Katherine Rowland - The Pleasure Gap: American Women & the Unfinished Sexual Revolution

T HIS BOOK REPRESENTS a years-long reporting effort involving interviews and roundtable discussions with roughly 120 women as well as with dozens of scientists, researchers, advocates, and sexual health practitioners. I connected with the women whose stories inform the heart of this project through a number of channels. For many it was via a snowball method, that is, I approached friends and acquaintances, who in turn pointed me to their friends and acquaintances, and so on. While this yielded an overwhelming response, I additionally found informants at the various workshops, classes, meetups, and conferences I attended as part of my research. I reached out to some women directly through social media, largely because of what I saw in their existing digital presence. Lastly, I was introduced to a handful of women by various sexuality professionals.

Given the highly sensitive nature of the subjectsexuality, pleasure, and desireI have altered the womens names and identifying details. No one presented here is a composite charactereveryone is her own unique person. However, I have chosen at times to edit quotations for clarity as well as to eliminate some idiosyncrasies of speech. In some instances, women selected their own pseudonyms, but in most cases I used a first or middle name, or assigned a name based on an individuals general demographic background.

Although I spoke with women of all sexual orientations, this book focuses most closely on the experiences of women who have sex with men, because that was where (in step with the existing research) I identified the locus of sexual distress, the target market for solutions, and the largest appetite for sexual recovery. While older research has suggested that queer women are not as libidinous as their heterosexual

None of which is to say that sexual health and its expression are unproblematic for queer women. Rather, it seems that, at least in terms of pleasure and satisfaction, queer women may have some advantage. Based on my conversations, I would speculate that this has something to do with the fact that by coming out they have done some fundamental work on understanding their own desires, whereas for heterosexual women that is not necessarily the case. In addition, queer women are not as mired in the logic that sex means penetrative intercourse, a concept that, as Ill discuss, is remarkably ill-suited to female pleasure. All the same, I acknowledge that one does not need to be straight or to have sex with men in order to be affected by the cultural privileging of male sexuality and function. As one queer woman told me, Just because I dont have sex with men doesnt mean the patriarchy doesnt end up in my bedroom.

While this book engages with scientific subjects, I have steered away from weighing in on some of the biological factors that shape female sexuality, namely, the enormous influence of hormones, reproduction, menopause, pain, depression, and chronic illness. These are hugely important topics that indelibly shape arousal, desire, and pleasure, but given their complexity, they are discussed here as points of reference rather than as dedicated topics in their own right. Many excellent books have been written on these issues, and my interest here lies in how day-to-day experiences of contemporary womanhood shape how we feel in our bodies.

At times I write in the first-person plural. Such statements of we and us are meant neither to be presumptive nor to exclude readersincluding male readersbut rather to reflect the fact that the writing of this book, at this particular moment in history, was a politicizing exercise. Sex is so much greater than an act of intimacy.

People have often asked me whether my own sex life benefited from writing this book. The answer is both yes and no. I absolutely learned to value my own pleasure more than I had previously and to rethink how I inhabit and express my sexuality. But it was a more somber education than I had anticipated. In the four and a half years between first researching desire and handing in this manuscript, I birthed my son, lost my father, birthed my daughter, and lost my younger brother. My revelations about sexuality were therefore bound in serial reconstitutions of my own identity. Given that pleasure is not the opposite of pain, but rather the receptiveness to feeling, I hope that these experiences enrich rather than impoverish my words.