It does not necessarily follow from all this that women deep down hate being able to vote and long to be beaten. What it means, I think, is that one fantasy many women share is the reconciliation of their actual orgasms with the impossible rules of the society they grew up in. Women have always tried hard to erotically assent to the lies they're told about how you get good sex, whether through marriage, or submission, or even our current theories about consent. None of it quite works: Bad sex was and remains a problem in America; behind every man's joke about a "frigid wife" is a woman who's done pretending otherwise. That the woman's side of what bad sex means is only now being discussed is both a sign of progress and an index of how exhausted women are from trying to sustain social fictions old and new about how women are supposed to get off. They're tired because social change is onerous. Because women have necessarily shouldered the bulk of that social adjustment. And because it still isn't done.

Favorite new word: Onanistic. And not just because it makes the business name Cummins Onan ("powering a world that's ALWAYS ON!") even more hilarious.