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The Dirty Little Secret of a Generation
by Merri Lisa Johnson

Oprah has called it a silent epidemic. The women of America are flocking to Chicago to reveal a terrible secret from behind closed bedroom doors. They have little or no desire for sexual intercourse. There’s no ignoring it anymore: women don’t want it. The camera pans the crowd, cutting from one face to another; hair swings side to side in sync as guest after guest admits that yes, she too feels sex is a chore, something to avoid, a service, a nuisance. It’s just gone, they exhale, wide-eyed and glassy, observing from the sidelines the dip and swell of their own sex drive. Oprah has put her finger on it once again-the pink nubby pulse of the nation (or lack thereof). Yet, as is frustratingly common to the show, she slides along the surface of the problem, then veers into various ruts of conventional wisdom. Her guru of the day chalks it up to women’s internalized sense of themselves as mommies rather than hotties, avoiding all the truly interesting, complex questions like why can’t mommies be hotties, or what could the men in the audience be doing to make sex more physically pleasurable to these women? Perhaps the epidemic is not that women don’t want sex, but that women don’t want sex as we know it.

Conversely, what sex-positive culture leaves unresolved is how to be a woman who loves sex, even likes it mean now and then, but still feels enmeshed in inequality in heterosexual couplehood to the extent that she can’t or won’t say what she wants out of erotic encounters, in which case the heterosexual bedroom remains locked, a private arena of tense physical exchanges and inarticulate desire. Concern about a male lover’s ego combines with one’s own insecurities to produce muted pleasures. Quietly, secretly, we search for the right tone of voice, struggle against the undertow of misogyny in our bodies and culture, knowing of no register for “discussions” initiated by women other than bitching, nagging, complaining, whining. “It’s the dirty little secret of a generation,” Peggy Orenstein confides, “young women. . . feel an entitlement to sexual pleasure on which they can’t convince themselves to act.”14

The following email is my own dirty little secret. In exposing it here, I am outing myself as one of those women who hold Ph.D.’s in nuclear physics (actually mine’s in literature, but you get my meaning) who turn into adoring little girls in the presence of the men we so long to be loved by. This is me, meek and knock-kneed, walking the tightrope between a feminist rhetoric of equality and a feminine appeal for male benevolence. Listen for the halting speech of my competing needs and allegiances.

July 23, 2000. 8:56 P.M. (E.S.T.)

Subject: Sex-Doing It & Doing It Well

Dear K______,

I am reading the book I mentioned to you a while back, When the Earth Moves: Women and Orgasm by Mikaya Heart, skimming it really, sexpert that I sometimes take myself to be. I don’t immediately count myself among the book’s audience of women who need to be prodded to overcome their inculcated shame over sexuality. Pm not uncomfortable with sex. Or am I? I made myself slow down and reread a section titled ‘”Asserting Ourselves,” a subject I initially assumed fell below my level of sexual sophistication. Heart writes,

“[A]t some point in your lifetime you need to take charge and make sex into a form of play where you make the rules and call the shots....[I]f you never say, ‘Okay this is what I want,’ then the relationship can never grow. . .. [D]ecide what it is you really want and negotiate with your partner from there.”

I took it for granted that I know my ‘’’rules,’’ my pleasures, that I know how to get off. So why do I cringe when I think of “real” sex-the nitty-gritty of opening my legs and feeling a body push inside me? Why do I turn off so completely to sex when I’m having it regularly?

One of the pitfalls of not living together (or anywhere near each other) is that we don’t have the luxury of time to explore each other’s sexuality honestly or to confront our own. I guess I come across as more sexually sure of what I want or don’t want, or expect or whatever. A ball-breaker. Emasculating. The truth is I am so vulnerable and afraid and totally lost. I’m twenty-seven years old and I never got a chance to become sexual outside the pressures to perform-for my man, for my ego. (Does anyone?) One woman in the book says her husband has been impotent for twenty years and that he makes love like a woman, with fingers and tongue. I caught myself thinking how wonderful. Then-pause-why wonderful? What a strange thought for a (primarily) heterosexual girl like myself.

Fingers and tongue. Before you say anything, let me clarify: I’m not suggesting I just want to be eaten out all the time and never fuck or suck anyone off or do anything for anyone but myself. It’s not selfishness I’m speaking from. Fingers and tongue sound good to me because they mean slowing things down from the first erotic charge that passes between us to slamming penetration. (The “uh, uh, uh” disguising impact as passion.) How do I ask for something different without facing your disappointment, feelings of being rebuffed, controlled, dismissed, chided (I’m searching for words because this story is newborn, wet with membranes I don’t want to tear)? I hear you challenging me, “’Why is it always about what you want or don’t want?” And me thinking, “Why isn’t it ever?” Something’s clearly wrong if we both feel ripped off by this sex thing.

From a chapter entitled “Fuck You & Your Untouchable Face” in Jane Sexes It Up: True Confessions of Feminist Desire edited by Merri Lisa Johnson.


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