In Defense of Difference

From all sides come assurances that women and men feel the same about sex.

Today's novels, films, and TV shows depict woman after woman longing for no-strings-attached sex, just as men do. Such scenes are rarely credible, but audiences accept and even demand them: it's what they want to see.

The news media seek out surveys and studies, no matter how dubious, suggesting women want sex as intensely, as frequently, and with as many different partners as men do. It's bullshit, but it keeps audiences tuned in. Feminists who once insisted women were essentially different from men (you remember the women-read-romance/men-read-porn argument) now say we are the same. This change of stance, perhaps more than any gain in the struggle for economic or political equality, has resulted in the mass popularity the movement enjoys today.

In conversation by water coolers or at cocktail parties it has become fashionable for women to brag about their lusts while the men, who cannot be so open with their feelings without being thought pigs, encourage them or at least refrain from asking them to back up their words with action. It's like a new form of chivalry.

The belief that women feel the same as men do about sex has become "politically correct." As with all things p.c., heretics must suffer the consequences, in this case being thought "unable to accept women's sexuality" or naïve, while the faithful pat themselves on the backs for their sophistication.

It is not difficult to understand why so many people want so badly to believe women and men feel the same about sex. Men like to imagine their lust is fully reciprocated: it is flattering. No woman likes to admit that she does not understand male lust, much less acknowledge that it dwarfs her own.

Feminists have come to realize that if we admit that women and men feel differently about sex, we will have to acknowledge that this difference gives women an enormous sexual power over men. This would undermine the easy male-oppressor/female-victim narrative and hopelessly complicate the struggle for equality. The truth is that we will never achieve equality until we first accept the reality of difference. Womanizers often soothe a guilty conscience by telling themselves that their victims just wanted a little sex, the same as they did.

Pious men like to suggest the world is full of nymphomaniacs because the illusion of omnipresent sexual temptation makes them appear all the more virtuous for resisting it.

A man and a woman who have just fallen in love don't like to think of the gulf of difference that lies between them, and even long-time couples often cannot find the courage.

There are many reasons for denying difference. Probably the main one is the simplest of all: so many people are pretending that women and men feel the same about sex simply because it is now the thing to do.

The trouble is that women and men are not the same. When it comes to sex, we're different. We think differently. We feel differently. We behave differently. To pretend that we are the same, as we are doing now more than ever, is a lie, and this lie is hurting many people.

We are misleading young women and men both about what to expect from the opposite sex and setting them up for terrible hurt.

We are encouraging men to leave women they love in a quixotic search of a sexual freedom that does not exist. We are assuring women that they understand male lust when they cannot, no more than a man can understand what it means to give birth to a child, and thus creating much MISunderstanding, just where sympathy is needed most. We are feeding the bitterness that so many women today feel for men, and vice versa.

The myth of sameness is the social problem of our time. We have not even begun to tackle it. The first step will be admitting that this problem exists.

Literotica is, I think, a good place to start. This is one of the few places where the differences between male and female sexuality are accepted, if only indirectly, through the reverse mirror of fantasy.

The stories here are fantasy, blatantly so. Unlike more mainstream or "serious" literature, they make little if any attempt to represent a sexual reality. Just the opposite: their purpose is to help us to escape that reality, and by serving this purpose they reveal an honesty about our sexuality that is increasingly rare.

To put it plainly, the stories here are filled with female characters who lust as men do (or better yet, even more than men do) because such women are no where to be found in life. We come here to escape into a world where women and men feel the same about sex, and by doing so we reveal just how different our feelings are.

I write to ask you to please take this honesty, already rare, a step further.

At some point today or at the very latest tomorrow you will encounter a film, novel, television show, blog post, news program, magazine article, or conversation in which yet another woman is portrayed as though her lust is basically the same as a man's. Unlike the stories here at Literotica, this portrayal will be meant to be taken more or less seriously as a representation of reality. It is meant to teach us the supposed truth of our sexuality. It is meant to convert us to the ideology of sameness.

You will know this portrayal is a lie, and most people in your life will know it too. The trouble is, no one is admitting it.

I ask for YOU to admit it. You will risk ridicule, no doubt, but, please, be brave and admit it.

If you are a woman, say, "I am a woman and women do not feel nor behave that way," and if you are a man say, "I have never known a woman who behaves that way."

Admit it. Point out the lie of sameness to anyone who will listen. Defend difference.