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‘We never talk of a woman’s pleasure’
The queen of sexual health, Seema Anand, on rewriting our sexual narrative, getting older and conquering shame
SEEMA ANAND photo by Sujata Sethia @butnaturalphotography
I think I finally understand some of the latent crankiness that I’ve witnessed in people older than me, that rises quickly to the surface like milk on the boil.
Once you are aware of how cyclical and unoriginal most things are – from politics to the mechanisms perpetuating inequality – when you see the same things resurfacing again and again, there is a quickness of anger. It’s not just because it takes up real estate in your brain which deserved eviction a long time ago, it’s watching new generations of people being warped by the same old ideologies designed to shame and control.
Most recently for me, this has been talk of body counts - the number of people you have slept with. These videos are rife on TikTok - what is an acceptable number - specifically for women, and I truly believe the straight male dating podcast bro contingent would collapse without it as content fodder.
Body count shaming is something I grew up with. In my early twenties, I told my second serious boyfriend that I wasn’t a virgin (the body count was one) and remember his brow wrinkling as if it was unacceptable, despite the fact that he’d slept with several others before meeting me. I remember being shamed by other women that I wasn’t still a virgin; they cited religious reasons, because they still were, because apparently oral sex in a dodgy car park in Ilford doesn’t count in the eyes of God.
If you’re enjoying As I Was Saying With Poorna Bell I’d be delighted if you’d consider a paid subscription. For the next 12 months, free posts will be very sporadic as I have two books to deliver. You can have access to the full archive, take part in live chats and enter any questions into the Ask Me Anything. That way you won’t miss anything and you can cancel at anytime!
Most of us, especially girls who went to single-sex schools, grew up with strange ideas of sex. Not least of which because our parents didn’t talk to us about it, and so we were forced to cobble together what we knew from eavesdropping (aged six, I thought a man’s penis detached from him like the cap on a pen), Mills And Boon (I seem to recall a lot of shagging against a tree) and scraps of what we picked up watching television. Men liked sex, and women wanted to be loved. (I wanted both and was unsure of where I fitted in.)
The idea, therefore, of a woman’s pleasure was laughable. We learned one way or another, that sex was about a man’s pleasure. I remember an older female family member commenting on the state of someone’s marriage, and she was talking about how the wife was being inattentive. “If the husband cheats, it’s her fault,” she said. When I replied with a WTF, she replied: “Well, men have needs.” The subtext always being more powerful than the actual words being said which is: and women don’t.
Recently, this double standard hit home while watching the latest season of Bridgerton. Yes, it’s a period drama, but it’s also a fictitious world which operates to different rules and history, and watching female chastity being placed on such a high pedestal that there is literally a walk of shame if a woman is caught unchaperoned with a man who isn’t her family member, is jangling and discordant. There is an excellent piece in Glamour that covers it as a topic.
As a woman in my forties, my definition of sex and pleasure is one that I have had to reclaim with a certain degree of ferocity, and an almost total rejection of heteronormative society’s ideals of what a woman should do, what they should seek and what they should desire.
My desire feels endless, filled with expansiveness and love and a yearning to feel everything, and refuses to be defined like it once used to. An allergic reaction perhaps, to my upbringing. I have lost count of the number of rom coms when, ahead of a wedding, the man is freaking out that this is the last person he will ever have sex with, while a woman is worrying that she’ll have to tidy up after him in perpetuity.
Not all men crave sex, and not all women want to sacrifice desire for domesticity. The other day, I witnessed the stream of consciousness meltdown of a friend who realised that we were only in our forties, and that she might live until eighty or more, and according to what she signed up for, she’d promised to have sex with her husband, and only her husband for the next forty years.
I watched as she wrestled with the voices in her head. “Well, I guess that’s what you’re supposed to do, isn’t it,” she concluded dejectedly, “you’re supposed to get married and then only sleep with each other.”
I looked at her and said: “What the fuck are you talking about?”
Now, I’m not suggesting infidelity (either open your relationship, talk to your partner honestly or have the guts to end it before you take that path). But I am saying that for many people, sex is an important part of their lives that doesn’t get shelved simply because they were told it would. Particularly if you are a woman who has never been taught to prioritise your own pleasure, or to write the narrative you want around it.
We need to actively question the beliefs that are so innate we forget they aren’t our own - especially if you are a heterosexual. Do you believe men want sex more than women? Do you believe your own desire is not as important as a man’s? Have we had toxic views about our bodies spewed into our psyche by former male lovers? By the women in our lives? It is vital to question this, especially as we get older, when sex and pleasure is almost always framed through a younger lens.
All of this is swirling in my mind as I’m about to start writing my third novel which takes a look at women’s pleasure, shame and the rewriting of an internal narrative.
To sense check my line of thinking, I asked one of the biggest and most respected names in the sex education field – Seema Anand. An author of The Arts of Seduction, she was Cosmo India’s 2023 Sexual Health Influencer of the year, she has over a million followers on Instagram, her advice is beautifully framed in common sense, teachings of the Kama Sutra, and compassion. Although I hadn’t planned to publish the interview, I couldn’t keep it to myself. And so here it is, my conversation with Seema about pleasure, sex and women.
Seema - you practice the art of healing and educating through narrative - and I’ve always felt as if narrative is so important when it comes to the stories we have told ourselves about desire, our own bodies - what do you think the narrative has been?
We don’t tell stories of a woman’s pleasure, we tell stories of a woman’s body being property. The most common story is the importance and power of chastity. These stories say that before you get your period you are the goddess, and after you finish, you become the wise old crone. But during that period of time when women are at their most powerful, throughout our entire life, we are told that we are polluted. We are born into these stories.
It’s the stories we tell ourselves but it’s also the stories that are silenced. How we think of ourselves, and how we establish our identity. Everything we know and think are not consciously taught to us. And we know a lot of things that aren’t being taught. The subliminal narrative of the woman’s pleasure not being particularly important, for example. Those things exist in the DNA of our brain, they come down in generations.
For instance, in every culture, we have this thing called the chaste woman. And the chaste woman has power, and we deified chastity to the point where we had women almost hustle to be on that pedestal. Because they are told if you are this chaste, if you are this ‘good’ then you have power. So women were doing this to themselves.
And that a woman’s pleasure is not as important as a man’s? I feel this narrative is in everything, from conversations to depictions on TV, and in mainstream literature.
We never talk of a woman’s pleasure. We never tell stories of how the woman lies back the end of it. She’s always satisfied with the love that she gets, the caring, or sacrifices she makes and suddenly she feels this deep sense of satisfaction, but there are no stories told of her satisfaction from being satisfied physically.
I remember piecing together what I thought men thought of women’s bodies during sex from male friends talking about other women, and from what one particular toxic former male lover said to me about sex. It always struck me that there were double standards.
It comes up in the no lube conversation, eg, the idea that you don’t need lube. That’s one of the most detrimental things I’ve come across.
Someone has just written to me to say every time we have sex my husband gets cuts on his penis, I get cuts on my vagina, they take a week to heal what should we do? Why is using lube so difficult to understand? Because you get a lot of men in the comments section saying if you’re a real man, she doesn’t need lube. There is this thing about her pleasure being secondary to your concept of your ego or masculinity.
Then there is the number of women who write in and say they have pigmentation down there – they ask about the dark patches on their upper thighs. How can I get a vagina whitening cream? I have never come across a man saying I need a penis whitening cream.
A guy doesn’t even consider that when he is having sex with his partner, that she will be looking at his balls not being the same colour as his penis. All testicles have pigmentation. He would not even consider you would look or comment on it, or that would detract in any way from the pleasure you are likely to feel. Yet for women, there is a whole thing that you are not perfect enough and hence don’t have the right to pleasure.
Or this thing about the vagina becoming too loose. No one ever says ‘oh the man’s penis becomes thinner’. But we believe it. It’s women saying my vagina has become loose.
There is still so much shame we have internalised around sex! How do we even begin to address it?
When you give yourself permission to touch yourself, you learn to understand that your body is special and that it can give you pleasure and make you feel good. I think one of the most important things you can say to women – men don’t have the patience to hear this – every part of your body has a sense of excitement. Every part has the ability to arouse you.
When you do sit down to pleasure yourself, it’s really important that you find a nice space rather than tucking yourself into a dark corner, or going to the loo to do it. Do it where it feels nice – you have to change the vocabulary in your brain, where this is a nice thing rather than a dirty thing.
The words we use totally define our culture. Our culture of thought, or your actions. It’s really nice to sometimes go out and experiment. Instead of thinking I need to find a relationship or a partner, or thinking if I go around kissing everybody that’s slut behaviour, rather than using words like that – decide you want to go and figure out how great kisser you are, and kiss as many people as you want. Literally.
If you’re enjoying As I Was Saying With Poorna Bell I’d be delighted if you’d consider a paid subscription. For the next 12 months, free posts will be very sporadic as I have two books to deliver. You can have access to the full archive, take part in live chats and enter any questions into the Ask Me Anything. That way you won’t miss anything and you can cancel at anytime!
I feel super awkward commenting on this article as a guy but check out OMGYES, it's absolutely amazing. Great article Poorna, bring on the new book!
Mmmmm I fucking LOVE this! Yes please to more narrative around women’s pleasure, there is so much power in it - and I believe even more so as we get older 🔥 And now I’m super excited about your next book Poorna…