You can have pleasure but no freedom
The year in women’s desire and restrictions
By every account, 2024 was a year of uninhibited explorations of female desire. The raw and uncomfortable sex in Miranda July’s All Fours; Babygirl, starring Nicole Kidman; Sarah Maas’s hot and horny fairy books A Court of Thorn and Roses; Sabrina Carpenter’s hit album Short and Sweet, in which she tells us, “I’m so fucking horny”; Tinashe’s song “Nasty,” in which she begs someone to match her freak. And CNN reports, “Subscription-based audio erotica app Quinn launched five years ago and says its revenue grew by 440% over the past two years after a string of celebrities including actors Andrew Scott and Victoria Pedretti voiced its stories.”
But any discussion of the rise in portrayals of female desire has to be foregrounded by the rollback in reproductive rights.
Each conversation about female desire is an important one to have. One of the largest gaps between men and women is the orgasm gap. In studies, men’s orgasm rates ranged from 70% to 85%, while women’s ranged from 46% to 58%.
And yet, one in three women lives in a state where reproductive rights are restricted. In states with restrictions, infant mortality and maternal mortality rates are increasing. Additionally, homicide is a leading cause of death among pregnant people. And if a person survives pregnancy, becoming a mother negatively impacts her pay, free time, and relationships. So maybe 2024 was the year of horny women, but it’s also a year they paid for it.
I do not think it’s accidental that the backlash to female freedom comes at a time when female desire is being explored in popular culture. Even Mormon housewives are promoting vibrators on their social media feeds. But the permission to express sexual desire, unaccompanied by equal rights, is an empty sort of liberation.
Rolling back reproductive rights in a country with no real social safety net, paid childcare, or paternity leave forces women out of public life. 2024 also saw the rise of the trad wife as a social influencer. Trad wives are basically a remarketed 1950s stereotype of the "heroic mother and happy wife.” In this iteration of womanhood, women’s sexual identity is pure sublimation. This woman’s sexual purpose is to be the passive receptacle of male desire.
But the permission to express sexual desire, unaccompanied by equal rights, is an empty sort of liberation.
The denial and surrendering of her own ambitions to focus on her children and chickens and husband reframes and transfers female sexual desire, focusing all the energy on the home in an ouroboros of frustration, desire, consumption, and perfectionism.
Breaking out of that cycle and expressing the raw, naked appetites of sexual desire is antithetical to that model of womanhood.
Writing in an influential pamphlet in 1972, feminists Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James used a Marxist critique to call out the ways in which female desire had been controlled by men. They wrote:
So far the women's movement, most notably by destroying the myth of the vaginal orgasm, has exposed the physical mechanism which allowed women's sexual potential to be strictly defined and limited by men. Now we can begin to reintegrate sexuality with other aspects of creativity, to see how sexuality will always be constrained unless the work we do does not mutilate us and our individual capacities, and unless the persons with whom we have sexual relations are not our masters and are not also mutilated by their work. To explode the vaginal myth is to demand female autonomy as opposed to subordination and sublimation. But it is not only the clitoris versus the vagina. It is both versus the uterus. Either the vagina is primarily the passage to the reproduction of labor power sold as a commodity, the capitalist function of the uterus, or it is part of our natural powers, our social equipment. Sexuality after all is the most social of expressions, the deepest human communication.
Essentially, they argued that women’s sexuality is far more than an aspect of the economy, our vaginal canals more than just an assembly line for creating a future tax base, our bodies more than just the repositories of male loneliness and alienation in a capitalist society. Our sexuality is part of our humanity. Its expression is about more than just the enjoyment of a patriarchal society, more than just reproduction; it’s part of our value as human beings who are worthy of pleasure without punishment.
And pleasure is liberation because it frees our sexuality from the objective of creating (and raising, with no societal support) children.
Earlier this year,
reported a story for New York Magazine about a lack of (usually female) sexual desire in marriages. The piece is an important reminder that sometimes sex is not an essential component of relationships, but it also highlights how often heterosexual marriage represses sexual desire into homemaking and children, and as a result, consumption. If we were truly free, we wouldn’t need to put all our time and money into our children and our homes. When the sex isn’t great (or even not desired or coerced), women as wives are told to just deal, submit, make it work. Sex and sexual pleasure is not something women are allowed to want or seek or even break their lives apart to find.Even with the increased cultural depictions of female sexual desire, they still usually center the beautiful white woman, the one who has done things “right” and only now is allowed to transgress.
In a podcast episode this year, I spoke to the wonderful Dan Savage, who talked about how women peak sexually in their midlife. I argued that midlife is actually when women are more likely to break their lives apart and find freedom to enjoy pleasure. As the anonymous newsletter writer of the newsletter “To the Bed,” which is a fascinating and deeply honest accounting of the sex life of a middle-aged divorced woman, argues, did I not want sex, or did I just need a divorce?
Our political oppression and our sexual liberation can’t coexist. As long as women pay for desire with the possible risk of their lives and livelihoods, that desire will always be tinged with taboo.
She writes, “I had zero interest in sex throughout my marriage. Then, a few months ago, as I pondered the freedom that divorce might bring, my desire lit up like a Christmas tree. Just thinking about sex can completely soak my underwear. (Anecdotally, I find that my desire peaks around the time of ovulation, so clearly, hormones play a role — but these monthly fluctuations are minor compared to the changes I’ve observed as a result of my divorce.)”
I love Loretta’s newsletter and others like it, like Rebecca Woolf who writes “The Braid” and Amanda Montei’s “Mad Woman”, because they grapple with both the personal and political liberation of sexual desire, showing it not without it’s difficulties, but without guilt or punishment.
After all, the remarkable part of Miranda July’s All Fours wasn’t the ravenous sex and masturbation scenes; it was the end, where her character finds freedom for her creativity and her life and she isn’t punished.
But until there is freedom for all women — not just the wealthy white women so often depicted in these movies, books, and television shows — even the most liberating displays of female desire in pop culture are a pleasant fantasy more than a lived reality.
Our political oppression and our sexual liberation can’t coexist. As long as women pay for desire with the possible risk of their lives and livelihoods, that desire will always be tinged with taboo.
Further reading:
I loved this newsletter by
on sex as a duty.And Nichole Perkin’s memoir Sometimes I Trip on How Happy We Could Be. Also, although it’s over now, Nichole’s podcast with Bim Adewunmi, “Thirst Aid Kit,” was and is incredible.
And, while
is linked above, I did also love this essay about coming out of blowjob retirement.- ’s book Touched Out is also an excellent exploration of the intersection between motherhood, bodies, and desire.
- has a very smart take on pleasure and heterosexual sex in her newsletter Matriarchal Blessing.
Wonderful article! I hope men begin to see how women’s repression, in modern times, means that more them are not going to have the type of romantic and sexual relationships with women that they were told they’d have (if any at all). Nowadays, more women are being vocal about how liberating singlehood is with or without children, despite criticism from society. The outdated models of partnership aren’t going to work anymore, especially with a decline in basic social skills due to technology. We deserve better.
I often think about how the world is run by those (not just men) for whom sex is defined by the contours of patriarchy--dominance, possession, submission, control, violence--and how those desires come to shape or overshadow my own.