Watch some mainstream porn! Women have sex with strangers, like plumbers, mechanics, pool cleaners, teachers or just strangers who pick them up on the street and the sex they're having is likely to include some measure of violence or degradation towards the woman. She may get slapped on her ass or her face, choked, made to gag, take his cock with minimal foreplay, maybe even anally without lube or warmup, called names, and there's a good chance she'll have to hop off his dick at the end so he can cum on her face.

Why?

Because porn is a fantasy for men, some may say. Sure, it's probably more a man's fantasy that he gets to have sex with his client, than the woman's fantasy, who's probably nervous enough to have a stranger in her house at all, let alone to have him choke her without warning and degrade her at every turn, including with his very orgasm... But how come doing that to a woman is supposedly a fantasy for men? What's the point of degrading women?

The point is they don't want it. But there is more at play here than random sadism and misogyny, I think.

Another big factor, in my opinion, is we don't have sexual role models that actually have sex. Our sexual role models have "conquests". They're seducers. They can't have sex because our media shies away from depicting it. Sex is implied, not shown, so the successes that define our sexual heroes happen outside of sex. Their successes in the bedroom remain hidden from us, irrelevant.

Don Juan is a character known for seducing scores of women. In Don Giovanni, his equivalent even has a list of his conquests by country, counting thousands. We learn he uses disguises. He tricks and cajoles women to get them to have sex with him even though the social mores of the time command them to remain chaste. Now, Don Juan is not famous as a great lover because he's known, for example, for being exceptionally gentle when introducing lovers to anal play... Too explicit, not part of the story, ergo irrelevant. What he is famous for is being good at getting women to have sex they don't or shouldn't want.

Let's look at a more modern male sexual icon that has stood the test of time: James Bond! We know James Bond is "good with the ladies" because we see him get with practically every woman he is ever after, and then some. The conquests are sealed with a smooch. Sex is (only!) implied. Presumably, Bond is also at least half-decent in bed but we really don't know: At most we see him vaguely writhing on a woman under the covers. We don't get to see his sexual successes like the moment he figures out how his newest lover likes her clit licked and after tense minutes of touch-and-go he settles into a rhythm and heroically powers through a little bit of ache in his jaw to get her there... Never shown because it would be much too graphic, therefore irrelevant to his image. All that matters is the seduction.

What is seduction? At it's core, it's getting someone to do something they aren't initially willing to do. Like Don Juan tricks and cajoles, often times, Bond tricks women into believing he has genuine feelings for them so when they decide to have sex with him it's on the false premise the developed feelings are mutual. Other times, he overpowers their resistance with charm, sheer animal attraction or persistence... At times he has even used violence! Either way, he is very efficient at getting women to give up something they don't initially want to give up. Be it their hearts, their bodies or some microfilm.

With sexual role models that don't actually have sex, what can we emulate if we want to be great lovers like them? We can't draw from their sexual knowledge or behaviors because we never see them. We can't even be inspired to try to experience what they found pleasurable! We're intimately familiar with what Bond thinks of certain wines but we're never shown how he feels about, say, feeling a lover's racing pulse with his lips on her neck, or a warm, silky vagina on his penis... All we have to go on, is we can prove ourselves, like he does, by compelling women to do what they initially don't want.

Which brings us to porn. Porn tries to present a superlative of sex. Regrettably, this superlative isn't about superlative intimacy or superlative stimulation.. Our sexual role models don't care about how sex feels so why should we? Instead it's about getting women to do things they superlatively don't or shouldn't want - for example because they're painful or degrading. We're not even meant to empathize with the male actor, to try to feel a little of his pleasure: Care is taken to show his face as little as possible and he is advised not to moan too loudly. Male pleasure has no place in this fantasy. It's all about how great he (and by proxy we) must be if this woman let's us to that and that to her and evidently still gets turned on.

Of course, porn is a big enough part of our culture to be a sexual role model in itself, further normalizing the degradation of women as an intrinsic part of sex.

For men, but also for women! Just as we're taught what makes us great lovers (being great at getting women to do stuff) and we're pressured to act on this by acting dominant, so are women taught that to be as hot as the women in porn evidently are, they need to enjoy their own degradation and let the man make them do stuff, i.e. act submissive.

So far, so patriarchal.

I'm trying to imagine a world were sex isn't suppressed in our fiction. In this world I'm imagining, a show as tame as Star Trek The Next Generation, for example, could show sex in just as much length and detail as it shows the crew playing poker! Riker could still be a ladies' man but it wouldn't be reduced to seducing alien babes but balanced by showing him actually with them! Curious about them, their alien bodies and alien ways, exploring, finding common ground and compromises.. He could shine as an actually great lover and we could learn from him, like we learn from the rest of Star Trek! Star Trek taught a great many people the value of exploration, open mindedness, empathy, tolerance, cooperation, diversity... It saddens me a bit that it couldn't teach us about sex.

Of course there is already fiction that doesn't shy away from sex. The show Girls, for example. Of course, with how complex and often neurotic the characters of the show are, their quirks would have big impacts in their sex lives too. Girls doesn't leave that part of their lives out but depicts the emotional battlefields of a family dinner and sex with the same level of detail. It's phenomenal in this regard.

I think, as audio creators, we have some responsibility too to not just regurgitate what we're served in porn. Which isn't to say we can't be into degradation or that we should hide if we are. Let's just not take it for granted. We have the opportunity here to make new sexual role models!

We owe it to ourselves to explore our sexualities and those of our lovers as authentically as we can. I think if we do that, even without the explicit goal of providing a counterbalance to misogyny, that's what will end up happening in a small way.