Oakland singer-songwriter Rachel Lark is clear that she has a very different relationship to sex and sexuality than her character, Maggie, does. In the world-premiere musical “Coming Soon,” which Lark wrote, Maggie has been faking orgasms with her boyfriend, Mark, for eight years, and Maggie’s best-slash-only solution, as she sings in a rousing early number, is to “deal with it later.”

But Lark’s contention in the show, which opens Thursday, April 21 at Z Space in San Francisco, is that even very liberated women with very compassionate heterosexual partners are pressured to sublimate their sexual needs. That dynamic, “Coming Soon” suggests, stems from the same forces that spurred #MeToo.

The Chronicle spoke to the 34-year-old North Carolina native during a rehearsal break to talk about how macrocosmic societal forces play out in healthy-seeming heterosexual relationships.

Q: How did you get interested in kink, sex positivity and female sexual empowerment?

A:Cool, diving right in! The term “sex positive” didn’t exist yet, but I would say I grew up in a fairly sex-positive household. My parents are both philosophy professors, and they had a sort of chosen family of their own. My dad was raised Orthodox Jewish, and he was disowned for marrying my mom, who is not Jewish. So they — I think similar to a lot of gay couples — really had to build their own family out of friends. That laid the groundwork for inventing your own relationship models and family being what you make it.

Then I went to Reed College in Portland, Ore. Reed’s slogan is “Communism, atheism, free love,” which I really related to. Reed, being Reed, also had a kink club on campus that had student funding.

I credit the environments I ended up in, but also I put myself in those environments.

Q: You’ve written songs about kink and sex positivity before, notably“The Unicorn Song.”At what point did a musical start to feel like the right next step?

A:I had a realization about my genre, which was that it was never going to totally fit in the live music world. In live music, you kind of need to pick your lane: Are you comedy, or are you not comedy? I always wanted to do both. I always wanted to crack jokes and get an audience like laughing, but I also wanted them to dig deep and cry or feel tender, and there’s not a lot of artists that do both.Tim Minchinis an artist I adore who does, and, of course, he wrote Broadway shows. All my songs were these little stories, like little musicals in one song.

Then when I started to think about the concept of bad sex, which is really what started this show. All these conversations were happening around #MeToo, assault and harassment, and I care deeply about those issues, but I was like, can we also just talk about bad sex — sex that just sucks and how that’s connected to the greater societal issues that create the environment where men can assault? How the water we swim in is actually just robbing all of us of real pleasure?

Q: So here’s my bad-on-purpose counterargument: But are mundane bad sex and violent bad sex really connected?

A:Misogyny has a lot of effects. One is that it creates an environment where women’s voices aren’t as listened to. Their bodies aren’t as valued, and men feel a sense of entitlement to them. It also creates an environment where their pleasure is not prioritized or even discussed and where men’s concept of sex is attached to a sense of conquest around women’s bodies, which robs everyone of an experience of real connection and pleasure that can be very unique to each moment.

All of us, regardless of our assigned gender or our biology, get the messages that vaginal orgasms are just elusive, rare, hard, complicated, confusing and ultimately not as important as male orgasms, and I think that has ripple effects that find their way into not only our sex, but also our entire relationships.

Q: In the show, is that Mark’s fault?

A:I think that there is some accountability to find for Mark, but I don’t think any of this is his fault or her fault. I think what the #MeToo movement is missing is that pointing the finger at the perpetrator is not actually the cure to this problem. All of us — not just perpetrators, not just monsters — need to start having different conversations.

Q: Is it at all hard for you to talk about these subjects?

A:Yes, definitely. Even the people who have journeyed the hardest and done the most intentional healing work still suffer the effects of sex negativity, internalized shame, internalized homophobia, internalized kink shame, internalized misogyny. I walk into my own triggers all the time and have a robust self-care system around that reality.

Q: Why is shame so good at holding us back?

A:Can you imagine: What would the world be like without it?

I used to think there actually was a point to it, some evolutionary reason why we feel shame, like it’s useful in some way. And the more therapy I do and the more conversations I have, the more I think, no. You might think, “Oh, well, shame is what helps you improve your behavior when you’ve done something wrong.” I don’t actually think it does. I think when you feel shame for something that you’ve done, you actually are more likely to not change your behavior and not feel like you’re in a constructive place. So I think it’s a useless emotion. I hate it. I feel like it’s like a disease that we need a vaccine for.

“Coming Soon”:Written by Rachel Lark. Directed by Rachel Dart. April 21-30. $25-$69. Z Space, 450 Florida St., S.F. 415-626-0453.www.zspace.org