Content Warning: this article includes graphic descriptions of sex. It also includes discussions of challenging topics including the ways gendered hierarchies, power, violence, misogyny and discrimination manifest through sex.
Make no mistake — this article does not pass the Bechdel Test. Its earliest inception is marred by original sin, born from a conversation between women about men. “I used to fake my orgasms all the time”, confided one of my friends after one too many white wines in the dim candlelight of a Newtown bar. “But I’ve stopped doing that now. It’s just not worth it.” Across the table, my lesbianfriend plugged her ears and shook her head.
While I agree with my friend’s sentiment wholeheartedly, I cannot help but remember the times I had let male fantasies overwhelm and undermine my own preferences; for example, when I let a man take my pair of black underwear home with him after sex, despite the fact they were my favourite and I had to catch the train home. Why, as a leftist and educated young woman, did I let this happen? And if I had, how many people like me were doing the same?
However naive or embarrassing, these thoughts represent important issues related to sex amongst left-wing Australian young people: we’re having it, we prioritise enjoyment, but we remain tied up by asymmetrically gendered power dynamics and undeniably heterosexual standards. When we cannot fulfil what is expected of us, we revert to traditionally religious feelings of guilt, shame and failure. Alternatively, we buy into supposedly liberatory discourses prioritising sexual empowerment. To be sure, we have come a long way. But pleasure is rarely ever just that — increasingly, it is being disguised as a world of pain.
The altars at which we worship
Recent studies have shown that young Australians are sexually active and regularly discuss intimacy with their partners. Just under half of those completing secondary school also reported ever having sexual intercourse in the National Survey of Australian Secondary Students and Sexual Health, with 77% talking about using a condom and 36% talking about avoiding STIs during sex. The 2018 Household, Income and Labour Dynamics Survey (HILDA) found that young people aged between fifteen and twenty-four were “very satisfied” with their intimate relationships, returning an average satisfaction score of 8.5 out of 10. Oral sex remains the most commonly reported sexual experience, followed by penetrative vaginal sex.
It is significant, then, that many Australian young people are reportedly moving towards the political left — and that this mobility is occurring across gendered lines. During the 2022 Federal Election, the Australian Election Study found that only one in four voters under the age of forty voted for the Coalition. In particular, 67% of those born after 1996 voted for either the Greens or Labor — almost twice as many women voted for the Greens in the House of Representatives than men. Not only does this represent a historic low in the Coalition’s level of support amongst young voters, but it also marks a shift away from trends in the 1990s which saw women more inclined to vote for the Coalition, and men for the Labor Party. While young men remain more conservative than their female counterparts, they are generally more progressive than men of previous generations at the same stage of life. Men are also still more likely to prioritise stereotypically ‘masculine’ issues like economic management and taxation while voting, while women tend to focus on climate change, education and health.
So, how do these ‘left-wing’ politics manifest amongst Australian young people? Despite greater emphasis on rhetoric around ‘equality’ and ‘empowerment’ in intimate relationships, the 2017 National Community Attitudes towards Violence against Women Survey (NCAS) found that these gendered differences persist. Very few respondents aged between 16 and 24 supported rigid gender roles and stereotypes; only 5% agreed that a woman earning more than her male partner is “not good for the relationship”. However, almost one third of young people believe that women prefer a man to be in charge of their relationships. Furthermore, 22% agreed that there is “no harm” in men making sexist jokes about women in front of their male friends.
Sex on-campus
Of course, these statistics only provide very narrow insights: they define ‘left-wing’ ideology according to mainstream electoral politics, they focus exclusively on heterosexual relationships, and do not interrogate the broader myths, cultures and intricacies affecting sexual politics. While we can recognise the same kinds of gendered power in our own relationships, the details, feelings and repercussions of the behaviours they produce are continuously dismissed and underrepresented.
The radical history and contemporary culture in activist spaces at the University of Sydney represents a unique space to critique and correct these deficiencies. Members of the Students Representative Council (SRC) — and, by extension, the contributors to Honi Soit — have long been engaged in more nuanced left-wing political debates around anti-colonial, feminist, sexual, socialist and queer liberation. In the 1970s, it was leftist students who won the introduction of a “Women and Philosophy” course at the University and stopped the publication of sexist car advertisements in the paper; today, activists in the same spaces lead the fight for a free Palestine on equal terms.
Of course, the University as a whole is continuously marked by high levels of misogyny; according to the 2018 Red Zone Report, female students living in the Colleges are 66% more likely to experience rape on-campus when compared to the national average. Furthermore, left-wing spaces are notoriously marred by systemic issues of weaponised incompetence, casual sexism, harassment and the reinforcement of gendered labour divisions.
The inequality of ecstacy
Consequently, I put a survey addressing the insidious forms of gendered power, discrimination and exploitation we experience in our private lives to this year’s editors and reporters for Honi Soit. Composed of seven questions, this survey explored the ways sexual politics manifest in the bedroom (and other intimate settings) for self-proclaimed ‘left-wing’ or ‘progressive’ couples of all sexualities. In particular, it targeted feelings of obligation around making one’s partner orgasm, levels of reciprocity around sexual needs, the impacts of gendered conditioning in relationships and broader tropes used to talk about pleasure inside and outside of relationships.
The results show that gendered power remains one of the largest determinants of a sexual relationship. It is often heteronormative, held by a male partner, and overrides the material needs of those involved. Many respondents noted that heterosexual cisgender men feel “entitled to the female body”, and are therefore more likely to be “self-centred” and seek “control.” Another wrote that sex is often spoken about through the “prism of weaponisation”, either in “highly romanticised terms which become gossip fodder” or in “highly suppressed terms” which leave people who choose to abstain from sex “out of the conversation”. Overall, it seems that we are letting other people do the talking — whether that means being “completely guided by a partner”, or letting cultural expectations dictate our preferences.
These asymmetries set the scene for more specific behaviours during sex. For women, the consumption of pornography that is “exploitative of women” and “catered mainly towards men” within a relationship means that a male partner’s understanding of female pleasure is “distorted and misinformed”. For queer men, associations between ‘femininity and bottoming’ and ‘masculinity and topping’ mean that partners “are usually not very open-minded to trying a role that they don’t feel like they fit into”. While some respondents felt that their sexual needs were “met” and “reciprocated in most cases” despite these dynamics, others felt their partners were “selfish” and cared more about their own needs. Some were able to work through these issues via “communication and habit-building during sex”, but most attempts at reciprocation still did not feel like “the pleasure was personalised to me [sic]”.
To cum or not to cum?
Orgasm was the largest point of contention in relationships raised by this survey. When asked if they feel obligated to make their sexual partner(s) orgasm, all respondents answered “yes”. When they are unable to achieve this, they feel “sad”, “disappointed” or “frustrated”. For heterosexual women, this also resulted in feeling “like a failure or that there is something wrong with me”, or like “I am not pleasurable/sexual enough”. The same group also revealed that they have faked orgasms in the past, either “out of guilt”, to “hurry it along”, or to “get the other person closer to orgasm”. Although the university students I interviewed appear to have moved past an apprehension towards sexual indulgence associated with maintaining faith, they are nonetheless bound by familiar forms of nominally ‘Christian’ guilt and shame in the bedroom.
Misconceptions around orgasm also continue to permeate sex in young people’s public and private lives. During sex, respondents explained that the myth “women never orgasm” is so widely accepted that it is never actually discussed in relationships — let alone challenged. Instead, male partners will opt to pleasure women first in what one heterosexual woman described as a tactic akin to “getting it out of the way”, so that “penal pleasure would always always always last longer.” Outside the bedroom, respondents confirmed that men regularly brag about being able to “orgasm in a woman without a condom”, and for “making a woman orgasm from penetrative sex alone.”
However, these issues were noticeably absent from the responses discussing queer experiences. One queer man noted that he has never faked an orgasm because “this is very hard to do, especially in a gay sex setting where it is something that people often look out for directly.” Another lesbian revealed that she found it easier to rationalise her feelings about being unable to make a partner orgasm, stating that “you can blame yourself at first, but there are factors out of your control.” While respondents also noted that the expectation for both women to orgasm in lesbian relationships “can create pressure”, they also noted that there are far more heterosexual tropes that they have “100% had talks about with straight friends” but “never experienced first-hand.”
Yet there is a significant body of academic literature explaining how and why orgasms are treated in this way within relationships. As scholars Sara B. Chadwick and Sari M. van Anders argue, women’s orgasms have never been more visible in popular culture and medical discourses as “symbols of sexual liberation and satisfaction.” However, a focus on how to give women orgasms, receive them, and make them more “frequent and mind-blowing” instead only serves men’s sexuality. When a man tells his friend about the ways he can make his girlfriend cum, he is exercising ownership over her body in the most intimate way possible. When his friend responds with a similar story, he flexes his sexual prowess, boosts his ego and treats orgasm as a “masculinity achievement.” The situation is not too dissimilar within queer relationships: according to psychologist Katherine L. Goldey, both heterosexual and lesbian women are more likely to view orgasms as a “nice bonus” and use their partner’s pleasure as a proxy for their own.
Socialising sex
According to the young people I surveyed, this new iteration of male chauvinism is borne from more entrenched forms of binary gender conditioning in heterosexual relationships. Many female respondents had been taught that men supposedly “orgasm easily” through vaginal sex. This creates two issues. One heterosexual male respondent noted that this myth “has made people expect certain things of me”, adding that it can be “difficult” to orgasm and that “lots of foreplay” is particularly enjoyable. However, some women regularly adopt a sense of “hyperfemininity and performance” or accept male dominance over their sexuality as a “means of being more desirable.” Others felt sex is “ultimately centred around male pleasure”, and that “women aren’t used to their pleasure being prioritised.” This can be especially difficult for women who identify as asexual or do not want to have sex, as withholding intercourse is often “perceived as a bargaining chip which can be talked about by others, either in front of her behind her back.”
A moment of reckoning
These results show that Australian young people are aware of the challenges they face in their sex lives. They can articulate and reconcile their feelings, but perhaps only within the confines of an anonymous online survey or amongst their closest friends. The problem, then, is that we are not communicating these seemingly universal issues with our sexual partners. We might choose to blame broad overarching sociocultural structures, rather than the hypocrisies of our own habits. We can ignore complicating factors, such as the existence of queer identities within heterosexual relationships, to avoid difficult conversations. We often forgive hurtful behaviour from our partners, like ‘bragging to the boys’, to keep the peace. But instead of making life easier, these decisions compromise our ‘left-wing’ values and further entrench gendered imbalances. Similar interrogation is also pertinent in transgender and gender diverse experiences, a limitation of this article due to identity and demographics of its respondents.
In many ways, sex is our antichrist: it is powerful, euphoric, and at times antagonistic. I don’t expect it, or anyone, to save us. But I do anticipate a serious reckoning before the Second Coming.
