Lovely, supportive snark from Holly of The Pervocracy the other day in an aside about social attitudes about men’s orgasms.

(Male orgasms are not interesting, of course. Because women’s orgasms are like intricate flowers blown in fierce waves under a sky of fireworks, and men’s orgasms are like “splurt.” Sigh. It’s tough being a flower, but at least my sexuality isn’t comic relief. Instead it’s the experience of the Other and must be documented for the edification of humans. But anyway.)

She said it here.

My version of this insight is one of the things that made me decide to invert the feminist “sex class” construction such that men are the “sex class” and women the “no-sex class.” Men are considered so automatically, intrinsically, reflexively, and obligately sexual that it’s just assumed that the only possible interesting things about us is when there’s something wrong with our ability to have orgasms. The top two being premature ejaculation and impotence, plus occasional grumblings about refractory periods.

But interest in healthy, non-dysfunctional, normal human male orgasms? Aside perhaps from a peculiar and probably porn-influenced obsession with volume, not so much.

One more bit of evidence, if we didn’t already have railroad cars full, that scientific and medical principal investigators are still overwhelmingly male.

That’s not to say that male orgasms will be the first thing women researchers tackle when they start breaking the glass ceilings of grant administration boards. But it is to say that women, unlike men, probably wouldn’t have the acute performance-related and homophobic “nothing to see there, let’s move along” anxiety combined with “I do it all the time how could anyone possibly be interested” arrogance I think a lot of male researchers have.