Can sex be freed?
April Reading Group discussion Pt. 2
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Last week we talked about Silvia Federici’s “Why Sexuality is Work”, specifically the idea that sex tends to be framed as a release for the workday, a weekend-warrior kind of affair— but that in practice, it’s just not that easy to become someone else on the weekends.
The way we compartmentalize our sexuality from our public-facing lives, however, is a main claim of the essay. While “men seem to be experts” at this compartmentalization, according to Federici, “it is always women who suffer most from the schizophrenic character of sexual relations, not only because we arrive at the end of the day with more work and more worries on our shoulders, but additionally because we have the responsibility of making the sexual experience pleasurable for the man.”
Federici claims this why women are more “sexually responsive”— which got me thinking about how, even today, most women are assumed to have more “responsive” desire (sexual interest and arousal needs to be stoked) while men are expected to have "spontaneous,” constant, needs-nothing-to-get-him-going desire.
None of this is natural. It’s that women learn that sex is “a duty” and worse, women are raised as “the safety valves for everything that goes wrong in a man’s life, and men have always been allowed to turn their anger against us if we do not measure up to the role, particularly when we refuse to perform.”