What Women (Don’t) Want
Tiresias on Female Pleasure
There is a story in Greek mythology that the blind prophet Tiresias spent seven years as a woman. One day, when Zeus and Hera get into an argument about whether men or women experience more pleasure during sex, they call on Tiresias. As the only entity mortal or divine who has been both a sexually active man and woman, he is, they figure, best situated to settle the dispute. Tiresias answers unequivocally that women experience ten times more pleasure in sex than men. Zeus wins the argument and, presumably, heads off to find another mortal woman to rape.
This story has always seemed ludicrous to me, not least because my own sexual history and that of many of my female friends is plagued by the orgasm gap. (Not that orgasm is the only measure of a pleasurable sexual experience, but let’s be real. That’s probably what Zeus and Hera were talking about.) I have always thought that the most interesting thing that this story shows is that people (men) in the ancient world were just as interested as we are today in understanding the experience of the opposite sex and comparing it to their own experience.
Today, we hear that the clitoris has twice as many nerve endings as the head of the penis, that female orgasms last longer than male orgasms, and that women can be multi-orgasmic, experiencing orgasm after orgasm with no refractory period. In the modern world, just like the ancient world, all these statistics apparently add up to women experiencing more pleasure in sex than men. Ten times more pleasure? Sure, whatever.
But this last year, with an out-and-proud sexual predator in the White House and an unprecedented female backlash against sexual assault and harassment on many fronts, has witnessed a growing public discourse around bad sex. Bad sex is not sexual harassment or sexual assault or rape. It is obnoxious coercion, clitoral ignorance, and vulvar pain. It’s unequal power dynamics, the orgasm gap, and the female price of male pleasure. It’s when men won’t use condoms and when saying yes is easier than saying no. And all of this has got me thinking about the story of Zeus and Hera and Tiresias, and wanting to take it a little more seriously.
Why does this myth exist? What was its purpose for the ancient Greeks? What is the purpose for us of asking whether men or women experience more pleasure in sex? Can Tiresias’ “experience” tell us anything useful about our own gendered approaches to sex? I think it can, if we allow ourselves to think it through deeply and with some creativity.
The act of sex is intimate and puts us in a place of vulnerability towards another person (or people). Certainly it is normal to wonder what your sexual partners are feeling; curiosity and concern about their experience is a sine qua non of good sex. But curiosity and empathy can quickly give way to comparison, qualification, and quantification. That’s why we know (and care) that the clitoris has 8,000 nerve endings to the penis’ 4,000.
Perhaps this curiosity (and comparison and qualification and quantification) crops up especially in the realm of heterosexual sex because men and women seem to play such different roles and to experience pleasure and orgasm in different ways. Or maybe the question is still being posed simply because most people are still having heterosexual sex, despite the fact that we millennials are the queerest generation on record.
The story of Tiresias tells us that people have been trying to figure out what pleasure feels like for the opposite sex for a very long time. It also tells us that the mechanisms of patriarchy have been interested, for a very long time, in perpetuating the claim that women experience significantly more pleasure than men during sex. For me, that has always seemed to be the purpose of the myth of Tiresias’ sex change.
If the ancient Greeks were supposed to take a message or learn a lesson from this myth, it was that women were the lucky ones when it came to sex. Women could be assumed to always want sex, and (when they got it) to enjoy it substantially more than men, giving rise to the need for men to control sexual interactions and the sexuality of women. The companion to the ancient Greek and Roman idea that women enjoy sex more than men is the ancient idea that women are sexually ravenous and insatiable. Their sexual appetites couldn’t be trusted and had to be reined in by male guardians (husbands, fathers, uncles, brothers) for their intended purpose: reproduction.
Additionally, it could be assumed that any time a sexual encounter took place between a man and a woman, the woman wanted it (at least in her body), regardless of her mental and physical state and regardless of any indication that she made to the contrary. In fact, Ovid advises that women will often say no, when they mean yes — a popular myth that persists today, even outside of overtly misogynistic PUA sites. They also believed that desire (even if a woman said no) could be proven retroactively if she became pregnant, since the Greeks and Romans thought that it was not possible for a woman to become pregnant if she hadn’t wanted to have sex.
So it seems that the myth of Tiresias is easily explained. The answer, as with many things having to do with sex and gender in the ancient world, is patriarchy. But this explanation doesn’t leave me quite satisfied (said the actress to the bishop).
In the first place, we might consider who Tiresias actually is. In the second place, we might think about how patriarchy actually functions when it comes to our understanding and experiences of male and female pleasure.
In Oedipus Rex, Tiresias is the blind seer who knows that Oedipus has killed his father and is sleeping with his mother. In Antigone he warns Creon that the angry king is destroying himself, and in the Bacchae he warns Cadmus and the people of Thebes that they must obey the will of the god Dionysus — nothing will stand in his way, certainly not anything mortal. Although he is blind, Tiresias has direct access to the gods. His predictions are never wrong.
But this does not mean that Tiresias never makes a misstep. The reason that he is blind, according to Callimachus’ Hymn to Athena, is that one day he accidentally stumbles on the goddess Athena while she is bathing. The virgin goddess, angered at this mortal man for seeing her naked, blinds him. When his mother, Chariclo, begs Athena to lift the curse, the goddess relents a little, giving him the gift of augury — the ability to predict the future through the messages of birds. He moves between the worlds of gods and mortals, men and women.
One day, as a young man, Tiresias accidentally steps on two fornicating snakes. The snakes are sacred to Hera, so as punishment the goddess changes him into a woman. He spends seven years in female form until he is transformed back into a man. During these seven years, he has many social and sexual adventures, even getting pregnant and giving birth to a daughter (which must have been an orgasmic birth).
Thus when Hera and Zeus call on Tiresias for his sexual expertise, he has spent substantial time working with a variety of pleasure-giving bits and parts. Surely he must know how much harder it is to manipulate the internal clitoris than the external penis. Why, then, does he say that women enjoy pleasure so much more than men?
Maybe Zeus and Tiresias are in collusion with one another, self-consciously punishing Hera—Tiresias for her turning him into a woman, and Zeus for her constant rooting out of his hidden sexual affairs, indiscretions, and assaults on divine and mortal women. On this view, perhaps they tell her that she enjoys sex ten times more than Zeus so that he can seem justified in having sex with nine other women for every one time that he has sex with his wife? Tiresias can reinforce the patriarchy and get in a solid one-two against his nemesis at the same time.
The problem with this idea is that Tiresias is nothing if not scrupulously honest and accurate in his verbal pronouncements. His words may be cryptic and usually people don’t believe him, but he is never wrong. We shouldn’t, then, make the same mistake as Oedipus and Creon and write Tiresias off as a mumbling old fool. Or dismiss his discernment as cool calculation, designed for a nefarious, patriarchal purpose.
So we must take Tiresias at his bewildering word. We must assume that we are supposed to believe that in his capacity as a subjective observer — after all he is speaking here from his own experience — he felt ten times more sexual pleasure as a woman than as a man. How could this be?
Trans YouTube vlogger Jesyka S. suggests that in her experience — having had sex in a male and then a female body — “the female orgasm seems better and longer because you work harder to get your orgasm.” British race car driver Charlie, also newly experiencing sex in a female body, laments the first several sexual encounters she has with her vulva:
When you have sex as a guy, you pretty much know you’re going to climax, and that’s cool. But as a woman, I find it quite difficult to reach that point. It’s like, sure, intimacy and being with somebody and having that experience is nice. But it’s very strange to suddenly make love to somebody and not climax, thinking, is this all sex is ever going to be now? It’s nice, but it’s kind of a bit shit.
Ultimately, they both think that the orgasm is the same before and after gender affirmation surgery, but orgasm is harder to achieve with a female body. (For all you cis people and your questions, here’s a link to get you started).
These women bring some cool rationality and more than a little humor to a situation that is often fraught and depressing (“‘Fuck, this is what having a vagina is like?!’ My friend was cracking up, like, ‘Girl, you wanted a pussy.’ I was like, ‘This is too real.’”). But as interesting and useful as their experiences are, we should be careful about thinking of Tiresias as a trans woman.
In the first place, the ancient Greeks did not have any concept of “transgender.” They had “hermaphrodite” (a now non-preferred way to discuss people who are intersex) and ancient medical texts featured gender divisions as nuanced as manly men, slightly less manly men, and womanly men (Hippocrates On Regimen 1.28–29). But they had no concept of the difference between sex and gender that is so easily understood in our post-Butler world.
In the second place, Tiresias was not a trans woman. He was not a woman whose sex was assigned male at birth (which is my understanding of how many trans women understand themselves). He was a man whose body was transformed into a female body for a limited period of time. Although he experienced the world with a female body, he did not experience the world as a woman.
It is useful when thinking about this to keep straight (no pun intended) the difference between sex (male, female, intersex) and gender (man, woman, non-binary, etc.). A woman (gender) might be born into a male body (sex) and then choose to undergo gender affirmation surgery (like the women quoted above) to make her body align with her own and her society’s expectations of what a woman’s body should look like.
If we were to compare Tiresias to any category of trans people (and I don’t necessarily think we must, or even that we should), we might more accurately think of him as a trans man — someone who is a man who is forced to spend a certain period of his life in a female body, usually much to his distress and chagrin. Again we run into an issue, because although these trans men are men, by being born into female bodies they are raised and socialized female. They do not experience the world in male bodies until they take steps to align their gender presentation with their sex and gender identification. If and when they take these steps, sometimes a veil is lifted and they can see a side of sexism that was not previously apparent.
Tiresias, though, spent the first many years of his life as a man. We do not know precisely at what age he became a woman, but we know that he gave birth to a child, so he had to be somewhere between 15–40 years (what the ancient Greeks understood to be the reproductive years of a woman’s life). We also know that he was transformed from a man into a woman, not from a boy into a girl. We can reasonably assume that he had sex as a man before he had sex as a woman. Therefore, at a minimum, he spent about a dozen and a half years undergoing the social and sexual conditioning that a typical Greek man received. Thus, he would have been raised up to believe that sexual encounters should involve and, indeed, revolve around his pleasure.
Ancient Greek men believed that a woman orgasmed at the exact same time as her male partner. So even though he was physically transformed into a woman, we might imagine that Tiresias retained many of the culturally encoded markers of masculinity — one of these being a belief that any sexual encounter should begin and end with his pleasure. Couple this belief with the female capacity for multiple orgasm and you can easily see how he might indeed have experienced ten times more pleasure as a woman than a man. With no refractory period and a strong internal belief that sex wasn’t over until his pleasure was over, we might understand that he was having long and satisfying sexual encounters.
Conversely, the social, cultural, mental, and physical development of female sexuality under patriarchy is a complicated and nuanced thing. Some women experience their own sexuality secondhand, as a function of male desire and the male gaze. They get off on the thought of men getting off on the thought of them. They might achieve orgasm through the visualization of a man getting an erection or ejaculating in or on their bodies. Pleasure and orgasm are achieved through a complex filter of woman having sex with man, imagining that she is man having sex with woman. With her sophisticated visualization, her adopted male gaze and her phantom penis, she can finally roll the rock up over the peak of the hill and come down the other side.
It is possible that Tiresias, as someone who had experienced the world as a man, with his male gaze, in a patriarchal culture steeped in outlets for male pleasure and desire, was better able, in his female body, to tap into these masculine mechanisms of orgasm. Perhaps his sexual training as a man, combined with the explosive and automatic power of the female genitalia (8,000 nerve endings and multiple orgasms, remember), caused him to have the best sex of any human to ever live on the earth. It is possible that the standard issue female equipment is that much better than the standard issue male equipment. The disappointing part is that this would mean that we socialize women away from their own sexual pleasure and their own sexual potential.
What if women were taught to feel confident in their pleasure, to believe, like men, that sex can be as long or as short as they want or need it to, that it can be as much focused on the clitoris — the whole clitoris — as the penis, and that any way they come is a good way to come? What if this book and this one and this one were taught in schools? What if we taught young people of all sexes and genders that they are entitled to pleasure and even entitled to orgasm, but not at the expense of (or even with) another person?
Tiresias was the ultimate male bumbler of antiquity, stumbling like Aziz Ansari or Louis C.K., wide-eyed and wearing a feminist hat, into sexual transgressions against women. But unlike Ansari and C.K., Tiresias was given true, personal access to a new way of being. In this era of bumbling and inept or, perhaps, calculating and cruel male sexuality, we might wish for more Tiresiases — men who are punished for their sexual improprieties, but, even more importantly, given the ability to hear, to feel, to experience another side of things. To know in their viscera what women have been saying all along — that sometimes sex hurts, that often we do not come, and that always it is about power. Most importantly, though, men might learn the truth about female power and female sexuality and female pleasure. That it is all possible and it is glorious.
Tara Mulder teaches at the University of British Columbia. Read more of her work here.
