I got a little giddy when I saw, "The Game is Rigged" by Rebecca Traister. "Fuck yeah," I thought, "another thought-provoking, revolutionary article about ladies having bad sex that stems from cultural, rather than personal problems - something is in the air."
And it's in NY Magazine, a respectable print magazine. I don't know about you, but I think the Orgasm Equality Revolution is coming. Seriously, maybe I'm biased, but I've been looking around and writing about articles in this genre for about 7 years now, and although I used to read occasional articles (like this one I wrote about) from women who spoke about their experiences with bad sex, I felt like they mostly came from a frustrated, beaten-down, sad point of view that blamed the problem not on 'the game being rigged' but on 2nd-wave feminists lying to them about the possibility of ever having the kinds of sex-positive relationships with men that were promised to them in feminist ideals. In these articles it is concluded that men and women are actually just innately different, that years of cultural adjustments haven't changed that, and we should just dampen our hopes to match reality.
However, what I'm beginning to see more and more (for instance "Bad Sex," and "A woman's right to say 'meh': being sex positive won't guarantee you an orgasm" - I write about those HERE and HERE) is, yes, a clear frustration with bad sex, but also more indignation, more insight as to why this occurs, and a sense that our culture is set up in such a way that women get a raw deal - but also that it can and should be remedied. I see optimism, but I think more importantly, I see acknowledgement - that there is a real, systemic problem that women face when it comes to the quality of our sex lives and that there's a lot of us out there going through the same things. It's like a coming out of sorts. "The Game is Rigged" and articles like it are boldly shouting - We ladies do in fact have a lot of bad sex, and no, it's not entirely because we are fucked up or not good communicators or too prudish or too slutty. There is something about how men and women are educated, what sexual options seem available, and how gender inequality plays out in the bedroom that is shitting sex up for us in unnecessary ways, and it needs to change.
I think this article made me so particularly giddy because it was quite comprehensive and had lots of women contributing to this discussion both about their own experiences with 'bad-sex' and with insightful and optimistic thoughts on it as a cultural problem. It felt like a movement, and by its very existence, it felt like it was breaking something apart; something that had kept women quiet on the issue and separate through shame and self-doubt; something that refused to see women's frustrations with sex as more than individual problems with communication and hang-ups; something that had pretended that there actually was no bad-sex problem for women; something that was keeping us from acknowledging and remedying this issue.
So, for realz - go read "The Game is Rigged." It has so much to chew on, and it's fucking revolutionary. Rebecca Trainer gets straight up Orgasm Equality Hero Status for this article (See her in the master list HERE), and I'll be adding some of the other women she speaks to in the article to the Master List soon...because it's full of bad-asses spitting truths and advocating for long-overdue sexual change.
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