This week in feminism, Cosmopolitan magazine explains why men are sexist if they enjoy giving their female partners sexual pleasure. Yes, really.
“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,” complains Cosmo Sex & Relationships editor Hannah Smothers.
Naturally, men enjoy sex more when their female partner has an orgasm; this is what the study has dubbed “masculinity achievement.”
Smothers says that there’s “nothing wrong with feeling good about making your partner feel good” — before explaining why it’s actually “sexist.”
First, the researchers conclude that the increased attention spent on women’s orgasms is actually also benefiting men: “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.”
This is not good, since we all know how evil men are.
Second, it’s sexist because men enjoying their significant other’s orgasm “ties into cultural ideas of women as passive recipients of whatever men give them.”
“One reason is that it might pressure some heterosexual men to feel like they have to ‘give’ women orgasms, as if orgasm is something men pulled out of a hat and presented to women,” they wrote. “This ties into cultural ideas of women as passive recipients of whatever men give them.”
The Cosmo editor also notes that said enjoyment allegedly perpetuates sexist tropes relative to the female orgasm, such as “women feeling pressured to fake orgasms in order to appease a male partner, or in their words, ‘to protect men’s feelings.'”
The researchers conclude, according to Smothers, that “When women’s orgasms begin to serve as a masculinity achievement for male partners, the orgasms cease to be about women’s liberation or sexual pleasure. They just become another opportunity for men to flex, or ‘shore up their sense of masculinity.'”
The Feminist Taliban have spoken! Sexist men must stop enjoying giving women pleasure.
We look forward to Cosmo’s “Why It’s Sexist that Guys *Don’t* Get Turned On When You Orgasm” article, next week.