Allow me to paint a picture that I am sure will be all too familiar to the heterosexual women reading this article. You finally crawl into your bed after a long day, your body is exhausted and ready for the soft embrace of sleep. The bedsheets are clean and crisp. The pillows, soft and inviting. Your mind beckons in the hazy swirl of distant thoughts, and you start to drift off into a deep slumber – when suddenly, you are jerked back to consciousness by a certain, firm prodding into your lower back.
Your partner and his penis have arrived to disturb your rest, but rather than shooing him away as one would a stray dog, begging for scraps, you decide it’s easier to just roll over and “get it over with”.
This is not sex without consent, but nor is it sex where both parties are enthusiastically raring to go. This is sex to keep the peace, sex because you think you should – sex because it’s just easier than saying no. This is what has been dubbed “mercy sex” and it is alarmingly common.
A recent paper, published in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, defines “mercy sex” as “sexual act(s) between consenting parties in which the female willingly participates not to satisfy her own sexual desire or arousal, but rather to fulfil an obligation.”
I gave that definition to a long-time married friend, only for her to laugh and say: “So just normal sex then?”
Personally, I strongly object to the term “mercy sex”, as this denotes a level of power and conjures up images of the women bestowing sex upon a pathetically grateful man, when the reality is far more complex. Feeling obligated to have sex when you don’t really want to is far from a powerful position to occupy. However, the term seems to have stuck.
The recent research paper aims to uncover just how often women are having sex when they don’t want to. They do this by drawing on data collected by other studies looking into treating women experiencing hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD) – AKA, a low libido. From this, they crunched the numbers to find out how often women were reporting having sex when they really didn’t want to and came up with the figure of (roughly) twice to three times a month.
I don’t think this is a very strong piece of research. For one thing, if you’re only using studies on women who are already being treated for a low libido, you aren’t capturing anything like the full picture. I’d wager there are plenty of women out there with very healthy libidos who are doing the same thing. For another, the experiences of women who have sex with other women are notably absent from the discussion. However, it has raised an important question; namely, why do so many women have sex when they don’t really want to?
Perhaps we’ll never know exactly how many or how often they are doing it – this is the kind of subject it is notoriously tricky to get accurate data on. However, anecdotally at least, I can tell you that I have certainly had sex when I really couldn’t be bothered and so have all the friends I asked – maybe not regularly but at least once. I would bet that most women reading this have also done likewise.
The “why” is far more complicated. To be clear, I am not talking about abuse or forcing someone to have sex. This is sex when you do it because it won’t take long and it will make the other person happy. At its core, “mercy sex” is emotional labour and women do a lot of emotional labour. We do it at home, we do it at work, and quite clearly, we are doing it in the bedroom as well. It is ignoring your own wants and needs to satisfy someone else’s. It’s the same behaviour as faking orgasms – and a lot of us are doing that as well. You put on a show so your partner can feel good about themselves.
For me, at least, mercy sex was simply the path of least resistance. In the moment, it seemed easier to just go along with it than it was to explain why I didn’t want to have sex and deal with the subsequent hurt feelings and inevitable sulking. I suppose I thought I was being kind, but the truth is that this type of sex is anything but.
Putting aside the fact that surely no one wants to be having sex with someone who is mentally calculating credit card repayments and hoping it is over with soon, every time I did this, I was avoiding a very important conversation. If I am being brutally honest, I didn’t want to have sex because I was either bored of the sex or I was bored of him.
What’s worse, the more I did it, the less I enjoyed it and the more resentful I became. It normalised my having bad sex and created a feedback loop where he felt good, but I felt intensely frustrated about the whole thing.
The research paper suggests that women engage in mercy sex to keep a male partner happy because “there is evolutionary pressure (based on male partners providing food, shelter, and protecting children) for women to please their male partners to maintain monogamous heterosexual relationships”. I told you it wasn’t very good.
This kind of oversimplistic, harking-back-to-the-ancestors line of reasoning makes me intensely angry. It’s the same hackneyed theories you hear trotted out on men’s rights podcasts. “Men need to spread their seed and women are designed to stay home and nurture.” Give me a break.
I think women engage in sex when they don’t want to because we are socially conditioned to deprioritise all of our own wants and needs, especially in the service of a relationship. We do it in virtually every arena of our lives, why wouldn’t we be doing it with sex as well?
I also think women get bored of monogamy and heterosexual sex faster than men do. Why wouldn’t they? Did you know that only 65 per cent of heterosexual women regularly orgasm with their partner, compared with 96 per cent of straight men? Depending on which piece of research you read, up to 58 per cent of straight women admit to faking orgasms. And then we wonder why women might get bored of doing that and start phoning it in once in a while!
Whatever the motivations behind it, mercy sex is a short-term fix that causes long-term damage to both parties. It is soothing the symptoms of dysfunction without ever addressing the cause. Yes, it might temporarily avoid an awkward conversation, but it also robs you both of the chance to really address what is going on in the relationship.
It also means that the person giving in or faking pleasure doesn’t actually get to have the kind of sex they want. So, ladies, please stop faking pleasure and start speaking up for what you want.
Mercy sex isn’t actually merciful at all. Ultimately, it is a way of avoiding the truth, which is the only sustainable option in the long run.