9.6: Conclusion

This chapter opened with the clitoris, which medicine spent centuries neglecting, and that disregard turned out to be typical rather than unusual. Traits that get described as natural facts about women, men, and desire kept looking more like learned scripts once we examined them closely. The orgasm gap narrows when the script for a sexual encounter changes. The sexual double standard assigns different meanings to the same act depending on who performs it. The emotional work of relationships gets handed to women, and once they are doing it, the arrangement looks natural rather than assigned. In most of these cases the measured difference was there. What does not hold up is the explanation attached to it, the claim that this is simply how women and men are.

Recognizing a script as a script matters because it can be rewritten. The double standard has loosened over the past generation. The orgasm gap shrinks when partners treat women's pleasure as a shared goal instead of an extra. Identities the culture once refused to acknowledge, among them bisexual, asexual, nonbinary, and trans, are now more widely named and better understood. None of these changes required human nature itself to change. Instead, they came from people refusing a script that told them who to be and answering with who they actually are.

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