Harvard University Human Sexuality Article Analysis & Response Discussion There are 6 articles that need reading responses. For each article, choose one qu

Harvard University Human Sexuality Article Analysis & Response Discussion There are 6 articles that need reading responses. For each article, choose one quote (must be the full quote, not just a phrase) that stands out to you from the corresponding article. Write one paragraph (about 5 to 10 sentences) on why you chose that quote, how you interpret it, and why it interests you.THE QUOTE MUST BE ABOUT SEXUALITY!You can combine all of the responses into one word document and label each article with the reading number (21 reading, 22 reading, 23 reading, 24 reading, 25 reading, 26 reading). 26 Reading will be provided after the question is assigned. Article
Faking to finish: Women’s
accounts of feigning
sexual pleasure to end
unwanted sex
Sexualities
2017, Vol. 20(3) 281–301
! The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1363460716649338
sex.sagepub.com
Emily J Thomas
Ryerson University, Canada
Monika Stelzl
St Thomas University, Canada
Michelle N Lafrance
St Thomas University, Canada
Abstract
In this article, we explore women’s accounts of consensual but unwanted sex, and how
these accounts connect to feigning sexual pleasure. Interviews were conducted with 15
women and we employed a discursive analytic approach to examine the data. All
women used discursive features (e.g. negation, hedging) to situate at least one of
their past sexual experiences as problematic although all avoided the use of explicit
labels such as rape or coercion. Furthermore, women commonly faked orgasm as a
means to end these troubling sexual encounters. We argue the importance of considering women’s accounts of ‘problem’ sex so these experiences are not dismissed.
Keywords
Discourse analysis, consent, faking orgasm, heterosex, women
Orgasm has been positioned as the ‘be-all-and-end-all’ (Potts, 2000: 61) of successful sex. It is the quintessential marker of sexual satisfaction (Fahs, 2011) and
announces the triumphant finish of sex (Potts, 2000). As such, orgasm does not
merely reflect embodied experience, but holds significant implications for both male
Corresponding author:
Emily J Thomas, Department of Psychology, Ryerson University, 350 Victoria Street, Toronto M5B 2K3,
Canada.
Email: emily.thomas@psych.ryerson.ca
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Sexualities 20(3)
and female sexuality. Positioned within a heterosexual (and phallocentric) economy, male orgasm is seen as inevitable while female orgasm is positioned as dependent on a man’s work (Roberts et al., 1995). Thus, female orgasm validates male
skill (Frith, 2013b) and denotes his ‘sexpertise’ (see Potts, 2002). Accordingly, it has
been argued that sex is not ‘a natural act’ (Tiefer, 2004: 3), understood solely in
relation to biological ‘needs’, but rather is enmeshed with social, cultural, economic, and political meanings (Braun et al., 2003; Gilfoyle et al., 1992) as well
as gender relations to power (Fine, 1988). From a poststructuralist perspective,
gender and sexuality are seen as constructed through language and discourse
(Gavey, 1989; Jackson and Scott, 2007). As such, it is important to go beyond
psychological frameworks that focus on the individual and to explore the cultural
contexts and discourses in which sexual experiences are situated (Bay-Cheng and
Eliseo-Arras, 2008).
Whereas female sexuality was once constructed as passive (Gill, 2008) and
‘missing [a] discourse of desire’ (Fine, 1988; Fine and McClelland, 2006), women
have been recently positioned as active and desiring sexual subjects (Gill, 2008).
Critical in this shift are postfeminist notions of freedom and choice (Gill, 2007).
That is, individual choice is no longer tethered to ‘the personal as political’, but
rather it is understood as operating independently and being unaffected by gendered power imbalances. However, scholars have expressed concern that the postfeminist sensibility’s ‘blend of feminist and anti-feminist elements’ (e.g. Burkett and
Hamilton, 2012: 829) paradoxically masks ongoing conformity to oppressive constructions of female sexuality. Sexual agency becomes compulsory as all choices are
constructed as acts of free will. Thus, power imbalances are concealed in this
repackaged construction where female sexuality continues to be understood predominantly in relation to male sexuality and ultimately to heterosexual intercourse
or coitus (Nicolson and Burr, 2003).
The coital imperative posits that penetrative sex is the norm in heterosexual
activity (Braun et al., 2003; Gavey et al., 1999). Dominant scripts of heterosex
typically encompass a range of sexual activities, including the occurrence of
female orgasm which is followed by male orgasm (Braun et al., 2003). This normative heterosexual sequence fashions intercourse-derived orgasm as the ultimate
satisfying sexual experience where male orgasm marks the end of sex (i.e. the
orgasmic imperative, Frith, 2013b, 2015; Potts, 2000). Within this coital imperative,
women’s pleasure has been reduced to achieving orgasm, despite women’s own
expressions of desire for multiple forms of sex, including expressions that orgasm
are not central to sexual fulfillment (e.g. Nicolson and Burr, 2003). Thus, pleasure
and orgasm are conflated as synonymous (Tiefer, 2004), often leaving other desires
unacknowledged (Frith, 2015; Gilfoyle et al., 1992). Within the dominant conceptualizations of female sexual pleasure, female ecstasy must not only be evidenced
by orgasm, but by a particular, culturally produced, version of orgasm that incorporates noise and physical performance (Potts, 2000; Roberts et al., 1995) in order
to be considered ‘real’ (Jackson and Scott, 2007). Thus, given the strong meanings
attached to orgasm, the experience of inorgasmia (absence of orgasm) can be
Thomas et al.
283
understood and experienced as both disturbing to the woman herself and her
partner (Frith, 2013a; Lavie and Willig, 2005) as well as disruptive to the typical
sequence of normative heterosex (Braun et al., 2003). The coalescence of coital and
orgasmic imperatives, along with negative connotations associated with the
absence of orgasm, promote the exaggeration and feigning of sexual pleasure
and orgasm (Fahs, 2011, 2014; Frith, 2015). Faking orgasm, a common performance by her which validates his effort (Potts, 2002), is thus a viable solution to
upholding hegemonic discourses without risking negative repercussions.
Faking orgasm: Prioritizing male pleasure
Most women fake orgasm at least some of the time (e.g. Fahs, 2014; Opperman
et al., 2014; Roberts et al., 1995). Consistent with dominant discourses of heterosex
in which male pleasure and satisfaction are prioritized (Frith, 2013b; Hayfield and
Clarke, 2012), research on exaggerating sexual pleasure has demonstrated that
women’s reasons for faking orgasm are primarily concerned with maintaining
the implicit rules of heterosex (‘doing it for her partner’: Opperman et al., 2014:
510). That is, faking orgasm can work in the interest of promoting a stable relationship in which his intervention leads to her orgasm and ultimately his satisfaction
(Potts, 2000). Women report faking orgasm to protect their partners’ feelings and
to avoid injuring their sense of sexpertise (Fahs, 2014; Muehlenhard and Shippee,
2010; Roberts et al., 1995), and because their partner was unskilled and thus
orgasm was unlikely (Muehlenhard and Shippee, 2010; Opperman et al., 2014).
Additionally, some women report faking orgasm to end a sexual encounter because
of boredom or fatigue (Fahs, 2011; Muehlenhard and Shippee, 2010). Indeed,
women have been found to be more concerned with achieving orgasm to please
their partners than for their own sexual enjoyment (Fahs, 2011; Nicolson and Burr,
2003). In the context of gendered discourses of sexual performance that privilege
male pleasure, faking orgasm can be seen as emotional labour where ‘faking
orgasm becomes a practice of emotion management’ (Frith, 2015: 112). In this
way, women’s experiences of faking orgasm (regardless of their own desires) can
be read as doing ‘emotion work’ in order to preserve their (male) partner’s feelings
and satisfy his desires (Frith, 2015).
Jagose offers an alternative to this view of faking orgasm as distant and at
odds with one’s actual experience of pleasure. Instead, she situates orgasm as
an ‘inventive bodily technique’ (2010: 529) that is political, agentic and
perhaps even pleasurable. If orgasm is a symbol of the heterosexual exchange in
which men work to give women orgasms, then faking orgasm may be a site of
resistance to this dominant practice (Frith, 2015). Faking orgasm in this way can
be seen as ‘political without (most likely) having political intentionality and as
agentic without therefore being empowering’ (Gavey, 2012: 720). The simultaneous
positioning of (fake) orgasms as emotional labour and as an agentic practice trouble the taken-for-granted understandings of female sexual desire, pleasure, and
consent in heterosex.
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Sexualities 20(3)
Consent and wantedness
The dominant model of sexual wanting conceptualizes sex as either consensual
and wanted, or nonconsensual and unwanted (Peterson and Muehlenhard, 2007).
This binary leaves no room for ambivalence between the two (Muehlenhard
and Peterson, 2005), resulting in the conceptual impossibility of experiences
of ‘nonconsensual wanted sex’ and ‘consensual unwanted sex’ (Peterson and
Muehlenhard, 2007). To address this problem, Peterson and Muehlenhard (2007)
adopted a quadrant approach in which consenting and wanting are understood as
distinct, albeit interacting dimensions. This framework was developed as a solution
to acknowledge a wider range of sexual experiences that do not necessarily meet the
classifications for enthusiastically consensual (and wanted) sex nor sexual assault.
However, within this model, consent remains the marker for what is considered
to be acceptable sex and consensual but unwanted sex is labelled as ‘not rape’.
Thus, although desire (or wantedness) is no longer missing in this model (see Fine,
1988), we assert that the prioritization of consent remains problematic given that
consenting to unwanted sex is a common experience among women and one that is
often accompanied by negative psychological effects (e.g. O’Sullivan and Allgeier,
1998; Walker, 1997).
There are many good reasons for engaging in unwanted sex. Acquiescence may
be easier and safer than refusal (Hayfield and Clarke, 2012), at least in part because
direct refusals are not culturally normative in conversation (Kitzinger and Frith,
1999). In addition, consenting to unwanted sex is connected to the expectation that
intercourse should happen (e.g. Hayfield and Clarke, 2012; O’Sullivan and Allgeier,
1998; Walker, 1997) with women reporting consenting to unwanted sex for reasons
similar to faking orgasm. For example, women report consenting to unwanted sex
to maintain relationships (Bay-Cheng and Eliseo-Arras, 2008). In this context, a
partner’s needs are satisfied (Walker, 1997) and interpersonal tension or violence is
avoided (O’Sullivan and Allgeier, 1998). Yet, although not ‘rape’ in the legal sense,
experiences of consensual but unwanted sex may have negative psychological and
physiological effects, including women’s difficulties to articulate and make sense of
these problematic experiences. The exclusive emphasis on consent as the measure of
violation may mask ongoing subordination and unequal power relations (Baker,
2008) as women’s participation in unwanted sex is then positioned as an active
choice based on individual desire free from relational and societal pressures. If we
focus exclusively on consent as the marker for acceptable sex, we ignore the important factor of (non)desire (e.g. Gavey, 1992). As a result, a range of troubling
sexual experiences are eclipsed from view and rendered unintelligible.
Current research
The analysis presented in this article was developed from research originally
aimed at exploring women’s accounts of feigning sexual pleasure (Stelzl and
Lafrance, 2011; 2012). After hearing women’s repeated expressions of distress in
these interviews, and contemplating the important distinction between consenting
Thomas et al.
285
and wanting, we revisited the data to see if women drew on these distinctions when
talking about exaggerating sexual pleasure and faking orgasm. Without exception,
participants alluded to or spoke explicitly of at least one unwanted and/or unpleasurable sexual experience despite having been recruited to talk about ‘consensual
sex’. Within these accounts, we were struck by the degree to which participants
were connecting, and often troubling, the practice of faking orgasm to accounts of
unwanted sex. While some talked about faking orgasm in positive ways, for
instance, as a pleasurable experience that heightened their own arousal, many
talked about feigning pleasure in the context of unwanted and unpleasurable
sexual experiences. In this article, we explore unwanted and/or unpleasurable sex
as a site in which women’s accounts of faking orgasm emerged. Although researchers have explored the reasons why women fake orgasm, the literature is scarce
concerning faking orgasm as a means to ending sex that is unwanted. As such,
we focus on the ways in which women talk about these experiences that are neither
explicitly labelled as coercive nor as sexual assault, but nonetheless, are identified as
problematic. As interviewers and allies, we heard women’s struggles to express and
articulate ‘what happened’ in the absence of adequate social vocabularies. These
struggles in meaning making became the focus of our inquiry.
Notably, we ourselves struggled to locate adequate language to talk about such
troublesome experiences. These accounts were often uncomfortable or distressing
for participants to discuss, and disconcerting for us to hear, but lacked the appropriate language for their clear expression. We considered the term ‘bad’ sex, but
this did not do justice to the violation some described. The term ‘consensual but
unwanted’ seemed unwieldy and ‘unwanted’ did not capture the fluidity of desire
expressed in some accounts. Indeed, in our informal discussions throughout the
research process, we invented and used the term ‘gak’ sex to refer to these instances
in the text. When faced with writing the research for publication, and after much
discussion, we settled on the imperfect term of ‘problem’ sex to refer to all accounts
of sex that participants did not describe as enthusiastically consensual and wanted.
The limits and possibilities of this language choice are discussed later in this article.
Method
Participants in the original study were 15 female undergraduate students of a
liberal arts university in Canada. Participants were largely from a semi-rural
area of eastern Canada and ranged in age from 19 to 28 years (M ¼ 21.53,
SD ¼ 2.88). Of the participants, 12 self-identified as ‘heterosexual’ or ‘straight’,
one as ‘lesbian’, one as ‘bisexual’ and one as ‘heterosexual/bi-curious’. The interviews of all 15 participants were analysed, however, the analysis emerged as only
relevant to participants’ accounts of heterosex. That is, while women talked about
both having unwanted sex with women, and faking orgasm in the context of sex
with women, the discursive features that emerged as central in our analysis did not
appear in these accounts. Thus, the resulting analysis speaks only to the accounts of
14 participants in which they talked about sex with men.
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Sexualities 20(3)
Participants were recruited based on having engaged in consensual sexual
intercourse and having been sexually active for at least one year. The study was
advertised as research on women’s talk about consensual sex and pleasure
through flyers posted around the university campus and in the student newspaper.
Two of the three authors conducted the interviews in a one-on-one setting.
The interviews were semi-structured around the themes of talking about sex,
faking orgasm, and resisting feigning sexual pleasure. After obtaining participants’
consent, each interview was audiotaped and then transcribed verbatim (see
Appendix 1). At the conclusion of the interview, participants were debriefed,
both verbally and in a written form, which included contact information for counselling services.
We used discourse analysis to explore how women negotiate and account for
experiences of ‘problem’ sex in the context of exaggerating sexual pleasure and
faking orgasm. Wood and Kroger’s (2000) model of discourse analysis guided the
approach. This framework encourages repeated examination of the data where
careful identification of key features of talk is one of the core components.
In our initial coding of the data, we extracted all sections of the interview
transcripts in which participants talked about sex that was not clearly identified
as both consensual and wanted. This master file was then read and reread multiple
times, attending to the discursive features and effects of participants’ talk.
Throughout the analysis, attention was paid to what the participants said, how
it was said, and what were the functions of their accounts (i.e. ‘what talk is doing
and achieving’, Wood and Kroger, 2000: 5). We worked together closely to develop
the analysis, discussing our ideas and the emergent analysis as it unfolded. That is,
we immersed ourselves in analysis individually and as a group. Once an ‘analytic
lead’ was identified (e.g. I think there is the repeated use of hedging in the interviews), one person would take primary responsibility for tracking it through the
data (e.g. How often does a hedging appear in the master file? Which participants
do and do not use it? In which contexts does it appear or not?). A separate file or
‘code’ was made for each emergent pattern of accounting, and we met regularly to
discuss the viability of each code and how they related to one another across the
data. Throughout this process, we explored if and how participants made distinctions between consent and desire when talking about exaggerating sexual pleasure
and faking orgasm, and how they negotiated these experiences of ‘problem’ sex in
their interactions with their partners.
Our analysis explores the discursive tools participants drew on in their accounts
of ‘problem’ sex as well as the connections they made between (non)desire and
faking sexual pleasure. In the first section, we analyse the available language that
participants did (and did not) use to trouble unwanted sexual experiences. We then
explore participants’ use of negative evaluations (‘it was bad’) in accounting for
‘problem’ sex. The following section examines participants’ mobilization of various
hedging and mitigating techniques, including negations (‘it wasn’t good’), disclaimers (‘it wasn’t non-consensual but. . .’), and modifers (‘kind of forcing me’).
Finally, we explore the ways in which participants connected faking orgasm to
Thomas et al.
287
ending sex that was unwanted and/or unpleasurable. Throughout the analysis, we
highlight participants’ attempts to make meaning in the absence of adequate vocabularies to construct ‘problem’ sex.
Analysis and discussion
The data were analysed to explore the terms used (and not used) to refer to
participants’ unwanted sexual experiences. Participants never used words such as
‘rape’ or ‘coercion’ to reference their own experiences, despite their descriptions of
events that could clearly be categorized as such. There were two instances in the
text in which such clear and direct language was used (‘rape’ (Kat), ‘coerce’
(Morgan)). In both instances, these terms were used in the context of describing
other women’s experiences:
[Sister] was talking to one of her friends from high school and she was saying ‘yeah,
one night I was really really drunk an::d, yeah this guy just like forced himself on me
an:d he: had sex with me and I didn’t really want to’ and she was like ‘well that’s rape
you know, like, you should tell someone about that’ (Kat)
I remember this one night, I woke up to go to the bathroom, and I was sleeping with
my Mom and my Dad? So, I remember coming ba::ck, an:d my Dad was trying to:
coerce my Mom into having se::x, and my Mom saying, ‘no, no, no, no’. Like, like
I: do. And then, I got kicked out of the roo:m (Morgan…
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