When her colleague Ellen Laan died, there was no letter on paper yet, but the doctor-sexologist Rik van Lunsen (71) promised that their book on the pleasure gap would be published. Now The Truth About Sex is here and it reads like a manifesto. “Lubricant should never be used to solve a problem.”
The Quaegebeur19 January 2024, 03:00
The doctor-sexologist Rik van Lunsen and his partner Bianca were in Paris for a few days during the Christmas holidays. They celebrated New Year’s Eve on the Champs-Élysées, where they watched the city’s traditional fireworks display alongside a million other people. It wasn’t scary or overwhelming to be there in such a crowd, Van Lunsen says, sitting at the kitchen table in his house on the water in the rural North. “Everyone behaved decently and was kind to each other. No one messed around with their fireworks. The atmosphere was fantastic.”
Van Lunsen can look back to the year when the second book he co-wrote with his colleague Ellen Laan, who died on January 22, 2022, was published. In 2017, they published Sex! Lifelong learning, intended as an information book for adults. Now they take it a step further in something that’s more like a manifesto: The Truth About Sex: Pleasure and Gender Equality on Planet Earth. The subtitle refers to the persistent myth that men and women are miles apart when it comes to sex and sexuality. Exciting and free, according to the title of the million-selling bestseller of 1992: men are from Mars (hunting, conquering, always horny), women are from Venus (thoughtful, picking berries, never spontaneously in the mood for a quickie at the front door ).
Silly, explains the duo Van Lunsen & Laan in a clear, well-written and scientifically based book. The truth about sex is that women, men, and everyone else are actually very similar in their biological predisposition for sexual pleasure and arousal. The fact that many women enjoy the sex they have less is still an understatement, it is largely the result of culturally and socially cultivated gender inequality and the misconception that sex is for reproduction. According to the authors, this “leads to a vision of sexuality in which men (must) determine the script and sex is reduced to penis-in-vagina sex, so that as many good sperm as possible increase the chances of a successful fertilization”.
More and more young people are choosing non-monogamy as a lifestyle, headlines headlined last week. How do you see all this in light of your book?
“I have the feeling that ‘open relationships as a trend’ is more of a media hype. As far as I know there is no scientific evidence for this. It’s a bit like what happened in the late 1960s and early 1970s during the sexual revolution: small groups in Western bubbles experimented with all kinds of forms of relationships. This quickly deteriorated due to massive gender inequality which meant that cisgender men had access to sex in all ways, but which did not contribute to the sexual well-being and pleasure of heterosexual women. Perhaps things are improving now thanks to decreasing gender inequality, but there are still no concrete indications that the pattern of sexual behavior of young people is changing radically, other than the fact that there is still a shift towards later career starts sexual”.
“The most common remains serial monogamy: a certain number of permanent partners throughout life, and in the period between two relationships they often change partners, and sometimes several partners at once. However, in the end it doesn’t matter which form of sexual intercourse you choose. As far as I’m concerned, the saying remains: do it with pleasure or don’t do it.”
Image Imke Panhuijzen
This is not the first time that Laan and Van Lunsen, who have worked together for over twenty-five years, have loudly shouted that sexual pleasure should always come first. When they were the first to measure sexual pleasure in the 1990s, using a questionnaire, the Amsterdam Sexual Pleasure Index, it made global headlines. In their equally famous “sex laboratory” in the Amsterdam UMC, they have proven time and again that healthy people, from young to old, can become physically aroused in exactly the same way and with the same ease.
Laan remained committed to spreading the message that sex is fun until the end. Lunsen was recovering from pancreatic cancer at the same time, he says. “He was discovered in time by chance. I was lucky because it’s a type of cancer that usually has little to do with it. Ellen, however, was unlucky. She died from a recurrence of breast cancer, a form that is often curable these days.”
Despite your illnesses, you managed to create such a beautiful book. How did it go?
“Two months before she died, Ellen told me: that second book of ours had to be published. I had written the first one, with Ellen as a sidekick. Ellen, who had now taken over my duties as head of the sexology clinic, would become the first author of The Truth About Sex. That’s how it went, even though I wrote it. Ellen worked very hard until the end of her life on an internationally published article that became the basis for the book. We thought about it several times, but at the time of her death there was not yet a letter on paper. Yet she had full faith that the book would be published, because I had promised her.”
In 2017, I interviewed Ellen, who had had breast cancer for the first time, during the publication of Sex! Lifelong learning. Many of the problems she mentioned then, such as ignorance about how the clitoris works and pain during penetration, still exist. At the end of the conversation she said: “I will say this until I drop, sexual pleasure for women without knowing their genitals is a fluke. Men always have sex because it’s nice. Good for them, but this can be the starting point for women too.” Is this the pleasure gap that you also write about in this book?
“It is undeniable that there has been and exists a pleasure gap. Ellen is right about that. This doesn’t mean that sex is always enjoyable for men. To this day, kids are socialized towards success. Constantly worrying about “I have to be able to do this” also ruins your fun. One of the many misconceptions we’ve written about in this book, but also years before, is that ejaculation is the same thing as orgasm. Many men ejaculate regularly without the physical symptoms of orgasm, such as intense contraction of all types of muscles, and without the sensation of being sexually stimulated, therefore without pleasure. Even in this respect men and women are not that different. Women can also get physically aroused, get wet, without the subjective arousal that happens in the brain.”
Are you surprised that in 2023 you could fill a book of over three hundred pages debunking misconceptions?
“I am neither surprised nor disappointed that our message about sexual pleasure is not yet widespread. I often provide supervision to sexologists in training. Sometimes they sigh that they still have to say the same thing. Hello, I say, you can’t eliminate the effect of five thousand years of senseless preaching in a few weeks. The information and education climate is moving in the right direction, especially when compared to the rest of the world, but it is moving slowly. Last year, for the first time in history, the Rutgers Foundation put the message of fun at the forefront of Spring Fever Week.”
And look at the commotion that ensued.
“This didn’t surprise me either. Gender dialogue is hardly conducted in most schools and in books the goats are separated from the goats. Sex education is still mostly about disaster relief – sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies, abuse – aimed at girls. Boys need to be careful and, these days, make sure they have consent, but the responsibility for ensuring things don’t get out of hand still lies with girls. Furthermore, the focus is still too much on one form of sex, namely cock-in-vagina sex. Ellen and I have railed for years against the “first time” thing, which is still interpreted as the first time PIV. All other forms of sex are apparently not real sex. Don’t women who have sex with women have sex? Masturbation for the first time without sex? The idea that the “first time” for girls is difficult and painful, and that this is part of it, is persistent. As persistent as the problem is that many women experience pain during PIV. About twenty percent of young women always suffer from it. But, according to Ellen, I’ll keep saying it until I drop: sex should never hurt, even the first time with PIV.
And spontaneous meaning does not exist.
“NO. But in the meantime, people worry and feel guilty because they never want to have sex. In sexologists’ clinics we often see that one person brings the other, so to speak, with the request: I want her – usually she – spontaneously wants to have sex. Or she says apologetically that her libido isn’t working. Another term Ellen and I have always resisted. Libido, a sort of autonomous pleasure mechanism, does not It exists. It is a fiction of Freud, who compared the sexual sense to hunger and thirst; something that happens naturally if you don’t have enough of it.
But let’s say I’m cooking. From the kitchen window I see my boyfriend approaching on his bicycle and suddenly I want to have sex. Isn’t that a spontaneous phrase?
“No, because there are the first incentives that make you want. You find your husband attractive, you haven’t seen him all day and he’s sitting on that bike, horny as hell. This makes you excited. Depending on expectations and circumstances, this can then lead to sex, for example if while he was riding his bike he had already thought that you were home alone that evening and that it would be fun. Look, our sexual system activates forty to seventy times a day. Not spontaneously, but as a result of something you see, smell, feel, think, remember and expect. Remember: the best indicator for an enjoyable sex life in the future is an enjoyable sex life before.”
It almost seems Cruyffian.
“Sex is very simple. This was always my message when I was still teaching medicine at the UvA. It’s a question of stimuli, context and communication. And that last one makes it so complicated. People often find it difficult to talk openly about sex. Thousands of men have come to the office with erection problems and many of them have come without their partner knowing. Most had also secretly tried Viagra, under the pressure of the desire to perform acquired from an early age. Everyone thought that everything would be fine after taking such a pill. And no doctor has ever explained to them that Viagra doesn’t work without adequate stimulation and context. In other words: for Viagra to work, you must first have fun, have fun. Arousal never happens naturally, even if you use an erection stimulant.”
And not by taking a testosterone injection, to name another misconception from your book.
“The one thing testosterone does for sexuality is that you respond easily to stimuli as long as you have enough. How much is enough varies between individuals and is slightly different for men and women, but much less than you think. In any case, it’s not true that you’re doing “good” sexually if you’re full of testosterone. You either have enough or you have too little. In the latter case, more stimuli are needed to “turn on” the sexual system.”
Can you give a little extra to those who have too much?
“Yes, and that helps too. The crazy thing is that for men who produce too little testosterone, doctors are eager to give them a little more. In women it is not even looked at. This is still the result of the persistent idea that women can always have sex, sexually stimulated or not.”
Ellen described this in 2017: “Female sexuality is still too defined in terms of the extent to which women are penetrable.” She had just experienced this herself in a painful way when she informed an American colleague who had conducted a lot of research on sex and cancer that she had joined her research group. She received a reply message with the unsolicited advice to practice penetration at least three times a week during treatments, to keep the vaginal wall elastic.
“This type of advice was and is widespread. Again, doctors often seek a solution to women’s sexual problems, such as vaginismus, by making the vagina penetrable. Partly because PIV is the norm. Women themselves grew up with it. How many times do you hear a woman say that it’s better to use a lubricant if things aren’t going well and you don’t feel like it? This summer I gave a talk about sexual pleasure at a conference for healthcare professionals. A woman stood up and said: yes, but if someone is busy with raising children, with work, with informal caregiving and perhaps even with menopause, wouldn’t it be better to advise them to have a quickie every now and then with the help from a lubricant? I asked her if she was crazy and if she thought a woman could get any pleasure from it. Obviously not. As a result, she’ll be even less interested next time, because yes, the best indicator of good sex in the future is good sex in the past. Lubricants should never be used to solve a problem.”
Is the obsession with penetration also linked, as you say, to the complaint that sex serves reproduction?
“Naturally.” Van Lunsen laughs, not for the first time in the conversation.
“Just think about it. 99% of all sexual acts are not intended for reproduction. Compare this to the lifestyle of bonobos. They do it with everyone, for fun, whenever they want, and they also reproduce, because sometimes they even do PIV. It works like this for us too. If people have enjoyable sex, children will be born naturally. Reproduction is a side effect of pleasurable sex. But yes, of course we are bombarded by the age-old echo that sex is dangerous for anything other than reproduction. Nonsense of course. Sex is not dangerous at all, riding a bicycle is much more dangerous. For Ellen and me, the book The Truth About Eve was an eye-opener as we wondered why Christian and right-wing male rulers around the world were doing everything they could to curb sexuality. Not theirs, obviously. Especially those of women. The authors clearly show that differences between men and women have increased since power has become important to men. This only happened when people settled in communities instead of moving as nomads.”
Was there more gender equality in prehistory than today?
“You can say it like that. People solved problems together and divided tasks equally. Men began to exploit the only proven difference between men and women – the difference in physical strength – when they found themselves arguing with each other over who was in charge of the community. From then on they wanted control over everything and everyone. And especially about women, because they were dangerous, because they had the same power that they had.”
And with that difference in physical strength, it wasn’t that bad, you write.
“Before the communities were established, women were much stronger than they are now and there was only about a 10% difference in strength compared to men. There is some interesting archaeological research showing that a woman’s arms in prehistoric times were as muscular as those of an Olympic rower today. The fact that you are shocked by this is due to the influence of heteronormative and misogynistic patriarchy. And obviously that history influences sexuality. Still.”
He smiles. “I thought it was cute that Ellen and I already talked about it in the book about that idiotic thing in Spring Fever Week. I think it was one of the last gasps of the patriarchy, knowing that it will be defeated. With worried mothers in their wake, raised with information about dangerous sex. And who, what’s more, probably have had largely negative experiences with sex.”
Unsatisfactory Piv neglecting the pleasure gap?
“Yes, or worse. I understand too. You obviously want to protect your children from something that has caused you distress. While for pleasure sex it is important that they grow up in a warm and safe home where gender equality is the norm and sex is discussed in a positive way. Information in schools must also be at the forefront. Stop constantly emphasizing misery. If there’s one word that should be banned in sex education, it’s resilience. As if sex is something we need to guard against. Autonomy, that’s what it’s all about. I am me and my body is mine. I once said, and Ellen continued to say it very intelligently: We need to stop teaching girls just to say “no,” because that teaches them nothing about what it takes to say “yes.” No means no, of course, but let’s let them discover their yes too.”
That’s much better, right?
“Of course. I just saw the data from the five-year “Sex under 25″ study from Rutgers, which will be released on Monday. Young Dutch people are not doing badly, sexually speaking, and certainly not worse than before. Things continue to be bad, but they also have a lot of fun. We also owe it to the young people who spread our message in all intelligent ways. Between the sheets with Geraldine, the Sex Sisters, Joy Delima, the Damn platform, Honey: they all put the spotlight on gender dialogue and on promoting sexual pleasure. Slowly but surely it starts to penetrate and take root. Now the men. There are some guys who vlog about sexuality, and they do it very well, but there should be more of them. You can’t achieve empowerment by educating a group”.
What was your upbringing like?
“I come from a liberal, non-religious and wealthy background in The Hague. Equality between people and between the sexes was fundamental. My parents were young and newly in love when the war broke out. Not long afterward they both had to go into hiding. My mother because she was Jewish, my father because he wanted to escape the Arbeitseinsatz – forced labor. So they didn’t see each other for a few years; they communicated only through smuggled letters. After the war they thought: look at this, we don’t stick to what we were given, no sex before marriage. They always told us that story. Other than that, there wasn’t much talk about sex at all. The positive aspect of my sexual education was that my parents showed how much they cared about each other and that information was available. As a child, if I wanted to know something, they directed me to a book on the shelf. This was quite progressive in the 1950s.”
You also have five daughters. How did you do?
“My two eldest are adopted daughters from a very young relationship with my ex. In the 60s she was so enlightened, she at the age of fifteen became pregnant by a pop musician. The children came to me when they were five and eight years old. I was very proud when the eldest got her period for the first time and she asked me: Daddy, do you have any cuddles for me? Apparently I did something right, I thought. My younger children were good at communicating when information came too soon. If they asked something and thought Bianca’s or my answer was too extensive, they interrupted with: enough, too much information. That’s the beauty of children, if sexuality is open to discussion, they ask their questions and if they think it’s enough, they say so.”
How would Ellen look at the year in terms of the message of your book?
“I think she would see signs of change, just like me, since we’ve had to tell the same story for thirty years. We would say: we will continue the fight. Even though I really don’t want to be a pioneer anymore. The Laan-Van Lunsen duo was good at translating the results of our scientific research into social action by making noise. Even the youngest can do it. I recently told the Sex Sisters: I can stop, you can continue. I am confident that everything will go well.”
Private archive image
Rik van Lunsen
2 December 1951, Roosendaal
1963-1969 Dalton Lyceum, The Hague 1969-1978 Medicine and science education at the University of Groningen 1979-1987 Teaching coordinator for obstetrics/gynecology, head of the birth control clinic and co-founder of the sexology clinic, UMCG Groningen 1986 Thesis: Who is afraid of a gynecological examination? 1987-2017 Head of the multidisciplinary department of Sexology and Psychosomatic Gynecology at the AMC 1992-2013 Head trainer in sexology training, RINO Amsterdam 1997-2003 President of the Dutch Scientific Association of Sexology (NVVS)
In addition to hundreds of scientific publications, Van Lunsen wrote the book You Should Learn About Sex (1992) and, together with Ellen Laan, the books Sex! Lifelong Learning (2017) and The Truth About Sex (2023).
Van Lunsen lives with his partner Bianca van Moorst in Amsterdam-Noord.
