Lux Alptraum - Faking It: The Lies Women Tell about Sex--And the Truths They Reveal

ON NOVEMBER 9, 2016, I awoke with a sense of despair. After a brutal, months-long presidential campaign, America had chosen its new leader. And rather than select a former secretary of state, senator, and first ladyperhaps the most qualified person ever to run for the positionwed gone with a real estate magnate turned reality show star whod risen to prominence on a wave of hatred, empty promises, and deceit.

In the eyes of a significant portion of the electorate, Clinton was not to be trusted.

That morning, as the reality of the election results began to sink in, I felt devastated, but not exactly surprised. As much as it broke my heart to see Clinton rejected in favor of Trump, the criticisms that had paved the path toward her defeatthat she was untrustworthy, manipulative, and duplicitouswere ones I was intimately familiar with. And not merely because they were accusations that had been hurled at Clinton for the entirety of her time in the public eye, but because being accused of dishonesty is a fundamental part of growing up as a woman in America.

The idea that women are liars is deeply ingrained into American cultureparticularly when it comes to sex. In the common telling, women are duplicitous seductresses, gifted with a particular talent for bending the truth to pull one over on men. We alter our appearances to make ourselves more attractive, we erase whole sections of our sexual pasts in order to seem more demure. We feign disinterest, we fake our orgasms, and when its all said and done, we cry rape in an attempt to destroy whatever man has done us wrong.

When I first started thinking seriously about the topic of women and deceit, I was convinced that we women had merely been victims of a particularly vicious smear campaign, one that unfairly cast aspersions on our fundamental honesty. Surely, I thought, the idea of the duplicitous female was nothing more than an invention of men, one intended to discredit women and keep us in check and out of power. Surely, I thought, the notion that women are gaming the system was a vicious myth with little to no basis in truth.

But as I began to dig, it quickly became apparent how wrong my initial assessment was.

Its true that the world is full of women who, like Secretary Clinton, are presumed to be peddling fiction when were actually offering up fact. But its also true thatwhether its fake orgasms, artificial hymens, or suspiciously spotless sexual paststhere are many instances in which women are lying. And while a number of honorable women have been unfairly slandered as dishonest, its the lies that many, if not most, of us are telling on a daily basis that offer the greater insight into the female experience.

We lie because it makes our day-to-day lives easier; we lie to keep ourselves safe; we lie because no one believes us when we tell the truth. But most of all, we lie because the world expects us to live up to an impossible standardand frequently, lying is the only way to get through life with our sanity intact.

The question isnt whether women are trustworthy. The question is why women lieand what those lies are trying to tell us.