‘It Is Time for the Stigma Around Women’s Pleasure to be Banished’: Reclaiming Our Sex Lives

By Emma Lynas 

For a long time, there has been a stigma associated with women pleasuring themselves and asking for pleasure from a sexual partner. Even now, writing this, I feel uncomfortable talking about the fact that I masturbate. And why? Because women are never told that it is okay. We aren’t educated about the parts of our bodies that bring us that pleasure, and we aren’t told to explore them. In fact, in a YouGov survey from 2019, almost half of females were not able to identify one of their own crucial body parts. How terrifying is that?

If you type ‘anatomy of v’ into Google, none of the predictive options are vagina. Even if you keep typing and Google realises that none of the choices it has supplied are what you want, it still refuses to offer the word ‘vagina’. Why? It is not a dirty word. It is part of half the population’s anatomy. Google doesn’t need to hide its existence from us. 

In the same YouGov study, it was found that 46% of women did not know that the vagina (not the vulva, to be clear) is self-cleaning and should not be washed. This lack of knowledge can be harmful as washing the vagina, even with just water, can damage the level of natural bacteria within and lead to infections. How many women will have to suffer before we are taught the basic understanding of our bodies?

The shame associated with our pleasure began with this unawareness and absence of knowledge. Emily Clarkson made me realise how much this shame is normalised and forced upon us when she said, “You can have sex in this country at sixteen, but you can’t buy a sex toy at a shop until you’re eighteen. So, you can have sex with a man but not with yourself.” 

The lack of knowledge starts with the sex education that we receive at school. For me, that curriculum consisted of a couple of lessons on periods and one on contraception. We were never taught about consent, or that sex was a pleasurable experience and nothing to feel ashamed about. A lot of schools barely teach the technicalities of sex; one friend thought that you could become pregnant from a blowjob and when another lost their virginity, he and his girlfriend chose to have anal sex as they were too fearful that they would get pregnant otherwise. This led them to believe that sex was a painful and terrifying experience. 

Children and teenagers all around the country are being miseducated and misinformed about sex, and it is leading to adults with a gap in their knowledge that could have been so easily rectified had schools educated us properly to begin with.

The stigma around masturbation damages women’s sex lives. It stops us from being able to communicate what we enjoy; most of us don’t know what we enjoy. We feel ashamed bringing ourselves pleasure, so we then feel that we can’t ask for it from someone else. Sexual wellbeing should not be something to feel embarrassed about.

I feel embarrassed asking my boyfriend for what I want when we have sex. I can’t finish from penetrative sex alone, so the act has always been more about him than me. I feel guilty asking for foreplay, even though I will enjoy the experience more. I know that he wouldn’t mind. He wants me to be comfortable and have fun, too, but I can’t get past the stigma, the feeling of embarrassment and selfishness in asking for what I want. 

Selfishness is a word that should not be in our vocabularies regarding sex. It is not selfish of me to want to enjoy sex as much as my boyfriend does. Yet, because of the way sex is presented to us through porn and the media, we have been conditioned to believe that it is all about the man.

As women, we have seen our bodies sexualised by the media time and time again. Women’s bodies are often depicted as sources of pleasure and open to comments from anyone. We lose the right to our own bodies because we are shown that it is others who have the rights to them. We forget that we have the right to explore those bodies ourselves – that we are the only person with the rights to our own bodies.

No woman should have to feel awkward or uncomfortable about her own body. We need to be taught. Taught about our body parts, taught that it is okay to pleasure ourselves, taught that it is okay to communicate and ask for pleasure to be returned, taught that sex is not all about a man’s satisfaction. It is time for the stigma around women’s pleasure to be banished.