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Unlike table manners, for example, people do not typically learn how to have sex through direct observation of others. Instead, their understanding of what sex entails and how it works is shaped by films, books and media. Because the portrayal of sex and sexual morality is often centered around male anatomy, women may easily develop the perception that their bodies or feelings are abnormal, according to a doctoral dissertation defended at Tallinn University.
“So far, there has been a tendency to talk a lot about how we supposedly have sex solely for the purpose of reproduction. However, the human world is much more complex and the layers of meaning associated with sex are deeply intertwined,” says Rita Niineste, a newly minted doctor of philosophy at Tallinn University.
When engaging in sex, people do not think about the hormones released in their bodies or the reproduction of the human species. Instead, they are primarily motivated by pleasure. “It is precisely pleasure that allows a person to understand themselves as a sexual being and to recognize their own needs and preferences,” Niineste points out.
In her recently defended doctoral dissertation, she explored the question of experiencing pleasure from the perspective of phenomenological philosophy. She sought to answer how a person’s personal bodily experience during sex and the way this experience is portrayed in morality, culture and science influence one another. Her research primarily focused on female pleasure, a topic that has received very little attention in philosophy so far.
While male pleasure during sex is generally taken for granted in literature, female pleasure is still often described as a mystery. “I was interested in how women’s pleasure became a mystery. Even more so, I wanted to understand why it remains a mystery to this day,” Niineste notes.
Pleasure as the alpha and omega
In her doctoral dissertation, Niineste analyzed sex as an experience and sought to describe what gives it meaning. “For a human being as a living entity, it is precisely the system of meaning that drives or motivates us to take action,” she explains.
In phenomenology, meaning is a broad concept and is not limited to linguistic meanings or cultural symbols. “Our body is also a center of meaning-making. If my stomach growls, it means I need to find food somewhere,” Niineste illustrates.
“If we look at what fundamentally motivates sexual experiences, we primarily engage in sex for pleasure.”
When analyzing experience phenomenologically, she explains, the goal is to return to this foundational level of meaning-making while initially setting aside theoretical knowledge, opinions and preconceptions. “If we approach sexual experience in this way, we can ask what makes the experience meaningful, understandable and significant,” she elaborates.
Through this process, it becomes clear that enjoyable sex does not require any additional motivation — it essentially motivates itself. “However, we generally need considerable extra motivation to engage in sex if we do not enjoy it,” Niineste notes. Such additional motivators can include the desire to have children, maintain a relationship or even earn money from sex. “If we look at what fundamentally motivates sexual experiences, we primarily engage in sex for pleasure,” Niineste concludes.
Although other primates, such as bonobos, also engage in sex for fun, Niineste argues that sexuality functions as a distinct meaning system for humans. “Sex is highly pleasurable for humans and I believe it serves a specific function comparable to humor,” she suggests.
Keeping consciousness continuously active is a significant burden on the brain, and from time to time, we need to “switch off” to balance this load. “We need relaxation, which humor provides, and sex offers something similar: it allows for a kind of interruption that, on one hand, simply makes us feel good and, on the other hand, is essential for alleviating the existential tension that comes with being a rational being,” says Niineste. From a meaning-making perspective, she argues that the recreational — or revitalizing — aspect of sex is far more significant than its procreative function.
Her methodological approach, phenomenological philosophy, is a branch of study that analyzes and describes experiences. However, she points out that there has been very little philosophical writing on sexual experiences and what does exist has largely been from a male perspective. “These texts do not address the problem of pleasure at all because, from the perspective of the male body, it is taken entirely for granted,” Niineste states. While not all human experiences are inherently gendered, sexuality undoubtedly has a strong gendered aspect.
From the perspective of experience analysis, a person feels during an experience whatever their body allows them to feel. “The anatomical structure of the male and female body differs in several key ways, particularly concerning pleasure,” Niineste explains. In the male body, the functions of pleasure and reproduction align, whereas in the female body, they are only indirectly connected. The most erogenous and sensitive part of the clitoris is located outside the vagina and is not adequately stimulated during typical penetrative intercourse.
“For men, pleasure and sex naturally go hand in hand because the ways we typically have sex are suited to the male body and make sense for them,” the new doctor points out. She argues that the emphasis on reproduction in Christian sexual morality has never threatened or questioned male pleasure. “However, female pleasure is not needed for reproduction in any way,” Niineste reflects.
“What’s up with women?”
When Rita Niineste began studying psychology, sexual medicine research texts and history for her dissertation, she assumed that, from an empirical standpoint, the issue of the clitoris as the most erogenous zone of the female body — and its connection to pleasure and orgasm — had long been settled. To her surprise, she encountered confusion even in scientific literature.
“On the one hand, the history of medicine shows that a fairly accurate and adequate understanding of female sexual anatomy has existed at least since the mid-19th century. On the other hand, studies conducted in various countries reveal that this knowledge is often not reflected in anatomy textbooks,” Niineste explains.
According to her, the same applies to pleasure. As early as the 1960s and 1970s, extensive scientific research demonstrated that, on a purely physiological level, women do not have difficulties experiencing sexual pleasure or reaching orgasm. “Problems arise when sex involves a partner, particularly in heterosexual intercourse. This allowed researchers to conclude decades ago that the primary cause of women’s sexual difficulties lies in the fact that established sexual practices are simply not sufficiently pleasurable for them in the long run,” the newly minted doctor notes.
She points out that Simone de Beauvoir, the founder of feminist philosophy, had already reached a similar conclusion earlier. This line of thought was further developed in the 1970s and 1980s by many feminist cultural theorists and authors. “Their advice to women was to reclaim their pleasure — to satisfy themselves rather than depend on men or societal attitudes,” Niineste states.
While analyzing empirical studies and feminist authors’ works, she began to question why this data has not significantly reduced the confusion surrounding female pleasure. “People still don’t seem to understand what’s going on with these women. What do they like? Why don’t they know what they like? Why don’t they say anything when they do? These kinds of questions have not gone away,” she lists.
This raises the question of why knowledge that has been available for decades has not spread more widely in society. Moreover, according to Niineste, societal attitudes toward female sexuality have gradually become significantly more open and there also seem to be more men who care about their female partners’ pleasure. “The belief that women don’t need to enjoy sex is becoming increasingly rare,” she says. In other words, if we set aside subconscious biases, the situation where women do not enjoy sex does not seem to serve anyone’s interests.
“This led me to the idea that this confusion is not deliberately created by anyone, but rather, it perpetuates itself because we lack the appropriate tools to analyze the situation,” Niineste explains. People are accustomed to thinking about and studying sex on physical, cultural, ethical, medical, linguistic and perhaps other levels — often assuming that these levels are generally in harmony with one another. “My hypothesis, however, was that this is not the case when it comes to women,” she states.
One-sided examples
According to Rita Niineste, it is not difficult to understand how the assumption of coherence in sexual experience has developed, as it indeed exists in the case of men. “We have a very clear scientific understanding of male sexuality and this aligns well with how sex is portrayed in culture, which in turn reflects how men actually experience sex and pleasure,” she points out.
The vast majority of representations of sex in films, media, social media, literature and art depict sex from a male perspective. On an ethical level, Niineste notes that Christian sexual morality, which sees procreation as the sole legitimate purpose of sex, would seem just as illogical and harmful from a male standpoint as it does from a female one. “However, as mentioned earlier, Christian sexual ethics did not challenge male pleasure, because the male body does not distinguish between sex for fun and sex for reproduction — the experience remains the same for men,” she explains.
This has led to the prevailing belief that the way sex is portrayed, or whether and how it is scientifically studied, has nothing to do with how pleasurable sex actually is and cannot influence it. “A significant part of my work involves explaining how these different layers of meaning have come into conflict in the case of women and why this has such a profound impact on their real-life intimate experiences,” Niineste adds.
She explains that humans learn how to navigate the world through intersubjective validation. “This means that we adopt a shared sense of normalcy — an understanding of how things are done — without anyone explicitly telling us. We simply exist among others and naturally pick up behaviors by following what those around us do,” she elaborates.
While people can observe how to tie shoelaces, ride a bus or follow table manners by watching others, sex typically does not happen in public. As a result, people’s understanding of what sex means and how it is supposed to work is largely shaped by how it is portrayed in films, media, books and other cultural representations. “This is why these portrayals have such a strong influence over us. We may not even notice their impact when the bodily experience of pleasure aligns with its cultural representation — as is generally the case for (heterosexual) men,” Niineste points out.
For many women, however, these layers of meaning come into conflict. “To put it figuratively, a woman sees in a movie what an enjoyable sexual encounter is supposed to look like, but when she follows that script herself, she eventually realizes that something doesn’t feel right,” Niineste explains. For a long time, many women assumed that the problem lay within themselves. “If the ‘normal’ thing is to enjoy sex the way everyone else seems to, then I must be the one who is strange, I must be abnormal,” she describes as a common thought pattern among women.
Depictions changing slowly
According to Niineste, there are no simple or quick solutions to this issue. Over time, she believes that women must find their own voice and the necessary courage to talk about sex and depict it in a way that reflects their experiences. This applies to both scientific and philosophical discussions. “There’s no magic formula here — women simply need to present their perspectives honestly,” she states. As an example, she notes that the portrayal of sex in “Babygirl” (2024) is already more realistic than in “Fifty Shades of Grey” (2015). “Things are slowly getting better,” she adds.
For larger societal changes to occur, Niineste argues that sex as an activity, the social attitudes surrounding it and its cultural representation need to align more closely than they do now. However, this is a gradual process. “Scientific knowledge on this subject has existed for nearly a hundred years, but that alone is not enough. Cultural representations must catch up and the way people engage in sex must ultimately evolve as well. This would give women a more direct connection to their own pleasure, leading to a better understanding of themselves as sexual beings, as well as their needs and preferences,” she explains.
Sexuality, she emphasizes, is an inherent part of being human that affects everyone in one way or another. Therefore, she considers it crucial for people to understand themselves better and to develop an awareness of the “logic” of their sexual partner’s body. “This would help us move beyond the current situation where, metaphorically speaking, men don’t understand what women want and women don’t understand what men fail to grasp,” she adds.
For this to happen, society must maintain a healthy attitude toward sex as one of the fundamental human needs and prevent sexuality from becoming a taboo topic once again. “It’s an old truth that the more you suppress or fear your own sexuality, the more control it actually has over you,” she says. Niineste stresses that it is especially important to challenge the notion that there is no need to talk about sex because “everything is already clear and comes naturally.” This assumption, she argues, does a disservice to women, whose bodies and pleasure are not adequately accounted for in prevailing sexual practices and cultural norms.
Rita Niineste, a doctoral candidate at the Institute of Humanities at Tallinn University, defended her dissertation, “A Pleasure of One’s Own: On the Intersubjectivity of Sexual Experiences” (“Naudingu tähendus. Uurimus seksuaalsete kogemuste intersubjektiivsusest”) on January 28. Her dissertation was supervised by Professor Tõnu Viik from Tallinn University. The opponents were Professor Sara Heinämaa from the University of Jyväskylä and Professor Dermot Moran from Boston College.
This article was originally published on the Estonian Public Broadcasting online news portal. Author: Airika Harrik, editor: Marcus Turovski
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