“The biggest ick (repulsion) is when a man says ‘I’d like to make love to you.’ My vagina closes up. All women know what I’m talking about,” says Charlize Theron on SubwayTakes, a series of short interviews filmed inside the New York subway. Its creator, Kareem Rahma, asks her why she finds that expression so unpleasant. “I don’t want you to do anything to me. I want you to do something with me,” the actress replies.
Cecilia Martín, director of the Psicode Institute of Psychology, asserts that nowadays, many people find it more comfortable to talk about ‘fucking’ than ‘making love’ because sex without emotional involvement is a way of protecting themselves.
“Saying ‘fucking’ sounds freer, more modern, and less emotionally committed. In contrast, ‘making love’ can generate rejection because it implies intimacy, tenderness, romance, and a certain emotional surrender, and that makes people uncomfortable who have suffered for love in the past and have learned to be very emotionally protective,” she says before indicating that it also plays a role that for years, women have been closely linked to romantic love and the idea of ‘surrendering.’
“Many women advocate for sexual pleasure separate from that emotional obligation. The problem is that, sometimes, in that search for self-sufficiency and emotional detachment, we end up normalizing superficial relationships and having difficulty building deep intimacy,” explains the author of Ghosting, Jealousy, Breakups, and Other Modern Dramas.
When ‘fucking’ underlines passion
Data indicates that the sex lives of Spanish couples are not at their best. A study by the Center for Sociological Research (CIS) indicates that one in four Spaniards (24.6%) have not had sex with their partner or other people in the last 12 months, mainly due to a lack of interest or sexual desire. Who knows if the insistence on “making love” isn’t responsible for the sheets becoming boring…
In Orgasmic Love, Cecilia Martín suggests integrating the practices of “making love” and “fucking” as a way to experience novelty and explore new roles and fantasies.
“This keeps passion alive over the years. For a long time, there was a rather classic (and very sexist) division between the woman “to love” and the woman “to desire.” The girlfriend or wife was associated with tenderness, stability, and romance, while more explicit, transgressive, or purely physical sex was reserved for other women. And even today, some people continue to reproduce this separation without realizing it,” she asserts. She believes the problem with this view is that it fragments desire and intimacy, as if a stable relationship had to be more emotional and less sexual, or as if certain practices were incompatible with stable love.
“Healthy couples who maintain passion over time integrate both: emotional connection and sexual desire. It’s also true that today we are questioning those old sexual scripts a lot. Many women no longer want to play the role of ‘the good romantic girlfriend’ versus ‘the sexual woman.’ They want to feel desired, free, and emotionally connected at the same time,” she explains.
However, the study Verbal Communication about Sex in Marriage: Patterns of Language Use and Its Connection with Relational Outcome indicates that although data previously showed men were more accustomed to talking about ‘fucking’ than ‘making love’ when having sex, there are now hardly any significant differences in their usage.
“Although the results showed that men report slightly more use of cruder slang terms — a finding that fits with existing data showing that men use more obscene language than women — these data generally suggest that the use of sexual language by married men and women is more similar than different,” note authors Tina Coffelt and Jon A Hess.
