Unpacking the popularity of a paper on feigning sexual pleasure: Consider both sexual politics and 21st-century profits

Sexual politics

Let’s first examine why the issue of “women feigning sexual pleasure” ignites public interest. One of the oldest elements in the story of heterosexual relations is that of woman as powerful sexual temptress. Seductresses abound in ancient mythologies, including both the Old and New Testaments, generating enduring cultural legends that permeate even our modern sensibility. Men’s lack of trust in women and their fear of women’s sexual power are more than just historical tropes in art, music and literature. As women’s studies research since the 1970s has expended untold buckets of ink to illuminate, this mistrust and fear form one of the primary bases of global misogyny (Kramarae and Spender, 2000).

Suspicions about women’s sexual purity continue to feature as the central expression of this mistrust in cultures with obvious gender inequality, where dowry demands, men’s honor entitlements, and virginity tests provide the tableaux where mistrust is played out. However, in the global North, where popular discourse emphasizes women’s sexual emancipation, sexual self-expression and gender equality, the mistrust moves to a more covert level. It fuels ongoing interest in “women feigning sexual pleasure” but you will rarely see any analysis of the sources of this interest.

Codes of honor may have gone with the wind in our pluralistic and transient modern societies, but the affective importance of men’s traditional needs for honor as regards their wives’ sexuality lives on in individualized masculine pride. To whit: how can men know for sure that their wife or girlfriend or even hookup of the night is sexually satisfied, and thus, that their masculinity, now linked to erotic performance, is affirmed? Alas, historic suspicions persist. Thus it is not enough to observe women’s sexual performance, much less to ask them for self-report. There needs to be an objective indication, something akin to the blood on the sheet that “proved” a new wife’s virginity.

The quest for such an objective proof of sexual pleasure, an idiomatic Rosetta stone, currently such a big part of sexual neuroscience, fills internet chat rooms. Is it patterns of breathing? Brain activation? Skin flushing? Nipple changes? What about direct genital measures such as vaginal pulse amplitude? Permanent need begets permanent suspicion and gives rise to the continuing demand that scientific research illuminate the mysterious “truth” of women’s sexual pleasure. Scientists with their secretive analyses and clever questionnaires and, now, their fMRIs and PETSCANs, will discern what is “really” going on behind women’s deceptions and give men answers they can rely on.

The media’s endless demand for sexual stories

The second vector leading to the global publicity given to this article has to do with the marketing of science in the media. Sex is the siren song of 21st-century mass media. As many news outlets make a profit-seeking shift from information to infotainment, media fill their pages and websites with exciting sexuality “news.” Depending on the media outlet’s audience and advertisers, there’s a mixture of hot new research studies on homosexual animals or brain pleasure sites, experts’ save-your-marriage advice about how to spice up your lovemaking or communicate your longings, and/or analyses of the colorful or shocking sexual peccadilloes of celebrities and newsmakers. Most of the time the sex stories are kept “clean” by their focus on scientific research or relationship benefits. Nonetheless, the neighborhood news and magazine kiosk these days is a tits-and-ass tabloid festival, and if you Google any sexuality topic you’d better get ready for thousands of hits. Mass media often seem to be an all-sex-all-the-time one-note song.

This media sexplosion is a recent development. Explicit displays are still severely limited in many localities and countries, as are politically controversial stories and images. However, new technologies and newly permissive publication policies are increasingly used to push back against cultural restrictions, and what might have been part of limited-availability porn and avant-garde literature as recently as the 1960s is now accessible everywhere. Censorship laws and publishing and broadcasting traditions that limited the mass media’s explicit attention to sex at first dwindled as laws were overturned, but now restrictions seem to have all but collapsed.

Every topic is fodder for the boundless sexual curiosity of the media. In its insatiable need for sexual material, especially with the dignified tone of scientific research, media look for content such as new sexual facts and theories. They look to you and me, the readers and contributors to this journal, to fill their pages and websites. We who write about and research sexuality are as much part of contemporary sexual commerce as the manufacturers of other sexuality products, at least in the eyes of the mass media, and it behooves us to grasp our situation and situatedness.

The double-edged sword of publicizing sex research

A huge global public relations machinery, including media consultants and academic and publishers’ PR departments, now channels intellectual material such as new science to media outlets. This “marketing of science” is a subject of growing concern to critical and investigative science journalists (Hamblin, 2014), especially those specializing in health issues where commercialization (e.g., pushing new drug products) is a danger. Through press releases, scientist speaker training, and free conference registrations, professional organizations, academic institutions, and publishers of books and academic journals energetically work these days to get the word out about their intellectual products.

There are some social advantages to this publicity, of course, especially when it comes to disseminating studies that correct misinformation or contribute to public health. Sexuality is so political and controversial that the need for accurate information and analyses that challenge oversimplification is constant. Publicity for its own sake or for a business purpose such as increasing the visibility of a publication, organization, or institution is harder to defend on professional grounds.

Ultimately, publicity about sex research is a double-edged sword. As Hamblin (2014) points out, science is complicated and press releases are often guilty of sensationalism and exaggeration. This is especially true as regards sex research, both because of the desperate interest of the mass media in the topic (second section of this essay) and because of the subtle politics underlying sexual reality (first section of this essay). The huge media pickup of the Thomas, Steltzl and Lafrance (2016) study appears to have been predictably superficial and tilted towards reinforcing the notion that sexual satisfaction is a deep mystery and women are deceptive and manipulative.

The original study itself, of course, was geared towards showing how young women in uncommitted relationships behave when confronting the conflicts and realities of sex and gender politics. They often deceive to preserve their self-esteem and their views of what is socially necessary. Their explanations are self-justifying and lack insight into their participation in a centuries old patriarchal drama. In reporting about the study, however, often just abbreviating press releases issued by the authors’ academic institutions or the publisher of the article, the mass media seem to have been attracted to a current instance of an ancient story: the endangered man and the manipulative woman.

In participating in quasi-public-sex-education through media publicity, sexologists lose control of framing their story. They serve the sensational and superficial purposes of the media and may unwittingly contribute to misinformation or perpetuate bias. We sexologists may agree to be part of new marketing strategies, but we should acknowledge the dangers as well as the rewards.