Bad sex? Men and women aren’t talking about the same thing
Why women’s experiences of “bad sex” are more likely to involve pain, while men’s centre on dissatisfaction
By Freja Love
Contributions from Professor Sara McClelland, feminist psychologist and Suzannah Weiss, resident sexologist for Fleshy and author of Eve’s Blessing: Uncovering the Lost Pleasure Behind Female Pain.
I was 13 when we had a sex education day at school. Five sessions spread across the timetable where teachers - who would usually be explaining Pythagoras’ theorem, refereeing netball matches or quizzing us on the War of the Roses - suddenly found themselves awkwardly teaching a room full of teenage girls and boys about STDs, contraception and safe sex.
In one session we were encouraged to shout out every slang word we could think of for vaginas and penises, but the whole day built towards the final session: practising putting condoms onto fake penises. We were giddy with excitement.
“The boys in my class seemed excited about sex, like pleasure was an inevitability waiting for them. For girls, there was a feeling that sex was something to get through, adapt to, maybe eventually enjoy later.”
Freja Love
We learnt about consent too. I understood that I should always be able to say no to sex, and that even if I changed my mind halfway through, I could ask someone to stop.
But I don’t remember anyone explaining that sex was also supposed to feel good for girls, or that pain might mean something was wrong physically or emotionally. I don’t remember being told I could ask for something different, or that speaking up during sex didn’t only apply to saying “stop”.
Teaching teenagers about sexual pleasure in a healthy, sensitive way is complicated territory. But even then, there seemed to be a difference in what boys and girls were being prepared for. The boys in my class seemed excited about sex, like pleasure was an inevitability waiting for them. For girls, there was a feeling that sex was something to get through, adapt to, maybe eventually enjoy later.
If I did have sex, especially for the first few times, it would probably hurt. Pain was expected. Pleasure wasn’t. Orgasm definitely wasn’t.
It probably wasn’t until years later that I properly heard the idea that women could expect sex to feel good too. By then, a lot of us had already learned to negotiate with discomfort.
Feminist psychologist Sara McClelland has spent years studying this negotiation. Her research on sexual satisfaction uncovered something unsettling: when young adults were asked to define what “bad” sex meant to them, men and women described entirely different worlds.
Men tended to frame the low point of sexual experience in relatively neutral terms - loneliness, lack of stimulation, an unattractive partner. Women, however, described something else entirely. Terms such as “pain”, “degradation”, “emotionally sad”, and “depressed.”
For women, “bad sex” sat much closer to harm.
Strangely, even as women described experiences that included pain, distress and emotional discomfort, Sara’s research found they did not necessarily rate themselves as less satisfied overall - suggesting that what they call “satisfaction” has already been reshaped to fit a much lower baseline of expectation.
I spoke to Sara and writer and sexologist Suzannah Weiss to try to understand where those definitions come from - and why women’s versions of “bad” might contain pain rather than just disappointment.
“If you’re taught your whole life that you should expect pain with sex,” Sara explains, “you’ve set a certain kind of really odd standard for yourself.”
Sex itself becomes something “tied to pain from the get go”, so that expectation reshapes what feels normal. “You then have a population of people who are thinking, ‘I guess I’m going to have pain, so I should adjust’,” she adds.
“We set girls up to believe that becoming a woman is a painful experience while becoming a man is a pleasurable experience.”
Suzannah Weiss
Suzannah also traces it back to the idea that discomfort is part of womanhood.
“From periods and PMS to medical dismissal and first-time sex, we are taught that female bodies are inherently difficult, and pain is something to be managed rather than questioned,” Suzannah says. “Many women do not speak up when they’re experiencing pain [during sex] because they’ve been taught it’s normal.”
“They think life is painful for women - I’ll just have to deal with it.”
Suzannah describes a pattern where women are told to normalise discomfort, to assume that early sexual experiences will hurt, and to interpret that pain as inevitable rather than a warning sign.
And so something subtle happens. Pain stops being read as information from the body and starts being read as expectation.
When women describe “bad sex”, they are often not describing something merely unsatisfying. They are describing something they have already learned to endure.
Suzannah points to the way sex education itself is often structured around risk and restraint rather than pleasure.
“Boys are taught about pleasurable events like erections and wet dreams. Girls are taught about periods, PMS and unplanned pregnancies,” she says. “This sets girls up to believe that becoming a woman is a painful experience while becoming a man is a pleasurable experience.”
In other words, emotional conditioning that can reshape what girls expect from sex before they have had it.
Writer and researcher Peggy Orenstein made an observation in a TED talk on young women and sexual pleasure: “While young women may feel entitled to engage in sexual behaviour, they don’t necessarily feel entitled to enjoy it.”
Suzannah describes how that plays out in practice: women struggling to speak up in bed, unsure whether asking for something different is assertive or “too much”, uncertain whether their discomfort is worth interrupting the moment for.
When women’s pain is consistently dismissed or treated as something to endure rather than investigate, the consequences extend far beyond sex. As writer Lili Loofbourow has pointed out, the gap in how that pain is treated is stark.
“These days, a man can walk out of his doctor’s office with a prescription for Viagra based on little but a self-report, but it still takes a woman, on average, 9.28 years of suffering to be diagnosed with endometriosis.” By the time women are finally taken seriously, she notes, “not just sex but everyday existence has become a life-deforming challenge.”
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I asked both Sara and Suzannah what they thought needed to change. And ultimately, it’s a reshaping of what we are taught to expect in the first place. For Sara, it doesn’t start with sex itself, but with behaviour far earlier. She talks about reciprocity - how little we are shown, even in everyday life, of what it looks like to treat each other fairly and mutually: “you did this for me, I’ll do that for you.” In her view, sex education is only part of it. What matters just as much is building a culture where supporting each other is expected across all relationships.
“Teach very young children how to share toys. Not as a metaphor for sex, but as a foundation for it” - a way of embedding reciprocity as normal long before intimacy is ever discussed, Sara suggests.
For Suzannah, the shift begins in education and culture too: language that treats female pleasure as real and legitimate, and sex education that centres communication, not just consent in the sense of stopping something, but also in what feels good.
“Women need to be taught that their voices matter in intimate spaces, not only when something is wrong, but when something could feel better,” she says.
A place where pleasure is not an accidental outcome for women, but an expected part of the experience itself. And while I don’t deny that putting condoms on plastic penises was fun at the time, I do wish we’d been told a little more about pleasure too.
As a mother of a three year old daughter, I want better for her. This is an interesting take, and very much needed discussion. I listened to a podcast where a female comedian said she’d choose to be stuck with a bear than a man in the jungle because she felt her vagina would be at risk with a man. That’s how wide ranging women’s experiences have been in their sexual experiences. I wish I had known how to navigate the spaces of first-time sex and advocating for myself as a young 20 yr old. Men are not the enemy, but we need to teach our children both boys and girls differently. I’m filling the gaps now so I can teach my daughter better. Thank you for this article.
That’s because girls and women have been conditioned by society to be soft and please men. Like literally a hundred years ago and less women were brought up to be married and please their husband. By any means. No one is taught that sex should not be painful and to speak up if it is. It’s still taboo and almost shameful to talk about and we need to teach our girls better and our boys. It’s not just about consent but about how to talk about sex confidently and safely without consequences. And better representation and examples in the media too