Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Learning How to Be A Better Lover

By Kevin Murphy
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
I was reading a woman’s magazine in a waiting room recently and it prominently featured an article on top ways for a woman to pleasure her man sexually. The tips themselves were hackneyed enough; that is to say, they have been recycled in various formats for many years now. But two things about it caught my attention. Firstly this was the second women’s magazine in a few months to run an article on the importance of women knowing how to sexually satisfy their men. There is obviously a demand for it. The previous article was a little less tasteful and a lot more graphic, despite being a mainstream publication aimed at teens and young twenty year olds.
Secondly, the more recent article introduced the topic along the lines that with the right sexual technique, and therefore a fulfilling sexual experience, love can blossom. If I was reading it correctly, this meant that in order for love to be possible, and by love I presumed it meant the vague multimedia-concocted version that is low on ordinary detail and high on promise, then one had to have a successful first sexual encounter with the man of your choice.
Thinking about it now, it must represent an alluring thesis for any woman. If one can turn oneself, through the use of tips and suggestions from a magazine or tv show or movie, into a modern day Mata Hari, then love is guaranteed. Successful sex, the definition of which is sex that satisfies the man according to the magazines, leads to love. As a formula, it is blindingly simple.
Leaving aside for a moment the often heard argument as to how thirty to forty years of feminism could have lead to this, there is a psychoanalytic perspective that probably needs airing in this regard also. From the latter perspective, the message is a curiously twisted one. On the one hand the woman is required – once again – to take responsibility for all things sexual. She must acquire the knowledge that will satisfy the man. Now while it appears to be putting the woman into the position of power, it also has the curious effect of making the woman into a sexual object.
For those who are familiar with psychoanalysis, this is the basis of hysteria – the woman becoming the object for an ‘other’ in a way that links in with her sexuality. This discovery led to Freud’s (and Josef Breuer’s) book ‘Studies on Hysteria’ in 1895, the book that is generally credited with being the start of psychoanalysis.
So, in an unintended twist, while taking on the mantle of all-knowing sexuality, the contemporary woman transforms herself into the object of sexual pleasure. The double-edge of this particular sword is that while the woman will undoubtedly attract the attentions of the opposite sex (if that is her choice) she will also run the risk of being defined in particularly narrow and objectified terms. For some it is not a problem, for others it most definitely is.
What of those women who may well be comfortable with their sexuality but who reject the requirement to become expert man-pleasers in bed or in any other part of their lives? And what of those women who suffer varying degrees of disrespect on account of this predominant ideology at the hands of their male partners? And what of those women who are made to feel inadequate because their brand of femininity precludes them from this way of being a woman?
It’s only when you look beneath the surface of things that you get a glimpse of the real complexities at work. The magazine idea of the perfect sexual woman, alluring as it might be, leaves many women behind. As such it represents an ideal for a section of women but not all women. That section, or constituency of women for whom it works, may well be in the ascendant because it is a value system that is most loudly heard. And we must not forget that powerful commercial organisations have a vested interest in promoting this ideology and fuelling its continued rise.
Now there is certainly an argument to be made that sex should be talked about, rather than hidden. Of course that is the case. But once we accept that it should be talked about and brought out into the open, the next question to be asked is ‘how’ it should be talked about and ‘how’ it should be brought into the open. In a way that elevates? Or in a way that diminishes? Often the world we live in is intent on ensuring that the lines between these two positions remain conveniently blurred.
Of course, to even raise such a topic is to be branded as someone with no sense of humour. Such has been the case, listening to the radio recently, for anyone daring to criticize the new Sex and the City movie. It’s only a bit of fun. Well, I can understand that. I jokingly complained at being called too early for my appointment in the waiting room mentioned above because I had only had time to reach sex tip number three. Now I’ll have to make another appointment.
So the ‘fun argument’ is all very well, but humour is a very subjective thing and to require people to find something fun or funny borders on the dictatorial.
Also, despite those who try to pass something off as ‘just a bit of fun’, every piece of humour has a deeper layer of meaning whether we like it or not. And that is something that was known long before Freud’s ‘Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious’ was published in 1905. There’s nothing wrong with being able to enjoy a joke once we can clearly see that the joke is not being made at someone else’s expense.
It is fun to read about sex tips in magazines. We all want to know how we can do things better. And it may even raise awareness of what to do and what not to do to make oneself a better lover. But we also have to remember that other meanings are also being communicated: that 'standards' of sexual performance are now being prescribed; that better sex leads to perfect love; that a woman is a better woman by having more sexual knowledge. But in this rising tide of objectified sexuality something of the richer complexity not just of womanhood but of human relationships is being swept away.

* The next blog will appear on Tuesday June 22nd, 2010.

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