This essay is the first in a four-part series, in which two philosophers—one a radical feminist, one a conservative Catholic—debate the morality of sexual intercourse and its implications for women’s equality.
In feudal times, the rich enjoyed their riches and took their entitlement to them largely for granted. How about the poor? Likely some simply accepted their position and its limitations, while others wondered whether it wasn’t rather unfair that “accidents of birth” made such a difference to each person’s life chances. Call this suspicion the egalitarian impulse: a sense that unless there is something to explain why groups of humans who otherwise seem so similar nonetheless have such different lives, there is a moral problem.
This is an essay about that same moral problem, in a very different domain: indeed, the most private domain of the private sphere: intimate sexual relations. Contemporary societies have achieved much in the way of equality, and innumerable keys have been tapped over the question of whether remaining sex differences in work (by industry; in seniority; in lifetime income and superannuation; in taking part-time or flexible work options in order to provide care) can be fully explained as a woman’s choice, or whether there are still remaining injustices ultimately producing these sex-different outcomes.
But there’s something very few people interested in equality are talking about: sexual intercourse itself. In what follows, I will argue that women today are like those poor under feudalism who simply accepted their position. I write this to encourage the egalitarian impulse in women: a suspicion that in the domain of the sexual men have more than they deserve and women have less, and that it’s time to talk about it. Or more accurately, it’s time for women to remember that we were talking about that once. Third-wave feminist “sex-positivity” won its culture war, but as has been made painfully clear by trans activism, winning a culture war is not the same as being right, and “wins” are not stable.
Sexual Intercourse ≠ Sexual Activity
By “sexual intercourse” I mean something narrower than “sexual activity.” Sex-negative feminism, as I am understanding it, has no issue with sexual pleasure, with intimacy, with the interpersonal giving and receiving of pleasure. It is not anti-orgasm or anti-fun. Its issue is exclusively with penetrative sex involving a penis and a vagina—in other words, heterosexual sexual intercourse.
To say that attitudes to intercourse are uncritical is an understatement. As Andrea Dworkin wrote:
In Amerika, there is the nearly universal conviction—or so it appears—that sex (f***ing) is good and that liking it is right; morally right; a sign of human health; nearly a standard for citizenship. Even those who believe in original sin and have a theology of hellfire and damnation express the Amerikan creed, an optimism that glows in the dark: sex is good, healthy, wholesome, pleasant, fun; we like it, we enjoy it, we want it, we are cheerful about it; it is as simple as we are, the citizens of this strange country with no memory and no mind.
An article in The Journal of Sexual Medicine by Muhammad Irfan and colleagues claims that “Sexual activity is an essential human need and an important predictor of other aspects of human life.”
Water is an essential human need: the average person will be dead within a week without it. Food is an essential human need: the average person will be dead within two months without it. Sex, obviously, is not an essential human need, because people can go their whole lives without it and suffer no particular consequences. Or, as Dana Densmore puts it in her 1968 essay “On Celibacy,” where she defends celibacy as an “honourable alternative” to sex, “Sex is not essential to life, as eating is. Some people go through their whole lives without engaging in it at all, including fine, warm, happy people. It is a myth that this makes one bitter, shrivelled up, twisted.”
If sex raised no serious moral questions, it might be inconsequential to describe it as an essential human need—morally on a par with claiming that annual leave is a human right. But sex is not a straightforward good in the way that annual leave likely is.
The Ethical Argument against Intercourse
Obviously, sex is different things to different people. The porn actress Bonnie Blue describes sex as a “hobby,” and appears happy to accept the claim that she is to porn what elite athletes are to sport. An ex-porn star interviewed for a documentary describes sex by popping her finger out from inside her cheek and saying “it’s like this.”
A paper in a collection on leisure studies by Feona Attwood and Clarissa Smith describes sex variously as: “a conduit to the most wonderful sensations”; “a tiresome chore, a painful imposition or simply tedious”; “a functional way of keeping oneself healthy and in touch with a partner”; “more like an ‘extreme sport’, where orgasm (temporary pleasure) is less important than as a side-effect of testing the body’s limits”; “acquiring skills and knowledges”; “thrill seeking and risk taking, sought as pleasures in their own right.”
Still, sex could mean different things to different people and it could be that some things are true of sex regardless of how people feel about it, and that a lot of sex that has something in common and what it has in common is bad. I suggest that sex is morally bad in at least four respects. It 1) is male-centered and male-identified; 2) is inegalitarian; 3) is instrumentalizing; and 4) violates negative freedom.
Intercourse Is Male-Centered
In his book The Gender Knot, Allan Johnson describes patriarchy as a form of society that is male-dominated, male-identified, male-centered, and control obsessed. His example of male-centeredness is “normal heterosexuality.” He noted the way that sex was equated with intercourse, a practice far more conducive to men’s pleasure than women’s. Doing what centers her pleasure might be considered not sex, just fooling around. Equating sex with intercourse means considering a commonplace social activity as something defined by the start and end of the man’s pleasure: it starts when he penetrates her and it ends when he ejaculates.
In other cases where social practices are built around men, we are able to cast a critical eye on them. For example, we question how the typical working day appears set up for a “breadwinner” husband with a “homemaker” wife able to pick up kids when school ends, run errands that can only be run during business hours, require overtime where that would for a primary caregiver eat into time with kids and time to cook meals and do other housework and household administration. Why are we able to recognize the male-centeredness of the working day and resent it, but not notice the male-centeredness of sex and resent it?
Intercourse is Inegalitarian
Being male-centered is one way of being inegalitarian, but there are others. In my debate book with Angie Pepper, Is It Wrong To Buy Sex?, I note asymmetries in time spent on his versus her pleasure; the orgasm gap; and the fact that nearly three-quarters of straight women say they have intercourse every or nearly every time they engage in sexual activity, yet according to another source 70—90 percent of women don’t orgasm from intercourse alone (which is to underline the point made already that intercourse is male-centered and male-identified).
Different asymmetries might be more salient depending on whether we’re thinking about sex inside relationships or casual sex. Hookup culture produces exceptionally bad sex for women, and yet is commonplace. That is not to say that women get nothing out of casual sex: a woman might experience considerable psychological pleasure in the form of feeling validated in her sexual attractiveness to men. Here’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s character in Fleabag expressing something like this point:
I’m not obsessed with sex. I just can’t stop thinking about it.
The performance of it. The awkwardness of it. The drama of it.
The moment you realize someone wants… your… body.
Not so much the feeling of it.
“Not so much the feeling of it” is the admission that the physical aspect of sex is not what she likes about sex. But her male partner is likely to experience psychological pleasure too, in the form of validation that he can attract women for casual sex, in addition to his considerably greater physical pleasure. So there is likely to still be overall asymmetry.
Inequality is not necessarily injustice. But these inequalities do not have easy explanations (“we just spend more time on him because it takes him longer to get off”), and they are not merely idiosyncratic to each couple. Rather, they are widespread between groups, working in men’s favour and women’s disfavour.
Intercourse is Instrumentalizing
To instrumentalize a person is what it sounds like: to use another person as an instrument or tool in the achievement of your ends, rather than to treat them as a person. In sex this is most visible in prostitution: the man treats the woman’s body, the woman herself, as an instrument to achieving his pleasure.
In the debate book I mentioned earlier, I quoted a male porn star, who illustrates the idea of instrumentalizing perfectly. He said of porn sex: “I used to say it’s like borrowing somebody’s body to masturbate with.” He also comments that this is “not bad… better than real jerking off.” This kind of instrumentalizing also happens in casual sex. Here’s one dramatic example from Cordelia Fine’s 2017 book Testosterone Rex:
A large-scale study of thousands of female North American college students found that they had only an 11 per cent chance of experiencing an orgasm from a first casual “hookup”. … While many men felt that bringing their girlfriend to orgasm reflected well on their masculinity, they often didn’t feel the same way about hookup partners’. … ‘One participant quoted by the study authors captured this sense of selfish entitlement particularly neatly: “Another man told us, ‘I’m all about just making her orgasm,’ but when asked if he meant ‘the general her or like the specific her?’ he replied, ‘Girlfriend her. In a hookup her, I don’t give a shit.’”
It’s difficult to estimate the exact extent to which the total sex had globally is instrumentalizing. There are many types of relationships that make instrumentalizing sex likely: child marriages, forced marriages, certain sorts of arranged marriages (where the wife considers sex a duty), some faith marriages (I’m thinking about the portrayal of sex in the Netflix series Unorthodox). There are obviously some men who approach girlfriends and wives in the spirit of acquisition. These men may well be imposing instrumentalizing sex, which the girlfriends and wives may be willing to tolerate for other reasons.
The distinction between bad sex and instrumentalizing sex is relevant here. A partner may be sincerely committed to achieving mutually enjoyable sexual activity and yet just not really know what he is doing; or he may have been deluded by porn into thinking that she enjoys whatever he wants to do to her, and so have false beliefs about what actually is mutually enjoyable. And there are hard cases in between, like the relationship sex portrayed in the Netflix series Sexify, where it is hard to tell whether the man thinks his partner is enjoying it, doesn’t care whether she is, and/or doesn’t expect her to. It seems to me that bad sex is not yet unethical or unjust sex. It might depend on exactly why the sex is bad, whether because of excusable ignorance or because of disregard or even malice. So intercourse is unethical because it is instrumentalizing to the extent that it is, in fact, instrumentalizing.
Intercourse Violates Negative Freedom
When philosophers talk about “negative freedom,” they mean freedom from interference by other people. This normally applies to violations of bodily integrity and violations of property rights. So a strong version of this idea would only apply to sexual assaults, not to reluctant acquiescence to sex-pestery.
But a weaker version might still be worth considering. Why do women in heterosexual relationships feel that they need an excuse to refuse sex (the ubiquitous “headache”)? In some cases, the male partner subjects the woman to pressure, pestering, duress, harassment, emotional blackmail, threats to break up, etc. In others, she feels pressure merely as a result of knowing what her partner wants and expects, or knowing what the society around her considers “normal,” even when he does not use any of the tactics just listed in order to obtain sex from her. Agreeing to sex is the default. Saying “no” on a single occasion is the exception.
Because there is so much cheerleading for sex going on (recall Dworkin: “good, healthy, wholesome, pleasant, fun”!) there comes to be a widespread idea that sex is required, that there’s something wrong with your relationship, or you, if you’re not having it. Compare this with a society of religious people where there is a widespread belief that public prayer is necessary, which creates an issue for individuals’ freedom from prayer.
A survey of all the reasons why people have sex, by researchers Cindy Meston and David Buss, came up with 237 different reasons. Among the top fifty were “I wanted to show my affection to the person,” “I wanted to please my partner,” “the person really desired me,” “it seemed like the natural next step in my relationship,” “it just happened,” “it was a special occasion,” “I wanted to keep my partner satisfied,” “I wanted to make up after a fight,” and “I was drunk.”
In case you’re a woman who has heterosexual sex in this sense of intercourse and you are feeling resistant to everything I have said so far, let me invite you to a personalized thought-experiment. Think about what you find physically pleasurable just as a matter of your own body. If you were single and not dating, and found yourself aroused, how would you get yourself off? How often would that involve penetration of any kind, and what proportion of the total sexual activity would involve penetration? For example, is it the main thing you like, or is it quite nice just for a little minute near the end, or would you pretty much never bother with it?
Once you have a clear sense of that, think about how your partner would answer this question (how much penetration of you would he ideally like, whether that is his preferred way to get off). Then think about whether, in your sexual life together, you have achieved equality, in the sense of a reasonable compromise between what you would both ideally want. If not, ask yourself whether you are largely going along with what he wants (or what men in general are expected to want) because that is “normal.”
When you feel inclined to defend the sex you have, is that because it’s genuinely physically pleasurable? Or is it for other reasons, like wanting to be a generous partner, wanting to maintain the relationship, wanting to be normal, or feeling validated in being sexually desired or sexually used in this way? If the sex you’re having is not a reasonable compromise between what you both find pleasurable, why is that? Could it have anything to do with sexism?
Anticipating Some Objections
In her 2016 paper “Love: What’s Sex Got to Do With It?” Natasha McKeever asks “what value, if any, sex adds to a romantic relationship.” Let’s take this as an objection: if sex adds value to romantic relationships, then because romantic relationships are good, sex must also be good. Or, at least, the way that sex adds value to love would be a serious counterbalance to any of the moral issues with sex noted thus far.
McKeever makes her case for sex adding value to love in terms of four elements: pleasure, union, intimacy, and vulnerability. The argument is that sex constitutes and is a vehicle to these elements: “sex does almost literally ‘make love’, as well as being a means of communicating love already felt.” Pleasure includes psychological pleasure; union is about the sharing of lives and achieving closeness; intimacy is about privacy and exclusivity; and vulnerability is about psychological and emotional need. These considerations do not show that sex is necessary to romantic love. Still, McKeever thinks that, taken together, they suggest that “romantic love without sex might be somewhat impoverished” (although she says this depends on how the individuals in the couple “think and feel about sex generally”).
Does this show that the critique of intercourse is incorrect, or at least counterbalanced? No, because all of pleasure, union, intimacy, and vulnerability can be achieved through the giving and receiving of pleasure without intercourse, with what we might now think of as mere “fooling around” rather than sex proper.
The consideration that gets us closest to thinking intercourse is required is union, in the sense of getting as physically close as it is possible for two people to get. But even there it seems that one could achieve union in a relationship without the physical act of intercourse; and without being too vulgar about it, I also wonder whether those who would defend intercourse as necessary to closeness also think it would be good if she started digitally penetrating him. If not, why not?
Thus there would appear to be no incompatibility between an ethical critique of intercourse and maintaining that sex(ual activity) “makes” love. The objection does not go through.
Another objection might be put in terms of procreation: intercourse is necessary to reproduction, and reproduction is necessary to the survival of the species. Kathleen Stock makes a version of this objection in discussing the lecture on which this essay is based on The Lesbian Project podcast, saying that it is absurd to criticize something which the survival of the species depends on.
But re-evaluating sex need not mean never having intercourse. It might become a thing a couple does only when trying to conceive, or only when the woman is feeling exceptionally generous. A welcome side effect of less intercourse would be greatly reduced adoptions and abortions as a result of unwanted pregnancy. All the casual sex and all the not-aimed-at-procreation sex could change, without that having any impact on the survival of the species. It is not as though once humans get out of the habit, they will forget how and become like the panda. We are an intelligent species, and we can be deliberate in our social practices. This objection, too, would appear to fail.
Click here to read the next installment in this series.
This essay is based on Lecture 7 of my free online course The Philosophy of Feminism, all lectures for which are available here.
