– There is an orgasm gap, says Maren Uthaug.
– When two heterosexuals have sex, the man orgasms 95 percent of the time, while for the woman the figure is 65 percent. If you masturbate, on the other hand, it takes an average of four minutes to have an orgasm – for both women and men. So it’s not that women have a difficult physique, we just have bad sex.
The author, who was born in Kautokeino, but moved to Denmark as an eight-year-old and stayed there, gives off a smile with bright pink lipstick. And continues:
– Now it’s not just men’s fault. Our culture has raised men to know what women want, without us explaining what we like. Then women play along and fake an orgasm, and men walk around thinking they’ve got it figured out. It’s bad sisterly solidarity to fake an orgasm.
How did we get here in the interview? Yes, it started with Maren Uthaug’s novel, “11%”. A bestseller in Denmark, where it was recently honored with the bookseller’s award “De Gyldne Laubær”, now translated into Norwegian and Dagbladet’s reviewer thought this was hilarious, macabre and black feminist humor for advanced readers.
It is a novel populated by witches and one-breasted Amazons, male ladies with sewn-on dildos, rats and snakes, preferably white cobra snakes, breeding centers, love cakes baked with menstrual blood, priestesses who must have orgasms to please the Mother, and men. But only 11 percent, well hidden away. Testosterone is poison, and men are too dangerous to walk free.
A crazy book!
Killed baby boys
And where did the idea come from? Yes, Maren Uthaug did research for her third novel, “Ein lykkleg schlutt”, in which both infanticide and sex are ingredients.
– Most of my books contain a lot of sex, I must have a hobby, me and.
Uthaug came across stories about Pacific islands where the men were constantly at war with each other. The women got so fed up with this that they moved to their own island and decided that no boys would be born for the next 20 years, and that those who were born would be killed. In that way, the population of warlike men would decrease. The strategy worked.
– Whether it is a myth, or a story rooted in reality, I do not know. But I knew I had to use it for something. Also, I read a lot of statistics, over 90 percent of all murders are committed by men. There are very few women in prison around the world. And take the masculine words, like rapist, murderer, warlord. In Danish, 187 words end with man, and only 14 with woman. How about creating a society without men, I thought.
And with that, it all started.
– People would like to think it is a manifesto, but it is a game. An experiment on what happens when you turn things upside down, when women do what men have done for centuries, especially on the sexual level.
It has made people – or, read men – furious. Men who haven’t read the book.
– You don’t have to say anything other than that the patriarchy doesn’t exist, then men send me very angry e-mails and call me one thing and another. I just delete them. It’s like when I kept getting dickpics, I didn’t sit and study the penises. But men who have read “11%” find it entertaining, they join the adventure.
Sexual equality
Maren Uthaug calls herself half Sami, half Norwegian and all Danish. She lives in Copenhagen with her husband and three daughters, is a writer and cartoonist, and has weekly humorous strips in print both here in Dagbladet and in the Danish newspaper Politiken. In 2010, she made her debut with the book “It’s fun to be the same”. A collection of cartoon strips with a satirical slant that depict Sami society and various taboos. Three years later, she made her novel debut with “Og sån blei det”.
– We will not get equality until we have sexual equality, that is my mission, she says in Northern Norwegian. With Danes, she speaks Danish.
– Proper housewife porn
– It is still the case that if a girl is filmed having sex with four boys, only she is exposed to revenge porn. Women must be given the same rules of the game as men, if we want to. And something must be done about sex education at school. It is completely useless, at best it is not harmful.
Maren Uthaug has three daughters, the youngest is fifteen and believes that if the teacher talks about periods one more time when they are actually having sex education, then she is going to leave. Mother runs her hand through her hair and sends off a disappointed look.
– It sounds like when I went to school. Why aren’t there special teachers who teach this? Sex is not taboo at our house, but I, as a mother, am not the best to talk about it. No child wants to know that their parents are having sex, and I don’t need to hear that my children are having sex with their boyfriends. Or with whoever they want.
Photo: Simon Klein-Knudsen
sea view
The shameful period
When Uthaug finished high school, she studied theology. For four years. She believes that religion has caused the woman a lot of damage and shame. Take the creation account, who made up that Eve alone was to blame? Why are witches and wise women banned and lonely? And periods, there’s only one thing more shameful than periods, and that’s not having them anymore.
– In the church meeting in Nicaea in the fourth century, there were priests who found it problematic that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary, it was impure to have to come out between her legs. It was discussed what could be done so that he was not defiled by the female sex. One suggestion was that he could be born out of her ear instead.
The women’s society in “11%” is not set at a particular time, but the author envisions somewhere between 500 and 1000 years in the future. Nor is it the process of arriving at this society that is important, but dealing with everyday life.
Bret Easton Ellis: – Was cocaine everywhere
– Did we lose something on the way to this society where men are in an extreme minority?
– No, the close relationships women have with other women. Society is different, the women don’t destroy, they don’t go to war, but we still have to deal with people, and people’s problems. Loneliness, bad mother-daughter relationships, stress, hierarchies, someone who decides who can be in and who can be out, they argue about masturbation, whether the clitoris is what matters or not. But what everyone agrees on is that the penis is not important.
And if you’re wondering why the book is called “11%”, the answer is that 11 percent is the number of men needed for inbreeding to not become a problem.
Out-of-body experiences
Uthaug leans his back against the backrest.
– It is no worse for the men in the novel than it is for many women around the world today.
– Did you have any aha moments when you wrote the novel?
– I have never before read so many books about orgasms and masturbation, and then I found a very interesting piece of information: If you have sex with a partner, and the partner gives you an orgasm, you can get into a kind of trance where the world closes in and you disappears from everything. If you orgasm by masturbating, the reptilian brain is present all the time, and you cannot have the same out-of-body ecstatic experience. It’s a bit like laughter. You can sit alone and chuckle, but laughing so hard your stomach hurts requires another person.
