people again while we continue the search for our soulmate.
At first glance, this value system seems liberating for everyone. It does not discriminate based on gender, and it lets us enjoy life in whatever manner we see fit. It is seemingly neutral.
Except that it isn’t.
Our system isn’t neutral because it hinges on a stark divide in how the two genders perceive their quest. Although we are told it is possible to have sex with no strings attached and to also have romantic relationships, we encourage women to look for love and men to look for sex.
The two genders are given distinct goals when it comes to sex. Women are tasked with building a relationship, while men’s mission is to get as much sex as possible, ideally with as many partners as possible.
From childhood we are led down these gendered paths, and by adulthood society judges us based on our ability to perform the expected roles.
Men and women are sent off seeking entirely different Holy Grails.
Today, a woman is better off pursuing the Holy Grail of Love since this quest allows her to sidestep being wholly objectified. Women who want to stop being viewed as prey, as simple targets, or even as “sluts,” or who aspire to be regarded with respect and affection, must be “good girls.” Doing so increases their value, since they have stayed “pure” — in other words, legitimate. Society will still objectify them, but their lovers won’t. The desire to escape objectification pushes women toward the Holy Grail of Love, which is a corollary to the cumshot principle.
How are men and women encouraged to carry out their respective quests? There are all sorts of subtle and roundabout strategies. The most effective way is to persuade everyone that the opposite sex is utterly consumed by his or her own mission.
We convince women that men are sex-obsessed, just as we convince men that women are only looking for a relationship and love. This doublespeak becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Clearly the mechanics of these two quests are not taught in the classroom. The messages are reproduced indirectly, yet continuously, across cultural platforms.
Take the man who is afraid of commitment, a cliché so widespread it fails to offend anymore. This stereotype is rampant in narratives featuring male-female relationships. He’s the man every respectable rom-com heroine will end up infatuated with. He’s Barney in How I Met Your Mother, Harvey in Suits, Eric in Life as We Know It, Mr. Big in Sex and the City. He’s Christian Grey. He’s James Bond.
The stereotypical man whose past is strewn with conquests, who keeps cheating on his wife, who is a commitment-phobe (only up to the denouement, when love eventually triumphs), represents virility in its purest form. The man who resists commitment is the alpha male, the man women drool over.
The man who doesn’t want us is the one we need.
This archetype reinforces the old adage that women love bad boys, along with its equally crude counterpart, “nice guys finish last.”
So, who is this bad boy? He exudes self-confidence, even arrogance, and treats women like numbers or objects to be consumed. He is the macho guy who exhibits dangerous and self-destructive behaviour, and he needs a woman to save him from himself by mothering him.
The nice guy, on the other hand, is characterized by his respect for women. He is looking to commit and lead a stable life, which is why women tend to turn their noses up at him.
Put simply, bad boys want sex but no relationship while the nice guys want a relationship (and monogamy).
What is puzzling about the idea that women have a weakness for bad boys is that these men purportedly make women unhappy. They don’t give women what they “truly want,” namely a relationship.
Of course, this hackneyed theory is not backed up with hard facts.
A 2003 study out of the United States aimed to test this “nice guy paradox.” Forty-eight women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three were asked to choose a partner for a fictitious woman from among men with three different profiles.1 The first was the typical “nice guy”: sensitive, attentive, kind. The second was a “real man”: macho, insensitive, and self-centred. The third fell somewhere in the middle. In the second part of the study, another group of 194 women had to choose a man for themselves from among the same profiles. This time the women were given photographs of male faces, so they could take physical appearance into account when making their choice.
In both cases, most participants opted for the nice guy, with the neutral profile the runner-up. The bad boy was consistently the lowest ranked. Moreover, it turned out the women didn’t think the nice guy seemed less exciting, funny, or sociable than the others.
Interestingly, participants’ priorities changed depending on whether they were looking for a serious relationship or a more casual fling. In the first case, kindness was a priority. In the second, they didn’t choose bad boys, but rather men who were more physically attractive, regardless of their personality.
We undoubtedly misattribute why we believe women love bad boys (and their behaviour). Just like men, women are attracted to beauty, and it is quite possible that good-looking men are the ones who tend to act like bad boys. In other words, a man with lots of sex appeal will often be taken for a bad boy: his popularity affords him the pick of the litter, which may predispose him to adopt associated behaviours (e.g., displaying unfailing confidence or not wanting to commit to a stable relationship). Put simply, it is not the “bad” variable which counts, but attractiveness (possibly correlated with the “bad”).
The study reported that some participants did choose the “bad-boy” profile independent of the man’s physical appearance, but these participants were in the minority.
Other studies have also explored the bad-boy stereotype. One demonstrated that women value altruism in men. Another found that when asked to choose the qualities they prefer, most women selected men who were sensitive and easygoing; very few picked men who were aggressive or hard to please.2
The cliché that women prefer difficult men who often treat them poorly does not hold much water, but is not completely false, either. Some women really do prefer this type of man. On several occasions I have interviewed women who openly admit to being attracted to bad boys. In my experience, these women often contrast the figure of bad boy to that of the “wimp.” By this, they are really talking about a man who lacks personality. American researchers Geoffrey Urbaniak and Peter Kilmann agree; they conclude the expression “too nice” can be a polite euphemism for “boring.”
Other women I have talked to admitted they like the challenge of a man who pushes them away and is stoic when it comes to love.
These are predictable reactions when we consider how the bad boy is presented in pop culture: he is the most desired, and therefore the most desirable. But the reactions are likely related to this female search for the Holy Grail. Women are socialized from an early age to believe finding a partner should be their primary life goal, and if the quest proves too easy it will bring an abrupt halt to an endeavour meant to occupy them for some time. The game ends too quickly. For many women, the intoxicating prospect of having the object of their desire fall at their feet and declare his undying love is a moment to be savoured, along with the fear that the jig could be up at any moment. If a man gets on his knees on the first date, he snuffs out the flame and derails the quest that motivated his conquest. It is the modern, feminized version of medieval courtship: during the pursuit, the woman’s desire should intensify little by little yet always remain partly unsatisfied.
Although some women claim to prefer bad boys, there’s a much better explanation of the pervasive idea that “all women love a bad boy”: Many men complain about their sexual and romantic failures, chalking it up to being “too nice.” They feel that bad boys steal the show. Whether out of reflex or empathy, we often throw out a friendly, “It’s because you’re too nice!” Yet when a woman laments her lack of success with men, she is fed exactly the opposite: “It’s because men find you intimidating!” The paradox is that women face rejection because they are too forceful, and men face rejection because they are not forceful enough. We use our difficulty conforming to gender stereotypes to justify our sexual misfortunes, which elicits the sexual dogma of dominant man/submissive woman.
Since men are indoctrinated to believe they should use trickery or elaborate strategies to entice women into their bed, they come to see sex as the ultimate life challenge.
Society promotes the notion that women get easily attached and want to shackle men with the old ball and chain. Men are led to believe that all women want babies, and that they are merely an accessory to this end (provided they have sufficient financial resources to support a family). And beware of marriage — the trap that affords women a right to alimony and/or child support in case of divorce! Charming, right?
For the men who subscribe to this narrative, the challenge isn’t finding a partner — it’s spreading a woman’s legs without falling into the trap of love and relationships.
But for women, the trap is sex. We bombard them with cautionary tales of men who will do anything to get them in bed, who only want to use them, get them drunk, lie to them, and screw them before throwing them in a taxi at the end of the night. Charming, right?
I am aware that this is wildly stereotypical, but the dynamic of man-looking-for-sex and woman-looking-for-love colours our relationships. Obviously, women who go to great lengths to secure a man and sex-maniac men who essentially use women’s bodies as sex toys for their own gratification are not representative of the population. But when we perpetuate the notion in popular culture — and come across one or two real-life examples — it is enough to generate mutual mistrust.
At times, all this may even push us to embrace these gendered clichés. When we assume accessing sex will be difficult, we become more avid hunters. Likewise, when we believe the man we are dating won’t want to commit, a relationship becomes all the more important.
All of this takes us back to the essence of desire: feeling as if something is missing. To experience desire, we need to perceive a lack of something that will not be easy to secure. If a woman feels as though she can snap her fingers and make a man sexually available, her desire dissipates. Similarly, when a man takes it for granted that the girl he is seeing wants a relationship, he will be in less of a hurry to start one.
In both situations, the gendered Holy Grails inform our desire for sex or for love. These quests exert a force that both attracts and repels.
We cannot forget the arbitrary nature of this dynamic: these quests have only recently been split down gendered lines. Prior to the sexual revolution, sex and relationships went hand in hand.
BIOLOGICAL CLOCKS AND FEARING THE END OF THE WORLD
The biological clock metaphor is another effective way of impressing upon women the importance of the romantic relationship.
Women are told that their bodies are a time bomb, that their fertility decreases every year, while a man’s fertility is unaffected by time. I described in Chapter 2 how we dramatize women’s reproductive potential but ignore men’s.
While this fear is grounded in reality (women cannot reproduce after menopause), the myth of the biological clock is painted in its most esoteric aspects as a primal urge, the body demanding a child and pushing women to desperately want to procreate. (I recently read an article about a woman who complained of menstrual cramps to her doctor, who responded by saying that her body was telling her it wanted a child.)
The narrative of the body demanding a child, combined with the threat of declining fertility, did not appear until women began flooding the workforce, explains American journalist and academic Moira Weigel in an essay published by the Guardian.3
The expression “biological clock” was coined in 1978 in a Washington Post article entitled “The Clock Is Ticking for the Career Woman.” It has since been used countless times to caution women who put career ahead of family.
The image is a perfect — and gendered — call to order: “Ladies, never forget you have been put on this earth to marry and produce babies! You may well have a career and use contraception, but your true vocation is to conceive children.”
It also, among other things, propagates the idea that reproduction is a woman’s responsibility. We scare women by telling them to hurry up and find a man so they can make babies, or risk growing old and bitter, lonely, and unhappy. As if men don’t need to find a partner if they want to have kids. As if they are indifferent to the idea of a family, and it is in their best interests to wait to start one. We also seem to think that even at a mature age they will always be able to find younger women to reproduce with (though the notion that older men all have access to a pool of young, single women is mathematically absurd).
Society insists that women are the ones who want children. There is a type of collective pressure to this end, and we expect women to subsequently pressure men on an individual level. Women therefore end up having to beg for commitment and children. In this way, we thrust family responsibility onto women, making it possible to demand sacrifices we would not expect from men.
And when we take the myth of the biological clock and tack on the popular belief that women are “natural multi-taskers,” we prime them with the perfect ideological cocktail before placing the burdensome institution of family on their shoulders.
In fact, we expect women to come home after a day’s work and begin another unpaid job — cleaning, cooking, and caring for the children. Since the woman wanted the family, she should be responsible for the upkeep it requires. And if a woman chooses to have a career in addition to being a mother, she shouldn’t complain about being tired. Shouldn’t ask her boss for special treatment. Shouldn’t expect her partner to do an equal share at home. She asked for this life, after all!
Prioritizing family over career is a choice we only expect women to make.
Even the way we organize parental leave is suggestive. Parental leave plans assume women will spend most of the time home with the children, and that their partners will continue to work outside the home. In Quebec, where the plan is often touted as a model, 70 percent of men do not take advantage of the leave benefits.4 This figure also matches the disproportionate share of household chores and childcare that women in Quebec often take on.
“You wanted kids, so take care of them.”
These observations reflect another sacrifice only demanded of women: coddling their spouse and not receiving equal support in return. This is what we call emotional labour.
Coined in 1983 by sociologist Arlie Hochschild, the expression initially referred to work related to certain job sectors — mostly the service industry — where employees are expected to be cheerful, tolerant, warm, and deferential in order to provide an emotionally fulfilling experience. Think of bartenders and nurses: we expect them to express (or fake) certain emotions as part of their job.
But emotional labour exists in the private sphere, too. Take women who fake orgasms: we regard the act as terribly dishonest, yet many women feign climaxing to keep their partner emotionally satisfied, so that his enjoyment isn’t tainted by the shame of not being able to satisfy them. Of course, men can fake an orgasm for the same reason. But women and men do such at disproportionate rates. According to a 2010 study from the United States, 28 percent of men and 67 percent of women have reported faking an orgasm during sex with penetration.5 And while women cite wanting to boost a partner’s self-esteem as the leading reason, men cite wanting to end a prolonged sexual encounter.
Faking an orgasm is just one of the many examples of the emotional labour carried out by women, who are seen as naturally more empathetic and affectionate than men. Women like to take care of their spouses, we tell ourselves. Men, on the other hand, provide resources, not comfort.
We also believe men don’t have to make as much effort to convince their partners to stay in the relationship. Since men always have one foot out the door, women must bend over backward to keep them around. But women stay put, even when they aren’t treated as well as they treat their spouse. Simply honouring them with a commitment should be enough to keep them invested in the relationship.
The myth of the biological clock induces women to accept these unfair situations. It also quells our collective fear of dying out, since people do worry that if women stop wanting children, we risk not being able to replace ourselves.
This same apprehension fuels homophobia and heteronormative discourse.6 Some people believe that homosexuality represents a threat to humanity, since it poses a hurdle to populating the planet.
Many people who fear a population decline support a neoconservative chauvinistic agenda that suggests a declining birth rate will give competing nations the upper hand in terms of economics and military. We must make babies for the nation — to keep the economy on its feet! Yet we don’t so much mean babies as we do little workers/consumers/soldiers.
This type of patriotic discourse is nothing new to me, but until recently I was under the impression that these people didn’t broadcast their beliefs. That is, until I received this email, following a TV appearance, from someone who proposed I take a new direction as part of my work on sexuality:
Beyond the quest for pleasure — a catchy, sexy topic to be sure — from the point of view of a white Francophone Quebecer, it’s alarming how our culture will collapse from a failure to reproduce if we don’t make drastic changes. French researchers have determined that the population replacement rate is an average of 2.4 children per woman.
According to my research, we’re at around 2.1 children in Quebec, including blacks, Asians, Latinos, etc. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against other cultures and races. But …
Just think, it took over four hundred years for white Francophone Quebecers to get out from under English rule and take charge of their lives. And if we don’t do anything, we’ll be wiped out of North America in just a few generations since other ethnicities naturally reproduce more quickly.
It’s a shame.
I know this isn’t your specialty, but once you make a name and reputation for yourself in the media, maybe you could address topics that are essential to our survival? […]
You see what I mean?
This fear, so openly expressed in the email, is very real. And women carry the burden of it. The image of the ticking biological clock and our fear of the end of humanity are ideologies working in tandem, conditioning women to see the couple as the locus of self-realization.
It is the couple, and not sex, that must remain women’s Holy Grail, and as a result, their relationship to sex outside of this institution differs from men’s.
PSYCHOLOGICAL TREATS
The problem with the quest for the Holy Grail among heterosexuals is that, even when fully aware of how absurd and stereotypical these gendered missions are, it is difficult not to fall into them. Because of the psychological treats.
A psychological treat is any advantage someone might get out of a given situation by virtue of their gender.
The ramifications for men and women who have sex outside the structure of a relationship differ considerably, which is why it is important to examine the costs and benefits for each gender, along with their underlying reasons.
As I argued earlier when I used Samantha from Sex and the City as an example, the archetype of the woman who has sex with multiple partners without falling for them is presented as an anomaly — she is wholly unlike the men who display these same behaviours. Samantha is a sort of anti-heroine, one female audiences are not required to identify with.
American comedian Amy Schumer has a similar stand-up persona: a drunk and slutty perpetual teenage alter ego who likes to party and sleep around. Like many comedians, Schumer stays in character for interviews. She plays a sex maniac who flees adult relationships so well that audiences have come to believe it to be her real personality.
But in more serious, intimate interviews, Schumer categorically dissociates from her character who is not, as one might think, a caricature of her own self. No, it is actually her anti-self. Amy Schumer, explains Amy Schumer, is a serial monogamist who has only had a single one-night stand in her whole life.
Of course, Schumer can be whoever she wants to be. I am using her example to illustrate how women tend to stick to the device of the Holy Grail, even when their public persona offers a picture of a woman on the fringes of sexual stereotypes.
It is difficult for a straight woman to think she has “scored” when she sleeps with a stranger, since the prevailing culture tells us that when it comes to sex, it is the man who gets something out of it. It is the man who deserves a high-five. He is the one to congratulate, to celebrate, because he has accomplished his mission. Not the woman.
The sexual revolution has done nothing to change the fact that sex gives value to men and takes it away from women. Several studies have confirmed this double standard, one of which reported that the anticipation of social reprobation following liberal sexual behaviour discourages women from participating in it.7
Society places a higher value on women who have not had sex (and who are therefore “pure”) in order to discourage this behaviour.
An episode from the cult series Gilmore Girls brilliantly illustrates my point.8 In one scene, Paris tells her friend Rory that she has just lost her virginity. The two teens are model students, both top of their class, who dream of getting accepted to Harvard. Seeking to intellectualize her sexual experience, Paris wants to know Rory’s thoughts. While the girls are talking, Rory’s mother, Lorelai, walks into the house and overhears their conversation. Paris asks Rory if she has slept with her boyfriend, and when Rory answers she has not, Lorelai is visibly relieved. She makes her entrance, pretending to have just come home, and acts unusually affectionate toward Rory — she even offers to take her shopping the next day. Lorelai is thrilled. “I’ve got the good kid,” she boasts once the girls are out of earshot.
And this is how you get girls to connect “abstinence” with “merit.” Even worse, in the same episode we learn Paris has not been accepted to Harvard. Shocked, she goes off the rails while giving a speech that was supposed to be about education. In front of a full house, she reasons that her failure is due to the fact that she lost her virginity: “I’m being punished,” she says. When Rory attempts to lead her offstage, Paris retorts that Rory, the virgin, will probably end up at Harvard.
We later learn that Rory has not only been accepted to Harvard, but to other prestigious universities, too. Clearly her success has nothing to do with her virginity — but thousands of teenage girls watched as Rory the virgin was rewarded by her mother and by life, in contrast to an unlikeable and hysterical Paris, who loses her virginity and bitterly regrets it. Paris deems herself a slut and worries her boyfriend Jamie will stop loving her. Rory reassures her as best she can. In the closing scene, Rory is staring at all of her acceptance letters when Lorelai references what Paris said earlier: “Apparently, you’re the biggest virgin in the world.”
Virginity. Parental pride. Shopping spree. Academic success.
Our culture does not send men these kinds of messages. We don’t think sex reduces a boy’s personal value, or that chastity augments it. If a boy stays a virgin, his parents don’t tell him they are proud and don’t reward him. At the very worst, when teenage male characters have sex, they are portrayed as bad boys taking advantage of girls’ naïveté — as if sex did not directly concern them and it only affected the girls.
This image of the sexual encounter is so entrenched in our minds that men actually gain more from sex than women — the issue of pleasure completely aside. Even if the experience is disappointing, the man gets his gratification, since having sex is not considered damaging to his gender; in fact, it’s highly encouraged.
Sexually active men feel good about themselves. They are doing what is expected of them. By virtue of their maleness, they must obtain sex from females if they want to be considered real men. This confirmation of manhood is a strong enough incentive to seek out sex. Desire for self-actualization is a strong motivator — it is, in fact, at the very top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs — and sex allows men to fulfill this need.
Even if a man does not tell his friends about a sexual encounter, the psychological satisfaction of having “scored” and therefore doing what is expected of him is enough to make him feel good.
I deliberately use the term “score” in reference to a sexual encounter, because that is what we are talking about: a goal, a points system. The same is not true for women: for them, sex is a zero-sum game where men always win the hand. There are no points for women who have sex. No matter what, a woman only scores if she can get a man to commit to her. Because culture runs deep.
I often find myself attracted to men from a strictly sexual point of view, no feelings involved. Sleeping with these men has frequently left me dissatisfied without me being able to articulate why. I wasn’t looking for a relationship, so why didn’t having sex leave me as fulfilled as my partners clearly were?
I chose those men. I was attracted to them, I managed to seduce them, and I brought them home. In short, I was the hunter. But from the very first kiss, the first caress, the situation seemed to reverse. My conquests would systematically take the lead. They seemed more excited by the prospect of sex, hornier, more eager to get down to business. They always wanted to go further, sooner, faster.
These men had internalized the idea that it was up to them to steer the ship to the bedroom, and I had internalized the idea that a woman should be passive. The men were more proactive, impatient, and even more ardent in their desire.
Despite my initial enthusiasm, the ensuing dynamic brought me back to “my place”: I settled into the role of a woman who wants to slow things down.
My eagerness to score completely dissipated, in spite of myself. It is impossible to score with someone who is convinced he is the one scoring — especially in a culture that affirms his role as scorer.
In the end, the men I had wooed stole my psychological treat and swallowed it whole.
The idea is not to boast of my irresistibility; these experiences have nothing to do with my sex appeal. What happened between me and my partners did not have to do with our respective libidos, either. It had everything to do with gendered sexual dynamics.
When a woman has her psychological treat taken away, it discourages her from seeking future sexual experiences with no strings attached. And that brings us back to the paradigm of the Holy Grail of Love: for a woman, just wanting and getting sex is not satisfying in itself. The experience is nothing like the man’s, who is always able to enjoy his self-actualization-flavoured treat.
There are obviously a host of situations where this dynamic is less clear-cut. Heterosexual women can feel as if they are the ones doing the scoring, despite what culture dictates. But after having spoken to several women on the subject, I know I am far from alone in these experiences.
And the way our peers react when we tell them about our sexual exploits also influences the way we see sex outside of the couple.
Social approval is a powerful enough incentive to positively reinforce the self-esteem of those on the receiving end. However, this approval is generally reserved for men, not women.
A woman who recounts the night’s adventures to her girlfriends runs the risk of having her friends listen, only to turn around and wonder what she hopes will come out of it. Does she think the guy will call her back? Will they go out again? What does he do for a living? Are they compatible? These girls will insinuate that having sex is not enough. To sustain their attention, things can’t end there. They want a fairy tale, a budding love story, as they were taught should happen to a woman. They are not impressed by sex, which is the easy part.
So. Contrary to what we claim, adventures in bed do not hold the same value for both genders. We tend to overlook the fact that men are entitled to the psychological treat, but not women.
Sex is not all about wanting to orgasm (this can be achieved through masturbation). Men derive psychological and even social benefits from sex, and it is high time to admit that the idea of “no strings attached” distorts our understanding of gendered behaviour.
And even if we look at sex solely through the lens of orgasm, men once again have more to gain than women.