A little more in relation to the survey we created for this movie... There was a particular group of people that surprisingly filled out the survey in numbers and gave me some thoughts to chew on. The group is pre-surgery Male to Female Transsexuals who tended to be 45 and older. In case you're not up on the lingo, these are people born as males who are currently living as women, often taking hormonal supplements to assist in the transition, and are awaiting surgery to physically change their genitals from male to female. The survey answers all came in during the same period of time, and they were all generally similar in age. From that I assumed someone found this survey on the internet, thought it helpful, and passed it along to her group of friends or her support group. There is always the possibility that these were just written up as jokes, but if they were, there was considerable care taken in the answers, and I applaud the ingenuity of whoever did it.
Technically, these people shouldn't have been filling out the questionnaires because I specifically asked for only people who have lived with female genitals, and since none of these people had yet lived with female genitals... You get my point, but I'm glad they filled it out because their answers were interesting.
I believe, and discuss in the movie, that many women, not able to identify with any available models of physical female sexual response, make a mostly unconscious decision to experience their sexual response as how they believe it is supposed to be and not what it physically is. These pre-op transsexual males trying to navigate through being a woman are in the same boat. They have little to no realistic models for understanding female sexual pleasure and release, and I noticed a strange thing in their answers. They all spoke about "orgasms" that happen because of anal penetration, and they spoke about them in much the same way as women do who claim to have "orgasms" because of vaginal penetration. Given the research I’ve done, I can be pretty sure in saying that a male did not likely have an orgasm simply through penetration of his anus. It is possible for a man to ejaculate - which is separate from an orgasm - from stimulation of the prostate through the anus, but it is fairly clear from the surveys that no ejaculation was happening. Also in these MtoF transsexual surveys, they were pretty explicit that only penetration was happening - no stimulation of the penis, yet they all spoke about these "orgasms." Like women who claim to have vaginal orgasms, they often used vague reference to joy/overwhelming emotion/love. For both, often no actual physical description of the feeling of an orgasm was discussed. They also often spent a lot of time and added great emphasis to (for instance a lot of exclamation marks and gushing adjectives) discussing the emotional connection instead of the orgasm; as if they chose to speak about the emotional part that they actually felt instead of the physical part that they were sort of creating in their mind. Most importantly, though, the discussion of orgasm in both these groups almost always turned towards the respondents partner; discussing his orgasm and how wonderful it made her feel, or discussing his knowledge and expertise in her orgasm, as if the women were not first person connected to the orgasm. There was also a large emphasis on simultaneous orgasms. My thought is that both these groups of people, pre-op M to F transsexuals and women who claim to orgasm purely from vaginal penetration, might be relating their experiences based on their assumptions of how a woman experiences orgasm during sex rather than on their experiences of an actual physical orgasm.
I know this might seem judgy and rude to insinuate that there are women who don't know enough about their own sexual functions to relay the correct information, but I think we have to consider the possibility that women in general are so misinformed about female sexual release that some women misrepresent themselves not out of malice but out of a largely unconscious decision to mold themselves to the limited environmental clues they have been given. Women who were born female at least have the physical sensations present in their own bodies that they can use to counteract incorrect assumptions about female sexual release. However, pre-op M to F transsexuals do not have the luxury of consulting their own female genitals about the sexual assumptions that surround them. They are more susceptible to the confusion and delusion that exists among women about their sexual functioning. These MtoF women have only the cultural cues, advice, and role models to go from when it comes to their physical sexual release. I never speak about MtoF transexuals in the movie, but I do speak about the cultural delusion regarding femal orgasm which could cause women to lie about thier ability to have vaginal orgasms in surveys.
That normal women can somehow be delusional when it comes to their orgasm might seem far fetched, but I think it should be seriously discussed, and I think it is an important avenue for further research. I’m not exactly versed heavily in psychology, but I have read some things involving the personal stories of gay people from earlier generations that seem to relate. Take this for what it’s worth - the stories I've read tend to go this way. Within their environmental scope, these gay people had no cultural cues or role models that seemed to have the same sensations and emotions that they were experiencing. They could not satisfactorily define these feelings because there was nothing definable in the environment to relate them to. They were forced to hide, adapt, and contort their feelings and desires to be relatable to their world. They often unconsciously chose to live as though, and in ways believe, they were having the same experiences and emotions that they thought they were supposed to have. It was not until they found environmental role models that they could relate these gay emotions to that things began to make sense. I believe it could be this way for women in regard to their physical sexual release. The environmental cues, advice, and role models in this arena rarely match up to a woman's actual experiences, and she too hides, adapts and contorts until she finds something she can relate to that allows it to finally make sense.
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