We tell women to have sex with as many partners as they desire while neglecting to tell men to study up on female anatomy. But who wants sex if it’s not good?

“I don’t mind motorcycles but do mind when people ride them without helmets,” I lied to a man named “Carl” on the dating app Bumble when he brought up his Yamaha. I actually believe that the only commendable function of motorcycles is to make aging dads feel the crisp bite of youth again during their midlife crises rather than resorting to age-inappropriate affairs, but I was trying to be pleasant.

“Wanna go for a ride?” he asked soon after, apparently not registering that not minding a thing is hardly the equivalent of being interested in it. I answered, “never in my life,” still willing to give him a shot but making clear that his motorcycle would not be a selling point.

“I’m not talking about riding my motorcycle 😈 ,” he replied.

In no mood to hold Carl’s hand through how game actually works, I said, “Okay you have a good night,” hoping he’d realize defeat. “Haha! I’m joking! Someone is slightly uptight I see.”

Oh, Carl. I would have been tempted to defend myself by letting him know I am actually a morally vacuous harlot devoid of sexual mores, but I was busy talking to another man also using the app. We hadn’t met yet, but his sufficient flirting skills prompted me to take a flurry of explicit photos and send the keepers his way. We would later have sex on our first and only date.

I am icy, certainly, but I am not uptight.

Beyond establishing my reputation as a woman who enjoys sex and a bit of text-based flirting, this episode highlights the troubling ease with which men dismiss women as prudish if they are not immediately open and enthusiastic about sex. It is cruel tool in a culture that was infiltrated by a certain brand of blasé sex positivity long before achieving true gender equality and, by extension, before we’ve decentralized men’s orgasms as the ultimate purpose of sex between a man and a woman.

We pathologize women’s entirely rational reactions of “nah” and “meh” to sex as the result of antiquated values. Often, these reactions are because sex might be perilous to a woman’s well-being – and often, if we’re honest, a physically substandard experience. This attitude wants sex to be a fundamental good so badly that it puts it in a vacuum, and ignores the snares that still surround it.

Too often, sex positivity feels rooted in a feminism that secretly wants boys to like it. It wants to be cool.

Media outlets feed us a relentless stream of articles sadistically asking, “Can women have it all?”, even though the answer is always “LOL, nope”. In these discussions, inequality is exemplified by the wage gap, the number of women in Congress, and whether women are courting poverty and death by having babies before they’re rich. What is decidedly absent from the debate is a woman’s sexual fulfillment.

This is partly a function of venue: Business Insider and Forbes are not about to sprinkle their coverage with talk of the happiness quotient of women’s sex organs. But the absence of sexual satisfaction from these discussions is also due to the belief that, for the most part, sexual inequality was resolved by the sexual revolution, women’s lib and the widespread adoption of birth control.

The legacy of these movements is a mountain of unfinished business which gave birth to a half-formed sex positivity lovechild now wrecking havoc on anyone who isn’t down to fuck.

In practice, sex positivism is an ideology that says, “What’s the big deal?” about sex, countering a narrative which sees it as inherently negative and shameful. But it dismisses our reply: the big deal is that when we sexually open ourselves up, access to a little bit of social capital is closed off from us.

It also tells us we should just ignore the social drawbacks that come with having all the sex we want – but it also overestimate how good the sex we are getting really is. For the most part, I’d hazard that it’s just OK.

For the most part, we’re comfortable with perpetuating the myth that it is easier to fit a camel through a needle’s eye (thanks for the metaphor, Jesus) than to give a woman an orgasm, instead of admitting that we’ve never prioritized teaching men how to give them.

Until the day that every “how to please her” article on AskMen.com comes with a realistic anatomy chart and clear instructions that this can take some time, we might get a little closer. And if those guys who keep humming when they go down on me finally cut that shit out like I said, we will be even closer still.

The kicker? It is more emotionally laborious for a lot of women to explain why they don’t want to have mediocre sex than to simply have the mediocre sex. It’s just that the sex does approximately as much for us as making a cupping motion over our elbow over and over again. It doesn’t hurt, but why would we?

It is sex to which we consented and isn’t harmful unless you think partner-induced orgasms are human rights, which is only true in the Netherlands I think.

For this reason, I propose an alternative view: sex blah-sitivism. It rhymes with “sex positivism” in a nod to the fact that yes, sex can and should be enjoyed for those who wish to have it. But the “blah” is an expression of the exasperation felt while living in a social climate that champions women having sex with one side of its mouth and condemns them with the other.

That all this happens while, for women who have sex with men, some of the most disappointing experiences in life are sex with men. We tell women to have sex with as many partners as they like, but then don’t vigorously encourage those partners to be any good at sex. Women who opt out of frequent sex or sex entirely are considered repressed, and women who opt in are considered worthy of disrespect.

That many of us have developed a politics of ambivalence toward sex in a society that can’t make up its mind should be no surprise. “Blah” is not just a reaction to these tiring conversations, it is a description of most of the sex itself.

In short, when I am asked if I am more sex negative or sex positive, it is my way of saying “fucked if we do, and fucked if we don’t”.