Can’t cum, too busy being fucked by the man

She told me she’d tried it all: she’d listened to every sex podcast, bought the arousal gels, spent $100 on libido gummies, read all the books but still, she felt nothing.

In my first session with Anthea* I asked, ‘how often do you feel pleasure?’ She froze. Confused, and then in a small voice, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever felt pleasure. I actually don’t even know what it is.’ Anthea had booked in to see me because she’d never had an orgasm. She felt broken, faulty, a failure: an emotional landscape all too common for those who’ve never had an orgasm. She told me she’d tried it all, she’d listened to every sex podcast, bought the arousal gels, spent $100 on libido gummies, read all the books but still, she felt nothing. Prematurely I’d like to note, there is a happy ending here. Anthea ends up having many orgasms, but she didn’t get there from the three fingering techniques I set her for homework. She had to do something much bigger, she had to fuck capitalism. 

When Anthea came back to session after having her first orgasm, we both did a silent seated dance, like we’d prepped choreo for that moment but we were just mirroring each other’s joy. A pretty different scene from our first hour together, where I felt the gravity of those precious 60 minutes. Not because orgasm was impossible, but because we had to do so much work to make big life changes. Changes that would shake, rock and abolish the scaffolding that prop us all up, the systems of oppression that limit our human experience, systems that feel completely out of our control. I felt Anthea’s expectant pauses waiting for me to fill them with new sex positions, or ‘tips and tricks’ as so many have also wanted. When clients don’t receive this instant result, many will give up. Because they’ve been told sex is something that should come naturally and when it doesn’t, there must be something wrong with them. So trying something new feels too hard, too confronting. Rather than staying with the practices, or the sessions, many accept a life that is productive and pleasureless.

This is never the individual's fault. Capitalism and consumerism have stolen our pleasure, only to sell it back to us with interest. Late-stage capitalism is shaped by consumerism, making us believe that consumption is an essential and necessary part of our day-to-day lives, that we must work only to stockpile more things. In jam-packed schedules and fluorescently lit offices, capitalism demands that our bodies are bots, committed to the well-oiled machine of labour, obsessed with being always on, always busy, hyper efficient and productive in the way we work, rest and play. And when we function like this for the majority of our lives, it’s hard to turn it off in bed. This way of living seeps into sex and relationships, where capitalism, patriarchy and anti-sex puritanism warns against any freedom or celebration of sexual autonomy. I often find myself asking my clients… have you ever considered you’re not the problem, that you are not broken? That these systems exist to keep you inline, driven by reward, stuck in the pattern of buying to fix instead of feeling to heal?

It’s not you, it’s capitalism. And if you want your orgasm back, you need to examine how systems of oppression are designed to control your pleasure. 

Capitalism won’t let you rest. I asked a client how they rested the other day, they answered like this: by scrolling Instagram, or shopping. Now, reading this you too may feel the similar wave of despair I felt that day. To hear their rest was centred around the habit of reaching for their phone to secure a reliable dopamine release, just to watch mindless videos of a stranger attaching accessories to their bedazzled Stanley Cup. Capitalism rebranded rest to be about lying down, spooning a phone as a companion, rather than giving our brains space to integrate, re-calibrate, feel. Many of us are so railed with fatigue, and when we don’t sleep, we can’t think up new ways of living, we don’t have time or energy for that, so instead we turn to routine. Exhaustion narrows our window of tolerance, we become over-reactive and unable to self regulate, we fight with the people we love, we have more health problems, don’t move as often and… we have less sex. Because when you’re fucking exhausted, you need to sleep, not to fuck. And sure, we’re seeing more TED talks telling us to rest. That’s great. But often they tell us to rest so we can be more efficient workers: rest more so you can work better! With wellness days integrated into most big companies, it’s clear the only reason they are spending thousands on morning teas is so they can optimise productivity and minimise the time it takes to complete tasks. For the future of the business! And the menial sacrifice of your orgasm.

 

Pleasure and rest are good bed buddies. We need rest to be able to feel, and we need to be able to feel to experience pleasure. In saying this, pleasure and rest are often seen as something nice to have, an indulgence, not an essential part of being human. Those who rest are perceived as lazy, slow, boring, inefficient. And those in pursuit of pleasure are slutty, infected, sex obsessed, freaks. If sex is dirty and wrong, but work is clean and good, we are reminded that sex should only be the smallest part of our lives, because the biggest part is our job, net worth and where we spend our money. It is acceptable to indulge in brief moments of pleasure, only once we’ve earned them. We can enjoy our bodies on the weekend, or when we are on holiday, we’re allowed to dip our toes in the forbidden. This will be enough to remind us of our humanness, and–importantly–our erotic charge, without it being at risk of becoming our entire identity, because capitalism has taught us our identity is what we do for work, not how we feel. 

Capitalism creates a culture of urgency. Time is money, baby. In an effort to feel sexual, but at the same time efficient, many will opt for quickies, or as one young couple named it ‘one-and-done’, an attempt at sexual intimacy that was really only about giving the boyfriend an orgasm so he’d leave his girlfriend alone for a week. These efficient sex sessions disproportionately affect women and people with vulvas as it can take them 20 to 40 minutes to be fully physiologically aroused. When I mention this time period, the most common answer is: 40 minutes?! I don’t have time for that! I understand people are busy, we all have to work to make money to survive but this response suggests that there is a larger issue with pleasure, as a concept. We’ve completely de-prioritised it, sex is now perceived as an act that is best done hard, fast and with a goal in mind. It may take longer for people with vulvas to be aroused but this doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with them. There’s something wrong with the way we’ve understood sex, that sex is about penetration and a few pumps should result in eye-rolling orgasms.

Orgasm is seen as the product of good sex, it is the end goal and when it’s not achieved, many aren't sure whether it was good or not. Capitalism has taught us that if we’re not productive, then we are worthless, because we link our behaviour, productivity and performance to our self worth. This translates to sex, if we can’t produce an orgasm, for ourselves or someone else, then we’re useless in bed. Anthea felt like she had nothing valuable to give during sex, that she wasn’t experienced enough or sexual enough, but it felt too confronting to tell someone she wasn’t going to orgasm, so instead, she’d fake it. Faking pleasure, or an orgasm, can feel like an easy way out of the stress response cycle. When I ask people why they perform their pleasure rather than voice a need, they'll say it’s driven by feeling broken, or wanting to be perceived in a certain way, by not wanting to hurt their partner, feeling bored, wanting sex to end, not knowing how to voice a need or desire. By the time Anthea saw me, she was going to give up on sexual pleasure all together, she said, ‘what’s the point of having sex if I don’t cum?’ For her, the value of sex was deeply connected to orgasm. Completely dismissing the many, many reasons people find sex fulfilling: connection, play, exploration, pleasure, love, expression, eroticism, desire, sensation, rest, fun... But without an orgasm, people start to ask what’s the point? Their partner is putting in all this time, work and all this labour to make them feel good without it paying off.

Under capitalism we are taught to focus on the benefits of everything we do, to become hyper fixated on how doing can optimise our function. If it’s not improving our day-to-day function, it’s probably a waste of precious earning time. At the start of my career I spoke extensively about the benefits of masturbation, sex and orgasm, to convince people that pleasure is good for them. I believed that by speaking about the benefits of such, I could remove the shame, and prove to the masses that there is a good reason to spend your Sunday afternoon masturbating. But years on, I now cringe thinking we need to be promised the benefits in order to be interested in pleasure, rather than the simple fact that it just… feels nice. That we’re a sack of flesh with nerve endings and erectile tissue and it feels good to stroke your inner thigh. That we are humans, and not AI sex bots, and actually feeling pleasure is what makes us distinct. 

Sex bots are hot, and they perform sex well, which aligns nicely with quintessential beauty ideals and sex appeal sold to us by capitalism. Very early on we learn that certain bodies are more deserving of pleasure than others. The size of our tits, biceps, labia or waist will determine the kind of sex and pleasure we think we deserve. Our bodies need to look, smell and taste a certain way before we have sex. No matter how close we get to the perfect aesthetic, embodying the object of someone else's desire limits the sensation we feel. Barbie didn’t have a clit, or a nervous system, but she had long legs, and sex appeal. I hear from cis women who say they’re not sure what they feel during sex because they’re more concerned with what they look like from ‘that angle’, and instead of bearing down and releasing into pleasure, they’re engaging their core and controlling their facial expression. All their awareness is focused on the way they look, rather than the way they feel. Their focus is on becoming the object of desire. It can feel impossible to turn off the head noise with years of conditioning on what sex should look like, but it can feel hopeful to buy a rose scented body cream that vows to enhance confidence (and skin elasticity). Capitalism and consumerism distracts us from accessing pleasure that already exists in our bodies, because it makes us the problem and then promises to solve it for us, for a steep price of $69. 

There is a way to remove the greedy grip capitalism has on our orgasms, and it’s through pleasure. In Uses of The Erotic: The Erotic As Power, Black Queer Feminist, Audre Lorde famously asserts the necessity of eroticism in our activism, that the erotic is ‘creative energy empowered.’ Many like to believe that sex and politics are separate. This may be because the image of white, cis men red-faced and yelling at each other in parliament is deeply unsexy. Though sex, pleasure, relationships, and bodily autonomy aren’t just personal issues that affect us for the ten minutes we’re ‘doing it’. For those who have faced oppression, be it their gender, sexuality, race, ability, the colour of their skin or the size of their body, they will know that the personal is political. Sex is political, because for so many decades it has been used to oppress and devalue individuals, rather than as an expression of resistance, imagination, or fulfilment. Lorde states, ‘in touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being that are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.’ These ‘supplied states’ refer to the scarcity mindset that is a result of a capitalist system. I saw a tweet months ago that read, they pulled funding from the arts so we couldn’t imagine a way out of capitalism. This tweet, and Lorde’s work reminds us, we are conditioned to be cautious of our potential and our creative, erotic capacity so that we stay in line rather than demand change. Pleasure is an effective tool for healing ourselves, which we’ve seen in recent decades with countless studies proving that in order to heal trauma, we need to address sensations present in the body. Pleasure is an essential tool for healing systems and approaches to living that are no longer serving us. 

Anthea started our sessions feeling broken, faulty, a failure, not because she was doing anything wrong, but because she was doing exactly what she’d been taught about sex and pleasure. She saw her body as an object, a machine created to perform an essential function, often for someone else's satisfaction. Our work in session was about insisting on something more, a new way of understanding pleasure that was about slowing down, tuning in, orienting her awareness to the sensation that exists in her body rather than anticipating a sensation that should be present. It was about understanding that pleasure is political because it happens in our bodies, the same place that we hold our identity and sexuality, our oppression and privilege, our safety and trauma, our emotions and sensations. She felt her orgasm through a slow process of unpacking, examining, rewiring and attuning to her body despite her productivity guilt. An ongoing and consistent process of accessing and experiencing pleasure everyday, regardless of whether she’d earned it. The more awareness we bring to our bodies, the more we feel. We just have to be committed to sifting through the distracting noise capitalism manufactures to keep us in line, demanding us to be better, more productive or more efficient. We need to access pleasure as a resistance against the systems that tell us it’s not important. 

*Anthea’s name has been changed for anonymity 

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