Why do women have sex? The list is long . . .
It’s one of those things that men want to know — but really don’t want to know.
What does it take to get a woman into the sack?
Cindy M. Meston, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, along with fellow psychology professor David M. Buss asked 1,006 women exactly that.
In their recently published book, Why Women Have Sex: Understanding Sexual Motivation: From Adventure to Revenge (and Everything In Between), they uncovered hundreds of reasons, deep, dark, delicious or devilish.
There’s medicinal sex (Yes Dear, I have a headache), mate-guarding sex and mercy sex, duty sex, jealousy sex and competitive sex, barter sex, breakup sex and booty calls.
This is an edited and condensed version.
Q: What’s the one thing we should know about women’s sexuality?
A: There’s a desynchrony between the genital arousal response and how aroused a woman says she is which is different from what you find in men. There’s a close connection between the erectile function and how aroused a man says he is. In women they’re not very correlated.
Q: Why do we need to know if women can name 237 reasons to have sex?
A: From a clinical perspective, if we’re to make advances in trying to enhance sexual pleasure or resolve problematic behaviour, we need to understand the underlying motivations. For example, if a woman is engaging in a lot of high-risk unprotected sexual behaviour, then a clinical intervention that teaches her to use condoms and to engage in safer sexual choices is not going to be effective if her underlying motivation is that she’s trying to punish herself.
Q: Let’s talk about some of the evolutionary reasons.
A: It’s not so much that there are evolutionary reasons but evolutionary explanations for a lot of the reasons.
Most of them pertain to sexual attraction. Women like tall men; they like muscular men. There’s actually evidence that tall muscular men have more sexual partners, more live-in girlfriends, more children. The body type and the height signal a man’s ability to protect the woman and possibly provide for her because he has the strength to do so.
Q: But these would also make them fairly risky as partners, no?
A: Yes, they’re the bad boys who also have more extramarital affairs.
You can divide the world into dads and cads. They tend to be the cads. But a lot of women reproduce with the cads and then marry a dad — or cuckold a dad with a cad — and pass on the good genes but then have a nice dad to raise the other guy’s good genes.
Random genetic testing shows that 10 per cent of people who think that their dad is a certain person are wrong.
Q: Everybody thinks women have sex to get a man, to hold on to a man, that kind of thing. Were you surprised by what you found?
A: There are certainly some unexpected reasons. Women intentionally having sex to give a man a STD. To get closer to God. Tons of revenge sex. Because they were bored or they were cold or there was nothing better on TV.
Q: A lot of women are taking SSRI antidepressants, such as Prozac, and we know they inhibit sexual response. Is there hope for them?
A: The good news is that, since SSRIs were introduced 20 years ago, there’s been a lot of research on how SSRIs affect sexual arousal and satisfaction. Now they’re developing antidepressants which reduce sexual side effects dramatically. There’s been real progress.
Q: Okay, so how many women have sex just because it feels good?
A: I don’t have a statistic that I can accurately cite but I can tell you that sex for pleasure was the main category why women have sex in our study. I was so happy to find that. We really thought that the No. 1 reason would be for love, commitment, to keep a man or please a man. But it wasn’t; it was for physical gratification.
Q: So then why do many women have orgasm problems?
A: It’s not the case that women have orgasm problems. The most common problem is desire problem.
Q: What do you think of attempts to medicalize that?
A: It’s not that I’m a drug pusher but if there’s a drug that can make sex feel good for women then I’m all for it. It just hasn’t been discovered yet.
Q: But I can’t imagine that taking a pill would help if a partner isn’t attractive or attentive.
A: That’s one of the big gender differences between men and women. It’s not just about what a woman’s genitals are doing that creates arousal. It has so much to do with how her partner is acting towards her, is the house clean, are the kids screaming, was the dog fed, did somebody piss her off at work . . . It’s so easy to be distracted because the genital signal isn’t very strong unless she is really super aroused. And to get there for many women, it takes a special event, a lot of foreplay, a massage, a bubble bath, a walk along the beach, a nice dinner. But there’s not enough time to have that five times a week.
For men the genital response is out there. It’s noticeable, it’s very strong, it’s hard to ignore.
Women’s genital response is easy to ignore. So a drug that increases genital response is not going to work because there are all these things in the environment which play a role. Anything can distract women whereas a man, an earthquake might be happening, and he’s still able to focus on his penis.
But there are other mechanisms for women to enjoy themselves.
Rumour has it that masturbation works. You don’t need a man to have sexual pleasure.
Q: No wonder men go bald. What can they do to make up for their, um, shortcomings?
A: They can get a good job, make lots of money, and have high status and show a lot of confidence and a good sense of humour.
interesting
