The Second Circle Series 4: BAD SEX
Episode 1: Aren’t we all sex positive now?
While plenty of us still grow up in families and communities where sex is taboo or there are strict rules around it, on a broader societal level here in Western Europe it’s fair to say sex is no longer seen as sinful. Sex is good, it’s healthy, it’s normal, it’s empowering!
We’re living in this lovely, glossy, horny world where we’re told that good sex is not just our aim, goddammit, it’s our right… so what gives?
The Second Circle is produced, written, hosted by Franki Cookney | Editor: Lucy Douglas | Audio production: Anouszka Tate
Theme music: Roof - Big Spoon (Instrumental Version) | Incidental music: _91Nova - Shell Games, Blaeker - Stay Up All Night, _91Nova - Moiety | All music courtesy of www.epidemicsound.com
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S04E01: Aren’t we all sex positive now?
[Montage of clips of people talking about bad sex]
Franki Cookney [voiceover] 00:54
Ahhh bad sex. We’ve all been there, let’s be honest. It’s not something we tend to boast about but I’d wager most of us have experienced it. Yup, at one time or another, we’ve all had the kind of sex that leaves us feeling disappointed, unsatisfied or just a bit… “meh”. And that’s just the start of it. At the other end of the spectrum, bad sex can leave us feeling insecure, ashamed, devalued, demoralised, and really bloody unhappy.
On the face of it, it shouldn’t be this way. We have a global sexual wellness industry worth an estimated £50bn (or £38bn). We have education, information, and sexual health services in the palms of our hands. We have CBD lube, audio porn, and air suction vibrators. Prospective partners are a mere swipe away. And yet…
Data from the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (NATSAL 3) shows around half of people in the UK report some type of sexual problem, whether it’s a struggle to orgasm or concerns about their libido.
We’re living in arguably the most sex positive era in living memory. So why are so many of us still having bad sex?
[THEME MUSIC]
Franki Cookney [voiceover] 2:06
You’re listening to The Second Circle. This is Series 4: BAD SEX.
I’m Franki Cookney. I’ve spent the last five years writing and reporting on sex and relationships and each time I read a piece on how to make sex better, how to improve, how to spice things up, I get the increasing sense that maybe we’re coming at this from the wrong angle. Instead of papering over the cracks, I say we dig down and have a proper look at the foundations. In this series I’m turning sex advice on its head and exploring what makes sex bad in the first place.
Needless to say the stories you’ll hear and the language people use to describe their sexual experiences can be pretty explicit so listener discretion is advised. All the sex we discuss in this series was consensual but it wasn’t always enjoyable and some accounts may be distressing.
Over the course of the next six episodes I will delve into some of the most common issues people face in their sex lives, from dissatisfying hookups, to sexual dysfunction, body image issues, and shame. I want to piece together the social and cultural context and find out whether the messages we get around sex are helping or hindering us. We’ll hear first-hand stories of bad sex and get insights from experts to help us unpick what’s really going on and hopefully find out what we can do about it.
To kick things off, I want to look a bit at our cultural influences. While plenty of us still grow up in families and communities where sex is taboo or there are strict rules around it, on a broader societal level here in Western Europe it’s fair to say sex is no longer seen as sinful. Sex is good, it’s healthy, it’s normal, it’s empowering!
Shows like Sex Education, Bridgerton, Love Island, are remarkable perhaps in the ways they depict and talk about sex but the fact that they contain sex, that the people in them have sex… I mean, duh. Of course.
Meanwhile magazines such as Cosmopolitan ask us “Are orgies the new LinkedIn?” Glamour promises “The 15 best G-spot vibrators to supercharge your masturbation and take that self-care game to the next level” and GQ offers advice on “How to improve upon the male orgasm” and “Seven podcasts that will help you get better in bed”.
I’m not gonna lie, I’d bloody love The Second Circle to make the line up for that last one BUT what seems clear (at least from our media) is that 2022 is a pretty sex-positive time to be alive. We’re living in this lovely, glossy, horny world where we’re told that good sex is not just our aim, goddammit, it’s our right… so what gives?
I spoke to writer and academic Katherine Angel whose book Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again examines the gap between the 21st century “empowerment” rhetoric around sex and our actual lived experiences of it. It’s fair to say her view is a little less rose-tinted than mine.
Katherine Angel 5:17
I actually don't think we do live in a sex positive era, I think we live in an era where we have sort of decided to describe ourselves in that way.
I think really, the kind of era we're living in now is one that's really paradoxical. And that puts women or not just women in a real bind.
We're being given constantly such mixed messages. And in fact, some of the kind of sex positivity that, you know, we're supposedly in isn't sex positivity, it's a kind of, it's on the one hand, a pressure on women to have a really uncomplicated relationship to their own sexuality. So it's a it's a pressure on women to, to know, their sexual desire to kind of be in control of themselves, and to come to sex with this sort of armour that will protect them. It's not actually about pleasure, it's not about enjoyment. It's about a kind of way to ensure that we have done our duty and our work so that we are not vulnerable to violence, that's not sex positivity, that's using the language of positivity to make women responsible for their own safety.
Franki Cookney [voiceover] 6:29
OK. So if we’re not actually sex positive… why the heck do we think we are? Where did the idea of sex positivity even come from? We’re going to come back to Katherine Angel in a moment but first I think we’re going to need a quick history lesson.
The term “sex positive” is first associated with Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich who saw sexual freedom as key to not just individual wellbeing but also to political emancipation.
But it was in the 1980s, that sex positivity really came to prominence. At the time, there were a number of high profile anti-porn campaigns led in the U.S. by Andrea Dworkin and Women Against Pornography and here in the UK by Campaign Against Pornography.
These radical feminists had a hard line which painted porn (and occasionally heterosexual sex itself) as inherently oppressive to women. So-called sex-positive or pro-sex feminists, on the other hand, argued that this kind of thinking risked denying women’s capacity for and interest in sexual desire and pleasure. In other words: women be horny too.
These days, The International Society for Sexual Medicine defines sex positivity as “having positive attitudes about sex, feeling comfortable with one’s own sexual identity and the sexual behaviors of others.” Nice.
But some see participation as a crucial part. Author and activist Allena Gabosch talked about sex positivity as “an attitude […] that regards all consensual sexual activities as fundamentally healthy and pleasurable, and encourages sexual pleasure and experimentation.”
We certainly see this in mainstream media, where sex positivity is often focused on “improving” and “spicing up” our sex lives.
Just think of the magazines I mentioned earlier which regularly feature enticing headlines such as “The New Sexual Milestones: Have you hit them yet?” (Glamour, 2014) “Are you having copy and paste sex: say bye bye to that bedroom rut” (Cosmo, 2015) and “20 ways Hollywood can improve your sex life” (FHM, 2015).
This shift towards sex-positivity being about “doing”, “getting”, improving” isn’t just something I’ve observed, though. In her book, Katherine Angel talks about something called “confidence culture”. This is a term used by sociologists Ros Gill and Shani Orgad to describe the post-feminist period of, really starting from the 90s. There was a sense that feminism had achieved most of its aims, something the outgoing prime minster Marget Thatcher fully promoted. (In fact she said that she didn’t think there’d been “a great deal of discrimination against women for years” - she said that in 1981 by the way). We’d completed feminism, apparently. So it was time for women to lighten up and have fun. In this supposedly liberated, gender-equal context, the best thing you could be was confident. I asked Katherine Angel to say a bit more about this and its impact on our attitudes to sex.
Katherine Angel 9:39
So post-feminism as the, the kind of ethos emerging from the 90s that insists that, you know, feminism has achieved its aims, you know, legally economically, I mean, it's blatantly untrue. But that's the rhetoric that feminism achieved those kinds of aims, and, and that some of those questions of kind of sexuality and gender no longer needed to be addressed. Because, you know, we had we had achieved certain forms of emancipation and equal status with men. So they talk about confidence feminism as a phenomena whereby things that are about embodying individual confidence are just conflated with feminism.
People like Angela McRobbie have written really interestingly about this as a kind of, in a sense, a form of backlash, I think. You have a sense that certain gains were made within feminism, certain legal, and economic gains have been made, you know, in the period, from the kind of 70s and 80s onwards, and that, in the 90s was a was a period where not only where there was a form of, you know, backlash to perhaps those gains made by feminism, but also a period of neoliberalism. So, you know, a kind of a regime whereby individual effort and individual responsibility, underlined above all else.
And I think that post-feminism was really part of that; it was part of trying to shrug off what we're seeing as on the one hand, kind of, you know, uncool, unsexy, spoiling the fun feminism, but also a turning away from the idea of a kind of more collective striving for the better good.
Franki Cookney [voiceover] 11:20
Those of us who grew up in the 90s will remember well the ladette culture which glamorised a kind of bolshy, don’t-give-a-fuck feminism. Here in the UK, Zoe Ball, Sara Cox, Denise Van Outen were our role models. The Spice Girls too, to an extent. Even the Sex And The City girls, despite their sophistication, despite the fact that they drank cocktails not pints, could be seen to embody this kind of go-getting sexual confidence.
In 2011 Ros Gill and Shani Orgad wrote an essay entitled Spicing It Up, in which they coined the term “sexual entrepreneur” which I absolutely love. They talk about the way in which - over the course of the 90s and the 00s - sex positivity became something of a “call to action”. As shame-free opportunities for sexual self-expression and sexual pleasure have increased, so too has the imperative to maximise these opportunities; to improve, to experiment, to be adventurous.
The “sexual entrepreneur” fit nicely in with the Conservative politics of the time, too, as Angel mentioned. Individual effort is valued above all and personal performance and opportunity-taking is seen as the best route to social progress.
The problem is, sex is not an individualistic pursuit. It is a connection between two or more people. You cannot pull your sex life up by your bootstraps, you cannot be self-reliant… unless all you want to do is get really good at wanking in which case, great, do that! A very worthy pursuit if you ask me and I’m not by any means suggesting you shouldn’t. But partnered sex, sex with other people. That’s collective action, baby.
Recent years have definitely seen some more diverse and nuanced depictions of sexuality – I’m thinking about shows like Orange Is The New Black, Feel Good, and Sex Education. But there’s definitely still a level on which sex-positivity is equated with being up for it.
What Katherine says at the start about the pressure to have an uncomplicated relationship with sex also really resonates. Growing up I certainly felt that sex was something you should just do, enjoy and not overthink it. I write a newsletter called The Overthinker’s Guide To Sex which is a direct reference to the way I feel I was taught by my culture to approach sex. Enthusiastically, yes, but not too earnestly.
When we’re operating on the basis that sex is uncomplicated and that NOT having sex is bad, this can put pressure on us to do things that… actually… we’re not really enjoying. The binary becomes Having sex = good and liberated. Not having sex = bad and uptight.
But where the fuck is the quality control? Let’s not forget that very few of us growing up in the UK had anything close to a decent sex education. Historically, relationships and sex education (RSE) in British schools has focused on the mechanics of reproductive sex and on contraception which is not even close to being the full picture. AND thanks to Section 28 laws (brought in by Margaret Thatcher in 1988) it’s only since 2003 that schools have been even to able reference homosexuality, never mind discuss what queer sex might look like.
When you tell people sex is a personal goal, linked to individual status and success, but don’t really give them any tools with which to negotiate it, to navigate their feelings about it, or even figure out what parts they like… a lot of them are going to end up having really bad sex.
Ella Dawson 14:59
I expected to go to college and have these very intimate connections with people where we connected based on our personalities and shared experiences. And the normal way to interact was actually the polar opposite of that it was get drunk, have some liquid courage. take someone home, usually without even knowing who they were. Maybe you exchange names and vaguely What's your major? Where do you live on campus? Let's go. And then you have sex, it's bad. And then you pretend it never happened. It was the polar opposite of what I was hoping it would be.
Franki Cookney [voiceover] 15:30
This is Ella Dawson. She is a sex and culture critic who lives in New York and she writes a lot about hookup culture, particularly in universities and colleges. Having read her work before, I knew she had strong feelings about the way sex positivity has, in some cases, led to a situation where the focus is no longer really on pleasure or connection or having fun, it’s more about just being able to say you got laid. Ella graduated in 2014 which is almost a decade after I was at university but a lot of what she describes feels familiar to me, both from back when I was a student and my more recent experiences with dating and hookup culture.
Ella Dawson 16:13
I went to Wesleyan University, which is a small liberal arts college in New England in Connecticut. I think it was around 2000/3000 students. And all four years I lived in a dormitory. Freshman year I had a single so I had my own room on like a communal hall where we shared a bathroom and then sophomore year, my lodgings got a little better. And then junior senior year, I was living in an apartment on campus with friends. And it was a beautiful Ivy covered campus. Lots of seasons, it's New England. And it's a very Wesleyan was a very contained campus. It's not super integrated into a larger city. So everything I needed was right there. We had dining halls, there was a small Greek row of fraternity houses
For me, it was the first time that I felt like I was in a community and in a place where I truly belonged. It was a very liberal and progressive school. And it was very invested in conversations about social justice and identity, just to the point where those conversations were becoming more normal in broader American culture.
When I was in high school, I was sexually active, but I hadn't had penetrative sex yet. I hadn't lost my virginity and the way that we talked about it. But I was a very horny teenager.
And I thought that college would be the I thought college would be heaven, that it would be this place where I could be my full self. And certainly, Wesleyan and was incredibly progressive and interested in sex. It was a very horny place. I think Huffington Post ranked it as like the number one horny school for a while. But I went to college thinking, I'm going to finally get a boyfriend, who I really love and who understands me, and I'm finally going to lose my virginity and I will be understood. I had this very romantic view of college. And I really wanted to have sex, but I really wanted to fall in love. And I hadn't had that experience yet, as a teenager.
And as I found out pretty quickly when I got to college, it's not really how dating works as much in the university, particularly in American schools.
As I quickly discovered, the routine on campus was on a weekend night weekend started on Wednesday, on a weekend night, you go to a pregame, you get pretty drunk, you and your pack of friends then go to a secondary location, whether it's a frat party or party in someone else's dorm, you drink even more, you start to dance with a stranger, or flirt with a stranger in the kitchen. And very quickly, you agree to go back to their dorm, and then you have sex, and then you never acknowledge them as a human again, even when you bump into them on campus at like the Student Centre in line for brunch, it was very anonymous, and it was kind of this competitive environment too of, you're out on the hunt. And you want to, you want to be able to brag about your conquest the next day. You want to be the person that cares the least in the interaction. It's something that you are doing for yourself for your own pleasure for your own experience. And the person that you're hooking up with is someone that you're using, whether or not you feel malicious towards them, their own enjoyment and their own humanity is kind of secondary to your own.
Franki Cookney 19:31
For all but it's supposed to be about, you know, bravado and getting something and achieving something and and like getting your end away. I don't know, is that an expression you use in the US? Or is that a Britishism?
Ella Dawson 19:48
I haven't? I haven't heard that before. But that makes sense.
Franki Cookney 19:51
Getting your end away. And I think that that's quite appropriate in the circumstance, because it is like about your end like your goals. But for all of that, it doesn't sound very pleasurable.
Ella Dawson 20:03
No, it was not very pleasurable. And when you're in an environment where there's no trust built up between you two, there's no mutual investment in each other's comfort, pleasure, whatever it might be. It's very difficult to communicate with that person and say, Hey, that doesn't feel good, what you're doing. Can you touch me here? Can you do this? So I think that, particularly for the women on my college campus sex in that hookup culture was disappointing. And I'm sure for the men, it was disappointing as well. Even if they achieved orgasm more frequently, it's still a dehumanising and awkward experience. So I think everyone I think most people lost, some people really enjoyed themselves. And I'm very conscious of the sexual double standard and of slut shaming. And I am absolutely here for casual sex and hooking up if that is what you want. And that's what you need. But I think it's, it's not for everyone. And it's very hard to do in a way that is pleasurable, and respectful and fun. And at 18 years old, almost everyone is going to walk away feeling awkward, and like they didn't get what they expected from that type of interaction.
Franki Cookney 21:17
Yeah, for sure. I think it takes it can take a while to realise though, can’t it, that you're not… cuz you're so busy doing what you're supposed to do and what all your friends are doing and feeling good about yourself because you can pull, that it takes quite a while to realise, like, I don't know if I'm actually having fun here. Does that resonate with you?
Ella Dawson 21:38
That totally resonates with me. Sex can be wonderful when it's just a physical act of gratification and pleasure. You don't have to be romantically connected, you don't have to be committed to each other. It doesn't have to be this excruciating, vulnerable soul bond. But sex ideally, is something that you're doing with another person. It's not something that you're doing, using another person. It's not something you're doing. Alone Together. The best sex is sex, where you're present with each other, and you're open with each other. And I think that that concept scares the crap out of a lot of us. And we don't have the context to understand that outside of the framework of a romantic relationship. We associate that with monogamy, we associate that with commitment and love. And that's just not the case. I've had casual sexual relationships and Friends with Benefits relationships with people who I absolutely was not romantically attached to but who I really trusted and connected to and communicated with both during sex and in our friendship, it is possible but it is very hard.
And I liked casual sex, but I didn't like the way I was having casual sex on campus. And that didn't make me a bad feminist. That didn't make me judgmental. It didn't make me sex negative to say, the sex that we're having is so bad and upsetting. And why is that? It's because we're not treating each other humanely. And we need to figure out how to do that outside of just a romantic context.
[AD BREAK]
Franki Cookney [voiceover] 22:52
We’re going to take a quick break. But stay with me because in a moment we’re going to hear from Ella about how she reached a turning point with casual sex and what she did about it. Back in a tick.
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Franki Cookney 23:07
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[Advert]
Franki Cookney 23:30
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[END AD BREAK]
Franki Cookney 24:25
I think to some extent, there's, there's a bit of an all or nothing attitude to it. It's like, oh, if I invest anything at all, in this casual sex, that means I'm in love, and I want a relationship. So I have to therefore invest nothing, I have to put nothing of myself into this. And it's like, Where is the middle ground? There are a huge range of emotions between complete apathy, and being profoundly in love with somebody, we could tap into some of those, surely?
Ella Dawson 24:52
Like there's a whole range of ways that we can interact and desire each other. It's not even a spectrum. It's like a giant gradient that goes in a million different directions.
Franki Cookney 25:03
I'm wondering whether there was a specific point when you realised that casual sex as it exists on college campuses, and I think also on in dating app culture as well,was not serving you.
Ella Dawson 25:15
I had a lot of little moments of clarity. My freshman and sophomore year of college where I realised that casual sex wasn't working for me, and wasn't all that it was cracked up to be. I had several hookups with people who I met at parties who I just thought were the coolest, like we had great conversations, we had great sex, I really enjoyed seeing them. And then we would pretend not to recognise each other. And that just blew my mind. Like, if I've had great sex with you, and we liked each other as people, why would we not see each other again? Why would we not like we don't have to date I just want to have sex with you again, like, why is that? Why is that so bad? And I had, there were honestly like three or four guys where I had that happen, where I was like, I, I'm not asking you for anything serious. I just would like you to acknowledge my presence, like that would be cool. And it made me so angry. And I remember my freshman year of college, there was a wave of protests going on to support Planned Parenthood, because it was just starting to be defunded at the state level. And there was a planned parenthood rally at my college. And this guy I had had a one night stand with was there. And he had his Planned Parenthood button. And I remember just being irate. And thinking, you know, you can't call yourself a feminist if you don't text me back after we've had sex, like, What is going on? How can you have these values about reproductive justice and an empowering culture of sex for women and then be such a dick? What is not clicking here? And so I did have all these little moments of like this, this sucks, but I didn't know how to get myself out of it. And in like, a weird act of God moment, almost. I feel like I'm not religious, but it really does feel like divine intervention. I wound up contracting an STI. And when you get an STI that is treatable, but not curable, I have herpes. In my case, it gets a lot harder to have these like very anonymous fleeting hookups, because you have to be like, Oh, hey, so condoms and valtrex and like, what do you think? And so it kind of it forced this moment of actual connection, even with one nightstands and it forced this vulnerability that actually wound up being really wonderful because then that person would go Oh, okay. And they'd have to think, and often they would then say something vulnerable, like, I'm okay with that. But can you also not pull my hair a certain way, like it would wind up unlocking more genuine connection? And after I got herpes, I never had another like bad hookup on college because it just, it eliminated any opportunity for dehumanising sex either they were like, Oh, I can't handle that. Good luck, have a good night, or they stuck around and then started seeing me as more of a human during sex because they had to actually think about the sex we were having. So thank you herpes. But yeah, it was it was interesting to become sexually active after getting an STD and realise, wow, the way I was going about this was not working for me at all.
Franki Cookney [voiceover] 28:23
At the very start of the show you heard some of the different answers people gave me when I asked them what “bad sex” means to them. In included a variety in the intro because I wanted to demonstrate that bad sex can mean a whole bunch of things to different people but actually, one of the things that came up time and time again was “lack of connection”.
I think there’s bit of a narrative that tells us that men in particular aren’t so bothered about the emotional side of sex, the psychological side. It’s all about the physical: In, out, get your end away (if you’re British!), no strings. Job done.
But honestly? My research doesn’t bear that out. Everything I’ve read, all my work on sex and relationships, and all the conversations I’ve had for this podcast, suggests to me that actually most of us do really want to feel connected during sex. And that applies across the gender spectrum.
For her 2020 book, Boys and Sex, journalist and author Peggy Orenstein spent two years interviewing young men in the US and she found that a huge number of them were dissatisfied with the kind of sex they were having, particular those engaging in modern day hookup culture of the kind described by Ella. One young man’s quote stood out to me in particular.
He said: "The sex can feel like two people having two very distinct experiences. There's not much eye contact. Sometimes you don't even say anything. And it's weird to be so open with a stranger. It's like your acting vulnerable, but not actually being vulnerable with someone you don't know and don't care very much about. It's not a problem for me. It's just odd. Odd and not even really fun."
Not even really fun!! And yet, you’ll have noticed that even as he admitted this, he felt compelled to caveat it by saying that “it’s not a problem for me”. I wanted to hear a bit more about men’s experience of hookup culture so I got in touch with Richie Benson. Richie is the Universities Project lead for Beyond Equality, an organisation that runs programmes and workshops in schools, universities, workplaces and even pro-sports clubs covering all things masculinity including mental health, social justice issues, relationships and of course sex. The idea that young men feel a pressure to be sexually active, regardless of whether they actually want the kind of sex that’s on offer, rang immediately true for him.
Richie Benson 30:47
My experience working with university-aged students in particular, we talk a lot about pressures and expectations around sex. And like, it's both internal and external. And I think the idea of having an authentic university experience for a lot of people means having sex, often, that's not everybody. But it takes like, a bravery and a confidence to step outside of that and say, that's what you don't want. Or like, that's not what authenticity looks like to you. So I do think a lot of people arrive at university, thinking, this is it, I've arrived, I'm going to be having lots of sex, because that's what happens at university. Because who even Are you if you're a guy at university and not having sex?
There's an idea. And this comes up in discussions quite a lot, that there's a right amount of people to be having sex with. Like, it's, it's a good amount, but it's not too many. Because the moment you get to too many, you get reputation. And then that prohibits you from having more of it. Because people are like, ‘Oh, you're that guy.’ The phrase fuck boy comes up quite a lot. And like, that's when it tips that balanced tips into a negative for someone. So yeah, and then the other point about the stories is so interesting. And that's where it becomes, I think, in a lot of ways, quite dangerous, like the gamification of sex at university, or feeding into hookup culture. It's not about the interaction. It's not about that connection with somebody. Maybe that's the residue of it, right. But it's about getting a story. It's about a tally mark on the fridge. It's about an like, that is legit. People do have tally marks on their fridge. They've shown me in zoom workshops. And then it's like, Okay, I've got a story, you know, to tell the next day. And if your focus is on that story, like, what is happening in between, right? There's a human being that you are dehumanising. There's connection, that safety, you're missing out on a world of genuine pleasure, which I think is a word which doesn't get brought into the conversation about sex and relationships enough. And yeah, it becomes a very dangerous and dehumanising space when you're just focused on the story. And what's funny is like how the story often focus around like, the mechanics of it, or like what happened. Seldom do I hear people tell stories about like the vulnerabilities or like, Oh, I was super nervous, I have butterflies in my stomach. And then I felt like this when we'd like, when we were laying in bed afterwards, or, you know, these really, kind of beautiful human moments, like the textures, and expressions of feelings and connection. Like, personally, I find that really interesting if a friend of mine told me about their nerves or the way they felt. I don't think I don't want to hear about the mechanics of it. I'm not interested in what you were doing. But yes, that that story is a really dangerous element, I think. And that's the hookup culture. You're feeding into the narrative of the gamification of sex is a numbers game. The two words I hate hearing, put together makes me want to vomit on my shoes every time I hear it, but it comes up a whole lot his body count. It comes up all the time. And it's like the very, very normalised phrase. What are we even saying? Like, body count? We're counting bodies.
Franki Cookney [voiceover] 34:20
So “body count” means the number of people you’ve slept with. As Richie says, it’s dehumanising... I mean it’s literally dehumanising, you’re talking about a person as if they’re just a body, you’re using the language of death and disaster to talk about your sexual achievements.
And the numbers can be so high. You only have to watch shows like Love Island to see this play out. Often the men on that show will claim to have slept with upwards of 100 people. And these are guys who are mostly in their early twenties? There’s just no way, there’s NO WAY that quality is what they’re focussing on here. Mainly its purpose seems to be to demonstrate how sexually desirable you are. To be able to say “Oh I’ve screwed a lot of people.”
The shifting meaning of sex-positivity seems to have led a lot of us to a place where “good sex” is defined merely by quantity and frequency; and where often, that sex ends up being this detached, empty thing we do AT each other?
So how do we start to find our way back? Back to connection, back to pleasure, back to having real fun! Here’s Katherine Angel again...
Katherine Angel 35:23
I think the fixation on sex can itself become this kind of disconnecting thing between people whereas, if we could, like fixate more on, on, on pleasure, on the erotic, you know, on whatever that might be, you know, what's erotic can be, can be so many things, including the sex itself, but everything around the sex as well.
Franki Cookney 35:48
I've written so many times about how, for me, one of my favourite parts of sex is the anticipation of sex. So like the, like, if I'm on a date, the tension, the conversation, the way you you, flirting, you know, the way you sort of pick up on the cues of whether the person is attracted to you or not? And that's not just about, oh, I'm a woman, so I need a long build up to you know, get my arousal going. I'm like, No, that's genuinely one of my favourite parts. on its own, you know, to the point that oftentimes, I could just go home after that, and I've had a really nice time, you know?
Katherine Angel 36:24
Yeah. I mean, that makes total sense to me, because, you know, the sexual realm isn't just about the sex. it's like you're saying, the pleasure isn't just about the sex itself, which I think is totally true. for all kinds of reasons, you know, also to do with the thrill of the chase and being chased. And you know, that's true for men and women's as well, I think. But it's also that sex is never just about sex. Sex is always also about like, feeling alive, or you know, also numbing yourself. I mean, it can people pursue sex for so many different reasons. It touches so many things in us, it resolves problems for us, it covers up problems, it, you know, it offers a momentary release from anxiety, like, there's so much going on. And I personally find it sort of helpful to think about that stuff, you know, to think about how it's enmeshed with everything else in your life, because that can also be an entry point to trying to make sex better, is you know, what, what else is going on in my life that is making me feel this way about sex?
Franki Cookney 37:32
How do we foster that kind of curiosity, then that, that that more collaborative attitude to sex, do you think?
Katherine Angel 37:42
You know, ultimately, it does come down to those norms of gender, it does come down to, to try and to create a space where it's okay, for things to fail, it's okay for for sex to go up and down, it's okay to, to not succeed, you know, and that's sometimes in those moments of like hesitancy or, or failure, or in quote, marks, that's where a kind of, you know, more, more deep human interaction can happen. And I don't mean that in the sense of like, you know, there's sex on the one hand, and then there's intimacy and love on the other at all, because I think that, you know, sex itself can be a profound source of quite profound existential meaning, you know, between strangers, you know, it's not, it's not about casual sex versus relationships or anything like that. It's that sex, I think, is around where we feel our mortality, we feel our precariousness, we feel our fear and our physical and emotional vulnerability. But that's what we're constantly trying to keep up at bay so much in the way in which we think about sex. And I think, if that can be allowed, into sex more, you know, by trying to dismantle these norms of gender where I think men are not allowed to play, they're not allowed to explore. They're not allowed to be vulnerable bodies and vulnerable people. I think, you know, without without opening that space, it's not just violence that comes in, but it's a deep lack of pleasure, ultimately. But it's not easy. You know, I can't I can't give you the recipe, sadly. Because if I could, lots of other people would have as well, you know, and it's, it's sort of incremental, you know, efforts to chip away at that stuff.
Franki Cookney 39:26
For sure, I almost think that's, that's precisely what we're getting at, right? Like, that isn't a recipe, there isn't a magic formula, you can't just slap a hashtag sex positivity sticker on it, and solve it, you have to be prepared to dig into this stuff.
Katherine Angel 39:43
Yeah, and I think also, you know, sometimes, I mean, sometimes, you know, when I talk about this stuff, I think, always I feel like was a bit trippy and kind of a bit, you know, mystical or something, but, but I really think it's a problem, how much we have focused on questions of technique in sex. And, you know, of course, there are, there are issues of technique, you know, if you, if you don't know, where the clitoris is or you don't understand, you know, more or less the anatomy of a sexual partner or yourself, of course, there are going to be things that you, you, you can't do and pleasures you can't reach and, you know, that might lead to pain or to harm. So, you know, it's good to know roughly what's what's where, and you know, what to do. And obviously, part of a good sexual relationship, or a sexual dynamic is one where you can kind of explore that, and you can try things out and all of that, but I think technique is really the least of what's challenging and enriching about sex because it's not, it's not really about finding the way to, to reach pleasure, you know, anything can be pleasurable. That's, you know, that's why Freud is, I think, always really interesting for all the kind of, you know, bad reputation, he has, in a lot of contemporary thought one of Freud's really important insights was that anything can be sexual, you know, I could have a sexual relationship to this chair. You know, sexuality is not about reproduction. It's not about anatomy. It's about what we invest like the meaning we invest in the people around us the objects around us and our past.
Franki Cookney [voiceover] 41:21
It’s about the meaning we invest! I love that. And it doesn’t have to be something huge or scary, you know? It’s like what Ella said earlier about you don’t have to have a soul bond in order to have a meaningful connection during sex. You just have to go into it with a little bit more curiosity - about yourself, about your partner - and a little bit more of a sense of, well, collaboration.
Modern day sex-positivity risks convincing us that we’ve got to be constantly in pursuit of more. We’re pushed to keep having more partners, trying more things, acquire more experiences, be more up for it. And if that’s how you want to approach sex and it feels fun and fulfilling for you then, absolutely, go for it. But we don’t have to. We really don’t have to.
I think true sex positivity is when we’re able to interrogate our own reasons for having sex, to allow ourselves the freedom to figure out what it is we actually like and want to get out of it - including the freedom to not know! - and be honest about that with each other.
Over the course of the series we’re going to be returning to this idea that there is no one purpose of sex, no “right” way to do it or feel about it, and that the paths we might take with sex are myriad and highly individual.
And hopefully you can start to dig into your own experiences, feelings, and desires.
I’m going to warn you right now though, it’s not easy. Unpicking everything we know about sex, everything we see in the media and hear from our peers is HARD. We have so many preconceived ideas about what sex “should” be… and that’s before we even get to the actual banging! This is what I’m going to get into in the next episode…
[Clip from Episode 2]
Mark 43:16
You know, everyone talks about sex as being this amazing, wonderful thing. You see it in the movies where, you know, the two couples, you know, they come together, and it's the music's playing in the background candles are flickering. And there's no mess. There's no, nothing. It's just perfect.
[THEME MUSIC]
Franki Cookney [voiceover] 43:30
Ah yes, expectation versus reality. A perfect recipe for bad sex. But where do these expectations come from in the first place? And how the heck are we supposed to know what we’re doing in bed if we’ve never been taught? We’ll explore all this and more next time.
If you’re enjoying this series, or you have thoughts you want to share, I’d love to hear from you. Drop me an email at secondcirclepodcast@gmail.com or send me a voicenote, I bloody love voicenotes. Go to speakpipe.com/TheSecondCircle to record one now.
Please go ahead and smash that subscribe button And don’t forget to leave a review, it helps boost visibility. I’ll see you back here next time for more BAD SEX.
The Second Circle is produced and hosted by me, Franki Cookney. My audio producer for this series was Anouszka Tate. My editors on this episode were Lucy Douglas and Rob Davies.
Special thanks to Tala Al-Husry, Annabelle Knight, Helen Birch, Simon Eves, Hugh de la Bedoyere, Mariana Feijó, George Aza-Selinger, and Rob Davies for their voiceover work which you heard in the intro.
Finally, I could not have made this series without the incredible support of those who donated to my crowdfunder. Thank you to all of you. In particular I’d like to thank Rochelle Dancel, Rachel Wheeley, Christine Woolgar, Anna Richards, Jeegar Kakkad, Quinn Rhodes, Simon Eves, Clíodna Shanahan, Paul Nixon, Tabitha Rayne, David Carroll, Douglas Greenshields, Tun Ewald, Jack, Laura Hunter-Thomas, Olivia Savory and David Kreysa. You guys fucking rock.
[Ends]
Episode 1: Aren’t we all sex positive now?