How Men and Women Experience Sexual Pleasure
The Differences of the Sexes
There's an interesting debate about the orgasm gap between men and women going on at the moment.
Women experience far fewer orgasms than men until a relationship is established. For example, in dating, hookups, sex with exes, in relationships which are no more than "friends with benefits", and the like, women come much less often than men – about 20% of the time, compared to men's frequency of orgasm, which is around 100%.
Only once relationships are established do women reach the same orgasm frequency as men – although it's fair to say that even here, there is some debate about whether or not the statistics truly represent the frequency with which women reach orgasm during sexual experiences with men.
Women do appear to fake orgasms rather frequently, even in established relationships, and you can only assume this is because their needs are not being met.
What are those needs?
I think primarily. Women would agree that the basic fundamental need being met is intimacy and emotional connection with the man to whom they're making love.
Men can disconnect from their emotional side and enjoy casual sex for their own sake. At the same time, women certainly need to experience connection and intimacy both to want love in the first place and, indeed, to enjoy it.
Many articles on the Internet speak of what women want to enjoy in a sexual relationship – and of course, those are interesting, particularly to men, who like to have techniques they can use to bring a woman to orgasm quickly.
After all, the art of pleasuring isn't exceptionally straightforward: women's needs change from one experience of sex to another. Indeed, men may find that what worked as a technique for bringing a woman to orgasm on one occasion certainly doesn't work on the next.
For men, this can be very frustrating because there's a linear relationship between stimulation and orgasm for most men. It's a straightforward matter for a man to come when a man and woman get together to have sex.
But the surveys asking women what they want are focused on male readers. They are not focused on what women want regarding emotional intimacy, connection, and perhaps, dare we speak the word – love!
So what is the importance of love in the dynamic of sexual interaction between men and women?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, you can find online evidence supporting any position you adopt. Separating the people with an axe to grind from the truly scientific who've read the evidence and come to a valid conclusion supported by science can be pretty challenging.
For instance, if you read this article, you might conclude quickly that women like sex just as much as men. In other words, sex is just about physical pleasure, and men only need to know the techniques to bring women to orgasm. Yet satisfying a woman sexually is not just about physical pleasure - women have deep emotional needs too.
It quotes some "science" - described below- to support this. It justifies its position by using emotive language such as "as researchers debunk the myths about female sexuality and the harmful corollaries for men", which is a sentence that certainly includes a few judgments and a few delicate nudges to the reader towards a specific position!
But to conclude that women want to get laid as much as their male partners do, and more often, is very questionable.
The so-called science is a survey of 500 women conducted through an app, which is not a natural science. It turns out that 53% of the female respondents said the emotional connection was necessary for good sex, and 25% said foreplay was an indicator of overall quality.
But statistics like this plucked out of context mean very little – and they don't prove anything about women's attitude to sex and intimacy or about women's attitude to casual sex.
The conclusion that the article appears to reach is that most women want more sex than they are having – which is no surprise to me.
But is it true that 75% of women said they'd like to have sex in some way three times a week or more?
No proper scientific research has ever been conducted which suggests women desire anything like this frequency of sex.
So the evidence that is presented here is used to justify the position that women are as sexually active as men, or at least as potentially sexually active as men – and that's no surprise. Tantric practitioners will smile knowingly when you say something like that to them.
But there's a difference between wanting sex three or more times a week and wanting good-quality sex with orgasms.
Are Women More Sexual Than Men?
The article suggests that the primary female sexual nature is distinctly libidinous – or, to put it another way, that women are pretty lustful, if not even animalistic, in their sexual nature.
Sure, there's no question that women's sexuality is as strong as men's because there are many different influences on female sexual behaviour, including feeling safe and trusting their partner.
Probably, women can only reach intense sexual expression and a specific environment with a trusted partner.
If you look at a more conservative website such as Web MD.com, there's a very different story to be told. On this website, the common wisdom that says women place more value on emotional connection as a way to experience sexual desire is acknowledged – and so is the fact that social and cultural factors influence women.
Indeed, this amounts to the cultural and social contexts of male sexual desire much more influence female sexual desire.
Men indeed think more about sex than women do – but it's certainly not true that men think about sex every minute! The truth is that most adult men think about sex once a day or so.
And in fact, only a quarter of women think about it that frequently. And even as men and women age, men still think about sex and indulge in fantasies twice as often as women do.
Roy Baumeister, a social psychologist at Florida State University, has demonstrated that men have more spontaneous episodes of sexual arousal, and their fantasies are more frequent and varied than women's.
The second thing to recognize as truth is that men seek sex much more enthusiastically than women.
They want sex more frequently than women at any point in a relationship. They also say that they want more sexual partners in their lifetime, and they are indeed more interested in casual sex than women.
And approximately two-thirds of men admit a masturbate, compared with only 40% of women, and women masturbate less often.
A third factor differentiating the sexes is that a woman's sexual arousal mechanism is much more complicated than a man's.
While men are turned on by the sight of men having sex with women and women having sex with women (in porn), straight women react with genital arousal in the same way to male-female, male-male, and female-female sex, although they say that they feel more turned on by male-female sex.
So there's a difference between arousal in the mind and arousal in the body for women that may not be reflected in men's arousal. It could be that women are more open to the possibility of sex with other women (than men are to the idea of having male-male sex) because their sex drive is less specifically directed.
As for the cultural and social factors, they take many forms. For instance, Baumeister's study revealed that women's attitude towards various sexual activities is more likely than men's to change over time. Women are more influenced by the attitudes of their social and peer group in their decisions about what kind of sex to enjoy.
The conclusion you may draw from this is that women's sex drive seems weaker than men's and certainly more vulnerable to influence by various factors.
Socially this might be a reflection of the incredible power of men in society or a reflection of the fact that society has different sexual expectations of men and women.
But there is of course, the old sociobiological explanation based on the fact that for men, it might have been more effective as a mating strategy to spread the seed around as much as possible. At the same time, women might be genetically hardwired to choose their partners carefully, choosing males who would be likely to stay around and take care of the child.
And there are other differences, too: women certainly agree with the idea that desire originates in the mind rather than in the body.
There's a context to female sexuality, which is about anticipation, fantasy, and imagination, making arousal more dependent on a framework of emotional connection.
Men don't need to have as complicated a sexual life since sex itself is much more straightforward, and arousal which easier to achieve.
But having said that, we must remember that men also want intimacy, love and connection in a relationship.
The difference between men and women as far as sex is concerned might come down to the fact that women want to talk first, connect, and then have sex. Whereas for men, rather obviously, sex is the connection and represents a way in which they may express their tender and loving side.
Finally, an interesting point about orgasms.
Men usually take around 4 minutes from penetration to ejaculation on average, whereas women take around 10 to 11 minutes to reach orgasm.
Now it is clear that there is a discrepancy here which will prevent many women from reaching orgasm during intercourse. However, the perennial question around sex between men and women is always: "How many women would reach orgasm if a man could thrust for 10 or 11 minutes?" As yet, that question remains unanswered.
In couples, men say they have an orgasm 75% of the time, whereas women claim only to have an orgasm 26% of the time – it's not clear whether that's during intercourse or not, but let's assume that it's during any sexual interchange between a couple. However, the women's partners said they believed women orgasm 45% of the time.
That does suggest that a lot of women are faking orgasms.