Sent a Pitch! (Patreon)

I'm back, baby!

Yesterday I allowed myself a walk in the park....which became 4 hours in the park. It was just so nice! There was sun and trees and the weather was perfect and I just COULDN'T leave. It's an actual chunk of proper forrest, where you can wander around and get slightly lost and not see other people for long stretches of time! My sunburned skin is paying the price but my little Mill Valley heart needed it so much.

I assuaged my laziness-guilt by sitting on a rock and writing about something that had been rattling around in my head for the past couple of days. After a couple pages it seemed like the start of a promising essay so I wrote a pitch for it. Then this morning I typed it up and sent it to Marie Claire. 

I have no idea if they'll be interested but just the fact that I pitched something is a pretty huge deal to me right now.

Here's the pitch

Recently, this twitter thread went viral

When I stopped laughing at this, the reality of this man’s statement hit me; assuming he’s straight, this man had never experienced sex with an enthusiastic partner. I was struck by how isolating that must be, and how it would warp a person’s relationship with an entire gender. If your sexual pleasure could only come at the cost of another person’s pain, you would have to dehumanize that person, wouldn’t you? At least a little. 

I would like to write an article speculating on what impact that kind of sex life could have on a person’s relationship and politics. How happy or intimate could a sexual relationship be if that sex was all one-sided? How satisfying could sex be if your partner never enjoyed it? 

If you considered it normal to hurt a woman for sex, would that make it easier to hurt them for other reasons? If you thought that women never happily consented to sex, wouldn’t that make it difficult to tell when content was withheld? Or why it was so important? If you assumed that women don’t enjoy sex, you’d believe it was easy for women who didn’t want children to “keep their legs closed.” If you believed this assumption, you’d think that sex work is more degrading than any other manual labor. You’d believe that a woman’s sexual worth can be “used up.”

I’d like to think that men like this are in the minority but the stereotypes of our culture don’t support that. Feminists have talked about the harm that this myth causes but it had never occurred to me just how sinister it could be, or what painful personal impact it could have on men as well as women.