Well, there's a sense in which we don't know whether sex was fun for girls (or guys either) way back in them olden days, but there's a sense in which we can be fairly confident that in general, sociobiologically speaking, sex is "supposed" to be fun, in that humans have evolved the capacity to experience sexual pleasure and it is fairly obvious that this is adaptive, sort of nature's little incentive to get us to reproduce ourselves. That is, unless the capacity to experience sexual pleasure, with or without orgasm is just a glorious gift lacking in any point, which seems unlikely.
There are design problems that show that these capacities are the product of natural selection or that God is a sexist: the clitoris is not optimally placed to ensure women's orgasm during intercourse, which, from nature's point of view, is the immediate point of the exercise, that being the way babies are made, and the studies indicate that women take longer to reach orgasm than men. However, like men, the studies (and I think anecdotal experience) shows that a great deal of sexual pleasure is possible even without orgasm.
So, given the basic facts of human physiology, other things being equal, sex probably is and always has been fun for guys and gals. Of course, other things are not always equal. We keep coming up with clever social arrangement or physiological interventions designed to spoil the enjoyment of this wonderful capacity. Making women virtual chattel and subordinating their desires and inclinations to maintaining economic arrangements in property systems controlled by or arranged for the benefit of men had to do a lot to dampen female sexual pleasure. (Never mind ghastly physical interventions, such as female genital mutilation, aka clitorectomy.)
Some of this has a possible partial sociobiological aspect as well: male control over women is one way in which men can assure that their resources are expended on and benefit their own offspring. (This is often quite consciously asserted in history as a reason for sexist social arrangements, although of course not with a sociobiological background.) Other explanatory factors contribute to patriarchy, such as the ability of men in the present generation to benefit through their own lives by the exploitation of female labor. So far as patriarchy is adaptive, however, it conflicts with full realization of the (also adaptive) capacity for sexual pleasure.
Joanna mentions exhaustion as a dampening factor in the experience of sexual pleasure, and assuredly it is. One wonders, however, to what degree that this is a modern phenomenon rather than a historical one. Sahlin's research suggests that hunter-gatherers worked relatively little compared to moderns, and humans have been hunter-gatherers for most of their history. Moving into the era of civilization and agriculture, most people in history have been slaves or serfs or something like that.
However, such spotty knowledge as I have about premodern and early modern society (mainly European) suggests that, first, people of both sexes worked much less and less hard than moderns as a general rule; it took the iron hand of capital several generations to subject the emerging proletariat to time and work discipline, exorcise "Saint Monday," get rid of 150 or so feast days in the old Catholic calendar, etc. Second, and this goes for moderns too, when people were in fact driven to work, most men did not have the luxury of relaxing at home while women brought home the bacon (or, more likely, the barley). Today, with leisure largely banished from the lives of most people, the double shift probably does impinge more heavily on women's sexual pleasure than on men's, but this is a phenomenon of the last 150 years and, in much of thew world,of the last 100 or even the last 50 years. Increasingly as well men are probably pretty exhausted too, although the evidence suggests that women work longer hours at home and work.
I suggested, and I agree with Joanna, that effective birth control, basically dating (in Europe and some of America) to the 1840s with the development of vulcanized rubber, probably was a great enhancer of sexual pleasure for both sexes, making it possible for the first time for people to make having fun the main point of sexual activity without worrying (too much) about pregnancy -- life threatening for most women through at least late 19th century, never mind potentially economically burdensome and socially risky if you weren't married, or not married to your sexual partner -- or disease. And of course the increasing economic and social independence of women have reduced the effectiveness of patriarchal constraints on women's sexual pleasure.
So you have, in the modern capitalist world, countervailing tendencies: basically, women can now choose their own partners and have sex without having to face very grave collateral consequences (such as death in childbirth), but on the other hand they are driven to exhaustion, like men, by the capitalist market, and are still exploited for domestic labor under not-yet-defeated patriarchal relations. In addition their labor is still paid less (though more than a generation ago), so insofar as it is needed, they have to work harder and are more exhausted. Because women's labor is paid less and they are still limited in their access to more desirable employment, the increasing availability of divorce and the high incidence of nonmarital sex increases the likelihood of single parenthood -- women are still far more likely to end up with the kids, and that promotes greater exhaustion too.
Therefore it's very hard to be highly confident that modernity is a net gain over hunter-gathering or even premodern modes of exploitation in terms of the possibility of women, or for that matter men, to enjoy the great gift of sexual pleasure. It has, like so much if capitalism, created the preconditions for that realization while at the same time creating social and economic relations that, in the old man's words -- I don't think he ever thought of it this way -- fetter the development and realization of sexual pleasure. (And I don't mean fetter in a good way, if that's your thing.)
This a point about capitalism that I think has been underemphasized except by a few thinkers like Wilhelm Reich. Socialism means better sex -- a definite selling point, boys and girls. Run up the red flag and peel off them undies!
--- joanna <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
> andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> >>Pleasure is now the historically evolved function
> of
> >>sex for human
> >>beings -- till relatively recently in history most
> >>women probably had
> >>little pleasure from it.
> >>
> >>
> >
> >Meaning of this please -- is there a human activity
> >that has, even in a historically limited way just
> one
> >function that merits the definite article? And what
> do
> >you mean by "pleasure," as opposed to what?
> Economic
> >need involved in keeping a provider, obsession,
> >submission to greater force, producing children,
> what?
> >Evidence for this vague claim?
> >
> I think the short answer is we don't know.
>
> I suspect things got a lot nicer since birth
> control, but the advent of
> birth control coincides with women working double
> shifts (work & home)
> and exhaustion definitely affects the capacity to
> feel pleasure.
>
> Joanna
>
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