The Things We Tolerate

The things we tolerate start early. It starts with adults holding you as a baby, jokingly saying how much of a heartbreaker you’ll be if you’re a boy, or how much your father will have to chase boys away if you’re a girl. It starts with apparel made for children as young as a month old with text like “future player” or “ladies’ man.” And if it’s not the unnecessarily objectifying slogans and sexist jokes, it’s the way our clothes are designed to sexualize us. We tolerate how clothing is made boxier for boys and fitted for girls, even for toddlers, with no discernible difference in body shape. 

We tolerate how girls are told to cover up when male relatives come over because our bodies are tempting, and we’d hate to lure good men. If something happens to our body, we have reason to believe it could be our fault for not hiding even the idea of what’s under our clothing well enough. And the darker your skin or bigger your body, the more you have to prove your innocence. It’s confusing as a child. On the flipside, I consider how boys are raised with the idea that girls are always playing hard to get, and that women are impossible to understand. I can recall countless children’s shows where the “good guys” had to be resilient in the face of rejection and keep trying persistently until their love interest saw that he, the protagonist, was worth a yes. Protagonists aren’t supposed to take no for an answer. So we grow up thinking we’ll be chased or will have to do the chasing. Our sexual roles have already been decided for us, and we learn to perform them subconsciously.

Sexual roles can be hard, but no matter how restrictive and binary they are, they are used as a marker of normalcy and desirability. If we don’t tolerate our given roles, we risk social isolation, bigotry and shame. I aspired to fit the role of a “woman” who was mysterious but not shy, willing but not eager, and innocent but not prudish. I failed miserably because I was loud, extremely outgoing, brutally honest, and desperate for attention; so I practiced. I figured out what men wanted, I looked at what older women did, and I’d fantasize about being desired. I learned that I should dress slutty without looking like I tried, be quiet but know when to laugh at the right jokes, and be ready for sex without having too much experience. Then, it was time to put my desirability to the test. 

“Your first time is never good!” 

We’ve all heard this assumption about virginity: that it’s never good the first time. As much as the notion can temper expectations around sex and allow room for imperfection, it also sets us up for failure. Let me explain.

We should welcome awkwardness and expect that communication and pleasure won’t always come easily. But we may unintentionally expect that NO communication is normal and that feeling good is not an option. We should accept that it can take time to discover what pleasurable sex feels like for our body, but we should not, and I cannot stress this enough, be in pain. My first time was a painful blur, and it took me years to know it didn’t have to be that way. But because it felt like the norm in this sacred rite of passage, I took it as a symbol of my sexual value because I was good for going through with it. 

Low expectations for sex give us new ways to be tolerant, such as painful penetration, little to no foreplay, poor communication, coercive tactics and non-consensual and/or dangerous kink. A high tolerance for discomfort can mean having a hard time recognizing and seeking help when something isn’t right, for example, health issues like vaginismus, yeast infections, bacterial vaginosis, urinary tract infections, sexually transmitted infections, and more. We aren’t taught what sex is supposed to feel like and what kind of pain is a cause for concern, so vaginal and sexual health issues can easily go under the radar. When our comfort is repeatedly sacrificed, our window of tolerance grows larger and more dangerous. For example, if your first time felt painful and unsafe, then painful and unsafe sex might not seem so bad going forward, especially when it comes to kink. 

Unsafe kink can be life-threatening. When our brains are deprived of oxygen for just a few minutes, we risk brain damage or even death. Choking is a violent and risky form of kink that requires proper technique and frequent communication. Yet, studies show that an alarming percentage of sexually active teens and adults, namely women and trans people, have been choked during casual sex with and without consent. One study found that choking has become so common that the majority of college-aged, sexually active women have been choked during a sexual encounter. Yet, we are not taught how to safely engage in choking during sex ed, and are instead shown the most extreme forms of BDSM on the front page of porn sites without context around safety and consent. Choking is now the standard. 

When we think our first time can’t be good, we can adopt all kinds of damaging ideas of what we should tolerate. I can think of many times I’ve been choked non-consensually and how normal it felt to struggle to breathe under the weight of someone’s hand. I wrongly thought that this was how sex was supposed to be with men: violent, painful, and one-sided. So what about with women?

“Women are so much easier!”

In our binary worldview, there is a persistent idea that women are mythical sex angels who will automatically provide all of the sexual and emotional needs that men do not. This expectation can place intense pressure on queer women to compensate for any social ills related to sex and be innately skillful. These expectations may also extend to trans men/mascs, non-binary people and even queer men who are supposed to “get it” by virtue of not being cishet men. But it is crucial to consider that queer sex can still be awkward and unsatisfying, and that our societal gender roles can still impact our queer experiences. 

Dating and having sex with women can often feel harder when you’ve spent your whole life performing for men. After all those years learning what attracts men, it’s as if suddenly you have to relearn from scratch. How? You weren’t taught to pursue, you weren’t taught to take the lead, and you weren’t taught to speak up for your needs or even know them. For some, a new sexual experience can indeed be a transformative milestone that feels orgasmic and affirming. But for others, their first queer experience is awkward and underwhelming, especially compared to the expectation that it will be perfect.

At any age, a new “first time” can take you back to puberty when you first learned how to play your role. It might feel like you’re learning how to flirt again for the very first time, and naturally, it won’t be easy. Interpersonal skills take time and practice, and so do sexual skills. Having the same anatomy as your sexual partner does not guarantee that you will each understand how to pleasure one another, especially when vulvas can be drastically different in appearance and preferences. Communication still takes work, and knowing how to please another person or ourselves takes practice and time. You are not broken if you haven’t figured it out. 

“Men only want one thing. . .”

When I consider the sexual roles we are taught to embody, my takeaway is that we all lose. Masculinity is so closely associated with sexual desire that any heteronormative sexual experience points toward success, even if it is at their expense. For example, the conversations surrounding virginity and early sexual experiences are met with praise and adoration when an adult woman assaults a teen boy. As the “more sexual beings,” men are assumed to always enjoy sex, even when it harms them. It’s also worth noting that men on the asexual spectrum can be particularly harmed by sexual stereotypes that assume less sexual desire/attraction is a sign of defectiveness. Wanting closeness, affection and intimacy is considered unmanly and thus harder to access. And though men can certainly benefit from their assigned role, we needn’t forget that they, too, must tolerate expectations that don’t align with their sense of self and restrict their fulfillment. Deconstructing their complicity in misogynistic gender roles can be liberating, though it requires vulnerability and listening to women, two things men are categorically taught to view as unnatural and emasculating. In this way, our sexual roles are designed to keep us trapped.

The Things We Want

In an ideal world, we’d choose our own sexual roles and make them up as we discover our desires. In this world, we can attempt to create those conditions on a smaller scale, with the hope that they translate into larger societal changes. People who consider themselves sexually liberated, kinky, and LGBT+ have already explored communities and personal dynamics where sexual expectations are not confined to the gender binary and encourage a wider range of exploration. Still, these communities can be impacted by the sexual roles already decided, especially when we have limited control over our access to sexual health treatment and education. 

We have some control over what we tolerate, and comprehensive sex education is a start for understanding our choices. We can decide that our standards are different than the ones assigned to us and that we won’t stand for harmful behaviours in our sex life. Doing so requires us to acknowledge that the sexual roles we’ve been taught are not a natural part of development but a deliberate process of conditioning. We have to understand what we’ve been conditioned to tolerate to change it. And friends, there is a lot we tolerate.