What women really want in bed

“I’m all for joyous experimentation, sex positivity, fabulously inventive kink, as long as both partners benefit.” Picture: istock

As if womanhood weren’t hard enough, now we have something else to be ashamed of. Vanilla sex. A blander type of sex, of the regular, in the bed, missionary-position variety, which some are deriding – and is yet another way the world has found to shame women into doing what men want them to.

“Vanilla shaming” is a bullying of women who admit they want regular sex, actually; the type that doesn’t include violence or hurting kink. Spitting, choking and slapping are becoming increasingly popular among sexually active teens, thanks to porn, and there’s a collective pressure to engage in rough sex; to succumb to violence during what should be, of course, a mutually respectful, tender and transcendent experience.

Statements ridiculing women who prefer gentler sex as “boring” are cropping up online. In response, one brave woman recently pleaded, “Stop shaming vanilla sex. Not everyone needs to be choked [and] punched in the face... in order to come.” How – a mere five years after the #MeToo movement roared into existence – did we descend to this? Of course the situations are related; this is a new way for men to control and punish women. “I don’t get why me wanting someone not to abuse me makes me weird,” a woman on TikTok recently commented. “I just want someone to be kind to me,” agreed another. Their words are just so… dispiriting.

Dr Rachael Sharman, a psychology lecturer at the University of the Sunshine Coast, told the ABC: “Young women... are enduring and indeed normalising painful sex and going, ‘Oh well, that’s what it’s meant to be’.” She says it’s a narrative centred on pleasing rather than being pleased. But why should experimental sex be so unequal and, for a lot of women, now associated with pain, fear and humiliation?

The legendary 12th-century lovers Abelard and Heloise were gleeful exponents of mutually beneficial sex beyond convention. “Our desires left no stage of lovemaking untried,” Abelard wrote, “and if love could devise something new, we welcomed it. We entered on each joy the more eagerly because of our previous inexperience and were all the less easily sated.” The key word there is joy: they were having a huge amount of fun. So why has human sexuality degenerated into the violent bleakness we’re increasingly seeing now? I’m all for joyous experimentation, sex positivity, fabulously inventive kink, as long as both partners benefit. Without any shame.

“Vanilla shaming” is yet another iteration of female ignominy, of the kind women have been made to feel since Eve was blamed for the downfall of man, by men. Throughout history women have been conditioned to feel shame as a means of control. It conditions us to modify our behaviour. Makes us feel lesser. Wrong. Keeps us pliant, obedient, quiet.

There’s even shame in the naming of our sexual organs. Rachel E. Gross, author of Vagina Obscura, explained that males responsible for naming female genitalia often slipped in the word “shame”. The French anatomist who dissected a clitoris labelled it the membrehonteux – “the shameful member”. The pudendum is derived from the Latin verb pudere, meaning “to be ashamed”.

Author Sandra Cisneros. Picture: Keith Dannemiller

The flip side of all this is a new poetry collection called Woman Without Shame from Mexican-American writer Sandra Cisneros. It’s a blistering antidote to female ignominy. She says she “grew up wanting to be a woman without shame” but that the shedding is a “lifelong process”. In her poem Making Love After Celibacy, Cisneros writes: “I bled a little, like the first time… A female body, ashamed of itself again.” Yet now she’s a blazing example of a woman in her sixties living a freed, post-shame life. And may all women, one day, reach that exhilarating state of transcendence.