By Robert Tracinski
Friday, March 24, 2017
Cosmopolitan
has a long history of giving young women bad advice about how to deal with the
young men in their lives, but they really outdid themselves with this
spectacularly bad advice: “Why Guys Get Turned on When You Orgasm—and Why
That’s a Bad Thing.”
Wait, what?
Hannah Smothers writes:
It’s not enough that men are
already having more orgasms than women. To make matters worse, a new study
published in the Journal of Sex Research found—aside from deriving pleasure
from their own orgasms, obviously—men also derive a specific sort of masculine
pleasure from making female partners orgasm. The researchers in the study, Sara
Chadwick and Sari van Anders, refer to this incredibly predictable phenomenon
as a “masculinity achievement.” I’m not exactly sure what that means, but I
imagine a “masculinity achievement” looks something like Super Mario punching a
coin out of one of those floating boxes in the video game….
“Despite increasing focus on
women’s orgasms, research indicated that the increased attention to women’s
orgasms may also serve men’s sexuality, complicating conceptualizations of
women’s orgasms as women-centric,” researchers wrote.
In other news, there’s a widespread caricature of
feminists as joyless scolds who hate men and want to outlaw fun. I have no idea
where this could possibly have come from.
It’s easy to make fun of this article, so I can’t resist
just one more. Alternate Cosmo
headline: “Five Techniques for Mindblowing Sex—Unless the Guy Enjoys it, Too,
Then Maybe Not.” But it’s worth investigating where this particular bit of
insanity comes from, because there’s a deeper cause behind it that’s not funny
at all.
Don’t Make Doing
What Women Want a Bad Thing
First, let’s start by acknowledging that it’s absolutely
correct that men enjoy bringing their partners to orgasm and regard this as an
achievement that gives us a special thrill. (Pssst, don’t tell the feminist
hall monitors, but women enjoy doing that, too.) The only thing this report
adds to that rather obvious observation is its pinch-nosed, disapproving
interpretation. For men, this is like “like Super Mario punching a coin out of
one of those floating boxes in the video game.” As one commenter added,
“Actually closer to when Mario gets the high point on the flagpole with a 6 in
the time spot. Fireworks and fanfare included.” Achievement unlocked.
Men tend to be goal-directed and task-oriented. For
decades, we have been specifically warned that it’s unfair for men to have
orgasms while their partners remain unfulfilled, and some of us have taken that
to heart and decided that if this is the metric we’re supposed to meet, by God
we’re gonna meet it. Heck, we’re gonna exceed it. And we’re going to take pride
in that achievement.
But notice the way Smothers describes that in a
belittling, dismissive way, meant to make all of us eager men look like
clueless bros playing a video game. Rephrase it without those dismissive terms,
and yes, of course sex is about enjoying one’s ability to achieve a goal.
That’s the whole point. That is specifically
what the orgasm is about. It is joyous effort reaching toward a climax.
Ayn Rand, who was famous for the sex scenes in her
novels, wrote a great description of an orgasm (and from a woman’s
perspective): “then she knew nothing but the motion of his body and the driving
greed that went reaching on and on, as if she were not a person any longer,
only a sensation of endless reaching for the impossible—then she knew that it
was possible, and she gasped and lay still, knowing that nothing more could be
desired, ever.” If you feel like you need a cigarette after reading that, Ayn
Rand would have approved.
So no, it’s not like Super Mario. It’s like climbing
Everest. It’s like crossing the finish line of a marathon. It’s the ultimate
reward for effort. Ideally, in a good relationship, this is a cooperative
effort, two bodies working together for a common goal—which includes the man
caring about the woman’s pleasure. After all, he loves her and wants her to be
happy. Really, really happy. Twice.
How Can You
Dislike Mutual Satisfaction?
So if everyone is enjoying themselves, what is there to
complain about? The question answers itself. Everyone is enjoying themselves, and even worse, they’re enjoying
themselves together. It’s the
ultimate win-win, and we can’t let that happen.
The neo-Puritanism of today’s feminism is a product of
its adoption of the ideological framework of Marxism. What contemporary
feminism imported from Marx was the notion that everything in the world is a class struggle. Always and everywhere,
there is a class of oppressors and a class of victims, and the relationship
between them is inherently adversarial. What one gains the other loses.
That outlook is now thoroughly suffused through the
feminist movement. The giveaway in this report is when Smothers worries that
“When women’s orgasms begin to serve as a masculinity achievement for male
partners, the orgasms cease to be about women’s liberation.” Be careful,
ladies, because you don’t want to end up having an orgasm that’s not about
women’s liberation. This sounds like a real-life version of an old Woody Allen
gag about having the wrong kind of orgasm.
But it’s actually what I have described as Social Realist
sex. In old-line Marxist dogma, art has to justify itself by its service to a
higher political goal. Similarly, sex now has to justify itself by whether it
conforms to the right politics. Since that politics is adversarial, the man’s enjoyment
of the woman’s pleasure just ruins everything. That’s why feminism has to take
every aspect of male sexuality, starting with the dreaded “male gaze”—i.e., the
fact that we enjoy looking at the female form—and make it seem dangerous and
oppressive. They need to maintain the fiction of a perpetual class war between
men and women.
Feminism has taken the first, oldest, and most intimate
form of cooperation, the basic one that makes everything else in human life
possible, and poisoned it with adversarial politics. This is such a dreadful
idea that there’s a kind of death wish behind it. It’s not just that they’re
trying to weigh down with guilt and suspicion an act that is essential to the
propagation of the species. It’s that they’re attempting to kill the very joy
of life itself.
That’s the end of the road for contemporary feminism, its
ultimate consummation—or perhaps more accurately, its anti-climax.
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