Let’s Talk About Lube (and Why Many Still Feel Weird About It)
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Time to read 4 min
Author's note: Throughout this piece, I sometimes use the terms “women” and “men” instead of “people with penises” and “people with vaginas.” That’s because this issue is one that’s greatly affected by misogyny and the relationship between those two genders. However, I want to note that not all women have vaginas and not all men have penises.
Sarah, 38, used to use lube for “kinky, non-mainstream” sex—but never for vanilla sex. She felt like she shouldn’t need it for “traditional sexual encounters” and that if she did, then something must be wrong.
“For some reason, I never asked myself why kinky sex never hurt and vanilla sex always did,” Sarah tells The Pelvic People. “Until an excellent gynecologist helped me figure it out.”
Sarah suffered through painful penetrative vanilla sex for years because she was operating under a common misconception: that lube is only necessary if something is wrong. She’d absorbed the cultural messaging that a turned on vagina is a wet vagina.
And if it’s anything but wet? Well, clearly something is wrong with you.
Table of Contents
A Brief History of the Wetness Obsession
While open discussions of Wet Ass Pussies really only started recently, preoccupation with the wetness or dryness of vaginas isn’t new. (Sex, after all, is the number one most essential thing that humans do to perpetuate the human race, so it’s a fair guess that we’ve been talking about it for as long as we’ve been doing it.)
But it’s only really in the past century or so that those conversations have taken on a scientific—and therefore more public—bent:
Freud tried to uncover the causes of female sexual “frigidity” in the early 20th century, which to him meant the inability of some women* to orgasm during sexual intercourse.
Kinsey blew everyone’s minds with his 1953 book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, which was one of the first times that many people were told that the clit is pretty essential to orgasm.
Masters and Johnson observed and reported on women’s physical arousal cycles, which they outline in their own explosive (and yet somehow still very dry; honestly probably could have used some lube) 1966 tome, Human Sexual Response.
Who Has Defined “Normal” Sex?
Do you notice a commonality in that list? There’s only one woman—Virginia Johnson—and not only was she technically a research assistant, but she was also rarely referred to using her first name.
That list of men who so changed our cultural understandings of sexuality and the sexual response of people with vaginas illustrates a startling fact: Most of what we know and understand about the “female” body has come directly from the minds and understanding of men.
In fact, many of our ideas around sex are based around the experiences of people who have penises. For example, when a man or other person with a penis is aroused, their arousal is visible in the form of an erection. Vaginas and vulvas, however, are not that visible. And most vaginal and clitoral arousal—engorgement of the vaginal wall and internal clitoral tissue, swelling, elongation of the vaginal canal, etc.—is pretty much impossible to see, unless you’re into playing with speculums and bio sensors.
And no judgment if you are! But since most people aren’t getting an eye-to-cervix look at things when a person with a vagina is getting aroused, the most obvious sign of arousal is lubrication. That means, historically, if we’re trying to compare arousal one-to-one, then vaginal wetness is akin to penile erectness. And since most of our understanding of sex comes from a male perspective, it makes sense that wetness is given a similar cultural value to hardness.
The Lube Stigma
The fact that vaginal lubrication also literally eases the act of penetration likely contributes to the cultural value we place on a WAP as well. While lubrication does a lot for making sex comfier, engorgement and elongation of the vagina (also called “tenting”) is super important for comfort of the receptive partner. Buuuut tenting doesn’t necessarily matter for the experience of the penetrating partner. (In fact, “tightness” is another highly valued quality for a vagina to have, despite the fact that a fully aroused vagina is likely to be more “open” than an unaroused vagina.) As long as there’s lubrication, therefore, a man might think they’re good to go.
Some men also view lube (the bottle kind) as a slight on their sexual prowess. If they’re good at sex, the viewpoint holds, then a woman shouldn’t need any other help. But that perspective completely ignores the myriad other factors—like preference, medication, hormones, and menopause, to name just a few—that might lead to a person with a vagina wanting to use lube.
Finally, all of this negative messaging around lube not only comes from a traditionally male perspective, but is also preeeeetty heteronormative. People who have penetrative anal sex regularly, for example, don’t have the same hangups about whether or not they should use lube. And since a lot of those people are gay men, the association with butt stuff could mean that heterosexual men see lube as being “gay.”
Reframing Lube
So why don’t more people use lube? The short answer is: We’re told it signals that something is wrong. But instead of “wrong,” why not think of the need for lube as being just another variation in the wide and wonderful world of human sexuality?
As Sarah says, “Use it solo or not, use it for penetration or not, use it every time or not. The people who need to use lube are the people whose lives are improved by using it.”
And that’s really all we need to think about it.
Many people think needing lube signals something is “wrong,” but it’s actually a normal part of sexual comfort and pleasure.
Mostly male-centered cultural and historical biases have made vaginal lubrication seem like the ultimate sign of arousal.
Using lube is about easing discomfort, enhancing pleasure, and embracing variations in sexual experience.
The Author || Emma McGowan
Emma is the Editor in Chief of the sex positive sexual health site Sexual + Being and the sex tech website Kink&Code. Emma McGowan also previously did freelance blogging and content editing for a startups.
Additionally, Emma McGowan's hobbies include making patterns and sewing, connecting with other women, and reading at least three books a week. Emma speaks Spanish fluently and spent her 20s traveling and living around the world. Her favorite places to live are Guatemala and Argentina and she hopes to never stop traveling. Follow her on Twitter @MissEmmaMcG.
