Most men don't seem to know how to communicate with their partners about sex. Photo / Getty Images
Most men don't seem to know how to communicate with their partners about sex. Photo / Getty Images
Opinion
OPINION:
Are straight men okay?
No, really, I'm concerned – and not just because a reader once sent me a picture of his junk and asked if I'd like follow-up images with objects held beside it for size comparison.
I'm troubled by the fact most men don't seem to knowhow to communicate with their partners about sex.
"I told him I wasn't done yet and his response was, 'Oh, OK. Do you want a back rub?'," a woman writes on Reddit.
"He said, 'Alexa, play You're welcome'," another shares.
The online thread, which was started a year ago and has since amassed more than 8000 comments, asks women to reveal the strangest things men have said after sex, and their answers are cringe-inducing, to say the least.
"[He said,] 'OK are we done?'" one woman recounts, continuing: "I guess he was too afraid to ask whether or not I came and that was his way of doing it."
"'Are you a lesbian?' Got asked this from a guy, since I didn't come and he thought of himself as a sex god, so that was his logical conclusion," another explains.
It's not particularly surprising so many of the thread's comments echo confusion around female sexual pleasure. Research suggests men aren't well-versed in getting women off.
The biggest study ever undertaken into gender and orgasms found while heterosexual men climax 95 per cent of the time, their female partners only do so 65 per cent of the time.
More tellingly, lesbian women were shown to climax almost as much as straight men – 88 per cent of the time – proving there's nothing elusive about the female orgasm.
Indeed, the reason so many heterosexual women report having unorgasmic sex has nothing to do with their bodies' ability to experience arousal and orgasm, and everything to do with the fact our culture doesn't equip men to care about or be knowledgeable in the mechanics of female sexual pleasure. Instead, we teach them to treat sex as transactional and a means of defining their masculinity.
This is something author and researcher Peggy Orenstein notes in her book Boys & Sex, which she spent several months travelling around the US for, interviewing boys about their attitudes to sex and masculinity.
In the book, Orenstein recounts young men using terms like "slammed" and "destroyed" in their conversations about physical intimacy with women.
"At first I found it inexplicable that boys used such violent words in reference to sex. Why would you be proud of being a lousy lover? If they were truly talking about sex in those situations, they might bring up pleasure, connection, finesse," she writes.
"But the whole point of 'locker room banter' is that it's not actually about sex … Those exaggerated stories are in truth about power: about asserting masculinity through control of women's bodies."
And Orenstein's right; by conditioning boys to view sex as a power exchange, we ultimately perform a kind of emotional castration on them, hindering them from growing into men who can have honest discussions with their partners about sex.
This is especially evident in the awkward post-coital stories women shared with me on Instagram this week, when I asked them to chime in with their own experiences of uncomfortable after-sex interactions.
"One guy waited till after we were done and then looked at me and said, 'You consented, right?'," a female follower divulged.
"He kept saying how amazing the sex was, even though there'd been no foreplay, it barely lasted three minutes and I hadn't shown pleasure," confessed another.
"He asked, 'Was that as good for you as it was for me?' We were 30 seconds into it, and he'd just finished," revealed a third.
Research suggests men aren't well-versed in getting women off. Photo / Supplied
While none of these quotes would look out of place in a zany Farrelly brothers movie script, they also reflect a far less comical truth: men aren't educated on how to check in with their partners during sex, look for signs of enthusiastic consent, and solicit meaningful feedback.
And telling boys to simply respect girls and seek consent does little to tackle the issue – especially in a culture where we teach them to view women's bodies as vessels for entering into the code of manhood.
Hearteningly, when I facetiously posted, "are men OK?" in reference to the stories women had shared on Instagram, a male follower messaged me back privately, writing: "No, we're actually not OK. A lot of us are confused and insecure. But most of us also want to do better. That's why I'm here."
Jokes aside, a lot of straight men really aren't okay when it comes to having healthy sexual interactions with women – we haven't given them the tools to be.
But the men that are still here, swallowing their pride and reading on, are proof too, that it can get better. And that's why I'm still here doing this, even if it means fielding a few unsolicited d*ck pics along the way.
Now, Alexa, play, "You're welcome".
Follow Nadia Bokody on Instagram and YouTube for more sex, relationship and mental health content.
