Sex between two dogmas

Even consensual sex in the best of circumstances can become a highly negative experience in the blink of an eye.

By Keren Sheffi | Translation: Dimi Reider

A true and not very shocking story: Boy meets girl. Later, after a largely successful date, the boy and the girl are strolling along the nighttime streets, towards the sea. The boy suddenly stops short, and points at a nearby building: Do you see this balcony – not that, the other one? Actually, this is where I live, so would you like to come up? As the girl likes the boy and is somewhat attracted to him, but does not want to sleep with him, she says no, I don’t think that’s a good idea. The boy says no, I didn’t mean it like that, it’s not something or other, just for a few minutes, you’ve got to see my flat. The girl says, I don’t know, I don’t think so, well, OK, let’s come up, but it’s really just for a few minutes and then I’ll go. The boy is glad.

They climb up the stairs, they see the flat, they drink some tea and make out for half an hour or so, first on the couch and then on the guy’s bed. The boy starts trying to undress the girl, and she moves his hand away; a bit after it happens again, she moves back and says, I think I’m going to go home now. The guy says wow, when you say five minutes you mean five minutes, don’t you? The girl says, yes. The boy says, but you’re here already, so maybe you’ll stay anyway? The girl says: I really, really want to go home now, and goes home.

Only when she’s out of the building and walking very, very quickly up the street, does she notice that although she didn’t do anything less or more than she wanted to do, she didn’t enjoy it at all, because she was petrified the entire time she was there; busy with reminding herself, repetitively, like reciting a phone number one needs to remember but can’t write down, that she had decided not to sleep with him, that she doesn’t have to sleep with him, and busy with remaining wary of things that would make her feel as if she does have to sleep with him, like removing one piece of clothing or another. And she comes home feeling relieved and thinking, both slightly surprised and not surprised at all, how difficult it is sometimes for a woman to avoid unwanted sex even in the best of all possible circumstances.

I kept thinking about it the next day, and wondering how the same situation would have looked like from the other side. And then I realized that the reverse scenario – that of a guy being somewhat interested in me but still not wanting to sleep with me there and then – nearly never happened to me. In other words, it’s not so much a case of male oppression of women, but a social structure that obstructs men as well as women: Men also hardly have a possibility to decline sex in these circumstances without “breaking the rules.” Moreover, it’s actually a situation in which women have more of a legitimate maneuvering space.

But there’s some negative dynamic that kicks into play as soon as you decide to use that maneuvering space by turning the situation from one of mutual attraction moving generally in the direction of sex into a situation where the guy wants sex and you decline. It’s a palpable, physical feeling of an invisible border being crossed, from one kind of interpersonal relation to a different, negative kind. Sometimes you never encounter that border, simply because you want the sex as much as the guy. I also think sometimes, when you’re not really sure what you want, you tell yourself that you want sex to avoid going across that border.

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So I tried to formulate to myself an idea of the border, and little by little I became convinced that the social structure of how we have sex, and most of what is really wrong about it, can be described with a mortifyingly simple binary model: Our Doxa – commonly held opinion – on sexuality contains two contradictory models. Model One states that sex is something mutual the man and the woman do for the pleasure of it – physical pleasure, romantic pleasure, emotional pleasure etc – which rewards both partners with a symbolic capital of desirability and sexual success. Model Two states sex is something men want and women can give, or that can be taken from women, something good for the men and bad for the women, something that increases the dignity of the man and decreases the dignity of the woman, etc.

Each being a doxa at its own right, both models are perceived by us as true on a profound emotional level, and are therefore immune to rational contradiction (every argument based on one of them sounds reasonable and intuitive); we never really face off the contradiction between the two models, but move, constantly, unconsciously , between one and the other and their illogical combinations – as it often happens when other kinds of doxas are involved.

But just like other doxas, this dual doxa allows the hegemonic side to live at peace with a feeling of coherency, and shoulders off the burden of facing down the contradictions onto the subjugated side. On a personal level, men don’t encounter a direct contradiction between the two parts of the dual doxa: They are supposed to always want sex, all the time and in any given situation (which expectation, as we noted, is also oppressive in its own way). But for the women, there is an essential contradiction here that manifests itself all the time, even if not verbally; because the sex can go, at any second, courtesy of any clichéd remark by the man or a passing thought of your own, from being perceived through one model to being perceived through the other model, and throw you completely off balance.

And this is why it seems to me that very few men, if any, really understand how profoundly ambivalent is heterosexual sex for women, even at its best: Because models can swap without warning; even in the middle of good, equitable sex with someone you love and trust and so on, there are moments when you get tired and think, maybe we should stop, and answer yourself no, he’ll be upset, maybe we’ll go on a little longer until he comes, and suddenly you’re thrown into the second model; not to mention the situation when you’re sleeping with someone new, in the perception that sex is something adults do for fun, and he makes some tiny remark about how easy it was to get you into bed, or any variation on that remark; and so all the way down to the situations where you find yourself having sex without really wanting to.

I think that many gray-zone date rape cases, ones in which a woman doesn’t want to, but not categorically, and is persuaded ‘nicely’ to agree to sex that makes her feel very bad, are like that: You get into a good, first-model sexual situation of your own free will, which is actually dependent on the situation being defined through that first model, and suddenly the guy – often not maliciously and not even consciously- changes the situation into the second model, including the retroactive restructuring of the entire situation up till now, and you quickly become convinced it’s clear you’re not meant to really-want sex to have sex, of course you’re supposed to feel a little bad and still go on, that if you’ve made a commitment to “give”, you can’t step back.

And there’s another, pretty elusive sting here. Because in our everyday attempt to live, as much as we can, in the first model, which is necessary in order to have any good and equitable sex at all, we need to actively suppress the second model, because it’s also self-suggesting and intuitive. And so when the staggering switch in the definition of the situation to the worse occurs, a feeling surges that you should’ve known, that this is also your fault, why did you come up to his flat in the first place if you didn’t want to sleep with him, you knew where this was going all along, and how could you – -

It’s this moment of shock that recurs so often, in so many ways: The moment when you experience the social anomie in which you live as if it was something screwed up and messed up in your own personal psychology.

Much of the public feminist struggle is an attempt to cut at the root, at the doxa, of the second model, and retain only the first. This struggle is very important, and its partial success is very impressive. Nevertheless, it seems to me that it would be a mistake to think that the private, day-to-day feminist struggle to live your life in a less oppressed manner should be just a small-scale copy of the great public struggle. Because changing society is one thing, and liberated living within society is another. Obviously, both struggles are intimately connected, because if enough of us lead liberate lives society will change, and to change society we need to change the way we live; but still, these are different fronts, necessitating slightly different tactics.

In the society in which we live, the second model is profoundly relevant. And the assumption that the feminist thing to do in your private life is eradicate it once and for all from the way you think, actually plays a part in preserving the anomie: The eradication attempt itself creates a kind of an oppressive situation (you’re having sex you do not want, even as you suppress the reasons for not wanting it, because they belong to the second model, because sex is supposed to be fun, you’re supposed to enjoy it); and it amplifies the threat in other kinds of oppressive situations (if all your efforts are invested in avoiding thinking in a certain manner, then when what is suppressed bursts forth in all its relevance and self-evidence, there’s nothing left for you to do, your entire position collapses; and this is how you hear about women who found out that “actually,” “deep down inside,” “women always were and always will be”, and so on – complete these phrases with your favorite chauvinist cliche about female submission.)

And this is why it seems to me that what we should be doing now, in our day-to-day lives, between ourselves, is to understand that – contrary to all psychologistic intuitions imbibed with our father’s morals- the fact that something is suppressed doesn’t mean it’s the-truth, but only that it’s a truth, a relevant one but one of many. And so, whenever this suppressed something crops up, to label it as part of Model Two, to bow before its inevitable common sense, and then still refuse to submit to it; and also to understand and to explain to our partners, that contrary to the phallocentric myth we all retain, it is not true that the Telos of any degree of mutual sexuality between man and woman is a dick ejaculating into a cunt.

But this is difficult to comprehend, and even more difficult to remember in stressful situations.

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Keren Sheffi is completing her Comparative Literature MA at Tel Aviv University, and writes in the Hebrew collaborative blogs “The Lottery,” and “The True and Shocking Story Of“, where this article originally appeared.