“Why brag about a bruised vagina?”

Patricia van Liemt is a radio presenter, writer and mother of Maria (13) and Phaedra (10). Every Friday she writes striking, honest, funny and above all recognizable columns about her life and motherhood.

A lady in the street, but a freak in the bed.

A phrase that is often sung about in pop music. I’ll do a small selection:

Usher’s “Yeah,” Beyonce’s “Sweet Dreams,” Adina Howard’s “A Freak Like Me,” and Elvis Presley also hit the mark on the objectification of women in his “A Little Less Conversation” at the time: “A little less conversation, a little more action please, all this aggravation ain’t satisfying me, a little more bite and a little less bark, a little less fight and a little more spark, close your mouth and open up your heart, and maybe satisfy me, satisfy me baby, aha, aha, aha, aha, a lady in the street but a freak in the bed”.

All right, Elvis shush.

Bruised vagina

Well, to my great surprise I heard the women in the reality series Love is Blind very proud to say that they had a fair vagina. This prompted them to have had sex with their new lovers for the first time. It wasn’t a few women, but all of them (!) They were just bragging, old-fashioned bragging. Which led the viewer to suggest that the sex must have been hard and brutal. I meanhow else do you get a bruised vulva?

imaging

I went looking for answers. Why would women brag about this in 2023? My conclusion is that we are apparently ‘taught’ this from society. That the norm for good sex is rough sex. Sex from a certain normative point of view. And that music is a large part of this image. Only it is mainly the women who are objectified.

I fear that this complex problem is deeply rooted in cultural, social and historical factors. And that’s not okay, because research shows this objectification often leads to low self-esteem and self-esteem of women, which can lead to all kinds of other problems, such as depression, eating disorders and sexual dysfunctions. And that last one is very topical.

Read also – A high libido and a large family: ‘We’ve almost been caught before’ >

pleasure gap

Which raised the question for me; how far are we women from our sexual autonomy? How far am I from my own sexual autonomy? Research is also increasingly showing that there is a real pleasure gap consists. This is a term used to denote the difference in sexual pleasure between men and women. It mainly refers to the fact that women generally experience less sexual pleasure than men during sexual activities, such as intercourse. Because the norm is still heterosexual penetrative sex.

“How far are we women from our sexual autonomy?”

The terms we use also bear witness to this. ‘Foreplay’ is something that often consists of doing some odd jobs to warm the woman up. After that, everything is in the service of the ‘main act’, which revolves around penetration and therefore about the man. I’m sure there are nuances, but this is roughly how it goes for many couples.

Coming back to ‘A lady in the street, but a freak in the bed’, this phrase often has a negative connotation. Freaks are people who are a little strange. Outsiders. The famous sentence therefore mainly contributes to gender stereotyping and detracts from female autonomy in bed.

Hmmm. I think I should give my great feminist friend Beyoncé a call…

Would you rather listen to Patricia’s column? Which can. Every Sunday between 4 and 6 pm she reads it on Wild FM.