Women need a reason to have sex. Men just need a place. – Billy Crystal
Here’s another of those reader questions that I felt deserved a whole column:
I find it quite remarkable that you not only understand the changes that occur to a healthy male denied sex, but can also write about it so well, and acknowledge and accept it rather than using it to manipulate and control men. Can you write a column for men, to help us understand women? I would very much like a better understanding of how the female sex drive is so easily thwarted. Most men can’t just turn off their sex drive, even when there are good, practical, and sometimes urgent reasons to do so. Yet it seems that most women can simply cut theirs off at will, and resume it later when and where they choose. How does this work?
In a way, I was very lucky to be a late bloomer; as I’ve said before I was quite plain in my early teens, and only started to blossom in my senior year (after I turned 16). Of course, I didn’t know I was going to blossom, so I recognized when I was 13 that I would need to understand men in order to attract them, rather than simply relying upon my natural gifts as the prettier girls could. I didn’t realize until much later that though I wasn’t much to look at, I had “a pronounced sexual aura, and coquettishness came naturally to me,” and that these characteristics more than outweighed my plainness in many young men’s estimation. So I learned everything my cousin Jeff was willing to teach me about men, read everything I could get my hands on about male psychology and carefully observed the behavior of my dates, male friends, brother, father, uncles, cousins and every other guy I interacted with; nor did I cease to learn once my looks caught up with the rest of my charms.
I’m afraid I have to disenchant you on one point, though: I certainly do manipulate men, and always have since I first discovered I could about the age of 14. However, I never do so in a harmful or malicious way; I’ve always had a strong sense of fairness (which, again, I have to thank Jeff for encouraging), and I determined while still in high school that any manipulation of men would be such that they would get something out of it, too, and would never regret having given me whatever it was that I wanted. In other words I tried to make it so that if a guy realized what I had done later, his reaction would not be an angry “That bitch played me like a piano!” but rather “That clever little minx! Well, she can push my buttons any time!” When friends realized how well I could do this they started asking me for advice, and like you found my degree of understanding remarkable; one appreciative young friend even called me “the Jane Goodall of men”.
But just as Dame Jane could probably tell you a lot more about chimpanzees than about her own species, so I probably know more about male sexual behavior than that of my own sex. It’s a matter of both necessity and applicability. By “necessity” I mean that when interacting sexually with other women I can just go by instinct, but for men I need intellectual knowledge. And by “applicability” I mean that whatever I learn about any given man tends to work for most other men, but what I know about my own sexuality (or that of any other individual woman) cannot necessarily be applied to most other women. Female sexual psychology is generally much more complicated than male, so it’s a lot easier for a woman to learn to understand men than it is for a man to understand women, or even for a woman to understand other women! A big part of the reason for this is that women tend to be sexually fluid; rather than being “target-specific” as men are, women tend to move around the sexual spectrum depending upon their environment, circumstances and experiences. In other words, though most gay men really are “born that way,” that’s not so true of women, who are much more likely to move between heterosexual and homosexual relationships over time as their conditions change. So it’s much harder to say “women tend to be like this” because as soon as you think you’ve got it pinned down, a woman’s sexuality may “morph” into something different. This is why an open-minded woman can often be talked into swinging, BDSM or some other “kink” that she may not really have been interested in to start with; it’s not necessarily that she has a deep psychological affinity for the activity, but rather that she loves the person who does the talking and as a result can “flow” in that direction unless the process is obstructed by guilt, sexual hang-ups, fear, busybody friends or the like.
This is, like a lot of sex, rooted in reproductive biology. Sperm is cheap; men make about a hundred million of the little bastards every single day, while women produce one single egg per month. In other words, each individual egg is worth over 3,000,000,000 times as much as each sperm. Guys can afford to throw sperm around to all and sundry like the cheapest kind of Mardi Gras beads, but women have to be really careful about whom we bestow our eggs upon; it doesn’t take a genius to see how this shapes male and female behavior throughout the animal kingdom. Furthermore, the biological cost increases exponentially if one of those eggs is fertilized; in a state of nature each pregnancy takes a dramatic toll on a woman’s entire body, while men actually feel better after sending sperm on their way! Because of this, female placental mammals are even choosier and cock-blockier than our egg-laying cousins, and the human capacity for anticipating consequences magnifies that still more. Biologically speaking, poor mating decisions have absolutely zero negative impact on a male; he can dump sperm in unhealthy females, in females of different species, in males of his own species or even on the ground and there will still be plenty more where that came from. But for a female it’s the opposite; every mating choice may have huge (and in humans decades-long) consequences. The existence of birth control is irrelevant: I know it exists, and you know it exists, but our hindbrains don’t, and they carry on just as though every act of coitus could lead to pregnancy…which for men means the same in either case, but for women is quite different.
What it boils down to is this: men typically want sex most of the time because more sex means more offspring, with absolutely no downside. But because a woman can only get pregnant so many times, and only once a year at most, our sex-response failsafe mechanisms are on hair triggers compared to yours. It’s not that women can cut off our sex drives at will, but rather that our brains and bodies will cut it off for many more reasons than yours will. If anything about a potential sexual partner or situation fails any of dozens of tests our brains subject them to, an alarm is tripped, the plug is pulled and the whole system goes down to protect the woman from squandering vital resources on an unhealthy baby or dangerous, troublesome pregnancy. This is also why older women often lose their sex drives; after menopause their systems are essentially sending back error codes, saying “you can’t get pregnant, so don’t waste energy doing this.”
I’ll leave you with an analogy that I used once before in a comment thread almost two years ago. Imagine how a woman might react if somebody walked up to her in public and slapped a scoop of ice cream into her hand; she’d probably be pretty upset. It isn’t that she doesn’t like ice cream; it’s just that she doesn’t want a nasty scoop of cheap vanilla ice cream slapped into her previously-clean hand by some random stranger when she wasn’t even in the mood for dessert! She wants her favorite flavor of her preferred brand at the right time, served neatly in a cone or dish, maybe with sprinkles, and preferably eaten with someone whose company she enjoys. If any of those factors are wrong, her experience is lessened; and if more than a couple are wrong, she is much more likely to react with disgust than with pleasure.
Where does “I’ll boink you only if you convince me you’re not interested in me as a sex object” fit in?
A guess? Since sex has a greater average cost for women than for men the kind of “do you really love me?” question pops up as a form of assurance that the man will help shoulder the cost of any resulting pregnancy.
Yep.
Another common one is “Would you get remarried if I die?” or something similar. This is based on the concern that resources would be transferred away from her offspring to a new woman.
I hate to say this, but that is a legitimate concern. I read that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (the creator of Sherlock Holmes) rejected his own daughter simply to appease his second wife.
Revealed: the cruelty of Conan Doyle to his eldest daughter
The article and the epigraph reminded me of the following quote:
“Among men, sex sometimes results in intimacy; among women, intimacy sometimes results in sex.”
— Barbara Cartland
My favorite Barbara Cartland quote was in response to someone asking her what she thought was the cause of the highly-publicized marital difficulties her niece (Princess Diana) was experiencing at the time; she replied, “I think she’s been reading too many of my novels.”
Commenting on this a year later. All-time greatest Cartland moment IMHO:
Reporter–“Do you think class barriers have broken down in Britain?”
BC–“Of course they have, or I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to someone like you.”
🙂
Yep again.
A sensible and rational explanation for sometimes seemingly random human sexual behaviour. Thanks Maggie 🙂
You’re very welcome, Susan!
Your young Jane Goodall photo reminded me of this:
http://www.fark.com/comments/6837022/That-Jane-Goodall-tramp-is-subject-of-a-documentary-thats-on-shortlist-of-potential-Oscar-nominees
Good old Gary Larson! His strip and Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes are the only comic strips I really do miss.
Ditto. For a while, Bloom County approached greatness, but Breathed didn’t quite make it into the pantheon. I did think that the plot arc where the racist white lawyer Steve Dallas was turned into a black man was rather funny. And I thought Opus was hilarious. “If One Million People Do a Stupid Thing, It is Still a Stupid Thing.”
Absolutely. My favorite Bloom County strip was a Steve Dallas one, after aliens turned him into “Mr. PC”; it’s a brilliant commentary on the euphemism treadmill: Right-click and “Open image in new tab” to make it more readable.
Beautiful! I loved how in PC Speak, People of Color is the antitheses of Colored People. I guess I just don’t understand in import of reversing the order and adding an intervening preposition.
THE import. Apparently I can’t tell the difference between a definite article and a preposition either…
Another example: “People with disabilities” vs. “disabled people”. Perhaps PC people just think increasing the number of syllables and the stiltedness of the cadence somehow makes terms better? After all, they’re all about “African American” (7 syllables and very stilted cadence), but turn their noses up at “Afro-American” (6 syllables and a natural cadence).
Not to speak kindly of liberals but I can understand what they think they’re doing in some cases. “People with disabilities” emphasizes that we’re dealing with people who happen to have disabilities. “Disabled people” puts the emphasis on “disabled”. Of course, I think that’s nuts, since the referents are the same either way.
Or an effort to make the phrase less usable as an insult, presumably because longer makes it harder to say, and so less attractive to school yards or bars?
If so I guess it might make some sense, doesn’t matter what words you use for different they do have a tendency to evolve into insults over time. Personally, I’d rather just use something short and simple, and judge by the tone of voice and the situation whether it’s meant as an insult or is just descriptive, during my lifetime the PC use of words has been changing fast enough that it’s been hard to keep up and I really hate this tendency some have for jumping all over anybody who happens to be a term or two behind what is the latest acceptable one in the PC world. So, I don’t mind if I get called fat, since I am, as long as you say it nicely.
Funny thing about that cartoon. In “Prehistory of the Far Side”, Gary Larson said he got a nasty letter about it from the Jane Goodall Society. But when Goodall was to be honored, someone wanted to use the cartoon. Turned out Goodall liked the cartoon and no idea someone was being offended in her name.
I’m going to say right now that if I’m ever well-known enough to be good-naturedly kidded like that, I will laugh as hard as anyone.
I loved that book! The other story that I thought was funny was when Gary Larson started getting hate mail from the prudes about his panel, “When Dogs Dream.”
The dog, having, at long last, vanquished his perpetual enemy, the automobile, is appropriately shown atop the infernal machine which is showing its belly to the victor, howling in triumph.
Or as Larson’s friend later said, “That dog is humping that car.”
I don’t have the graphic, but here’s the dialogue from one of my favorite Calvin and Hobbes cartoons.
Calvin is talking to his dad.
Calvin: Dad, how come old photographs are always black and white? Didn’t they have color film back then?
Dad: Sure they did. In fact, those old photographs are in color. It’s just the world was black and white then.
Calvin: Really?
Dad: Yep. The world didn’t turn color until sometime in the 1930s, and it was pretty grainy color for a while, too.
Calvin: That’s really weird.
Dad: Well, truth is stranger than fiction.
Calvin: But then why are old paintings in color?! If the world was black and white, wouldn’t artists have painted it that way?
Dad: Not necessarily, a lot of great artists were insane.
Calvin: But… but how could they have painted in color anyway? Wouldn’t their paints have been shades of gray back then?
Dad: Of course. But they turned colors, like everything else did in the ’30s.
Calvin: So why didn’t old black and white photos turn color too?
Dad: Because they were color pictures of black and white, remember?
(Later, Calvin is alone with Hobbes in a tree)
Calvin: The world is a complicated place, Hobbes.
Hobbes: Whenever it seems that way, I take a nap in a tree and wait for dinner.
Oops, all I had to do was append “cartoon” to the text quote and here it was.
http://www.flickr.com/groups/bangbw/discuss/72157624321294118/
There’s a line that Bill Watterson said in response to criticism of one of his cartoons that I think you could use. The cartoon was a dream sequence where Calvin imagined he was a T-Rex flying an F-16 fighter plane. At the end, Calvin destroys the school but wakes up in the middle of class. Well, some people took offense at the cartoon, thinking that destroying a school wasn’t funny under any circumstances. Watterson wrote (and this might not be the exact words) “Anybody who doesn’t understand this cartoon has forgotten what it’s like to be a kid, or never was a kid in the first place.”
It’s very easy to change that to “Anybody who can’t understand male sexuality has either forgotten what it is like to be a man, or never was a man in the first place.”
If I unearth it, I’ll send you a cartoon a friend of mine sent me. It was titled, “The difference between men and women.”
The first pic was of a machine festooned with meters, rheostats, toggles, punch switches with an incredible variety of (incomprehensible) status readouts. That was woman.
The second pic was of a simple metal box with a toggle switch. And the only position available was “ON.”
I think I’ve seen that before, and I’d definitely like a copy if you find it again.
Will do. I just have to figure out which unlabeled media drive it’s in.
I’ve got it on Amazing Women Rock at this link:
http://amazingwomenrock.com/just-flip-the-switch-but-which-one
Thank you!
Thanks Susan. That beats a couple hours combing the archives.
I also like these gender prayers:
http://amazingwomenrock.com/gender-prayers
LOL, yet oh-so-true!
LOL! 😀
Reminds me of the old joke about how to impress a woman: Wine her, Dine her, Call her, Hug her, Hold her, Surprise her, Compliment her, Smile at her, Laugh with her, Cry with her, Cuddle with her, Shop with her, Give her jewelry, Buy her flowers, Hold her hand,Write love letters to her, Go to the end of the earth and back for her.
And how to impress a man: show up naked; bring beer.
Actually, I think my wife would send me to a shrink if I did all the above. And I always preferred whiskey over beer. But …
“…when interacting sexually with other women I can just go by instinct, but for men I need intellectual knowledge.”
I would think it would be the other way around.
Maybe not the other way around, but that a woman would at least have “instinctual knowledge” for interacting sexually with men.
Maybe I phrased that badly. I meant that I can “get” why women do things without having to analyze it, but when trying to predict male behavior I have to think about “what would a man do?” Does that make sense?
You have to remember: women don’t really need to do anything to attract men; it just sort of happens.
Okay, I get it now.
“women don’t really need to do anything to attract men; it just sort of happens.”
I feel the same way as a man. I don’t need to do anything to attract women, a minority of women are just naturally attracted to me and it’s obvious. The rest of them are completely indifferent.
I am talking here about physical attraction. Not “attract” in the sense of bring into ones life. Sure a man can “attract” a gold digger by spending lots of cash lol.
In my experience, whenever I had to DO something to attract a woman, the results were unsatisfying.
Maggie, you’re the most intelligent woman I can think of, but this time you’re wrong.
Women seem sexually different from men because most little girls are mentally castrated, while little boys aren’t. Do you think men want a scoop of ice cream dumped in their hand?
Come to grips with mental castration before you talk about most women being less eager for sex than men. http://sexhysteria.wordpress.com
I respectfully disagree; IMHO the cross-cultural evidence is overwhelming, and even little girls who get no sexual messages whatsoever (as I did not) are considerably sexually different from men. I simply do not buy that “social construction” has that kind of power.
Female and male sexuality is certainly different – due to biology. But I do agree with Frank to a certain extent.
It seems girls are taught not to let on just how much they’re interested in sex, even when they’re very much interested. By the same token most men are not anywhere, anytime, anywho beasts they’re portrayed to be.
So perhaps “men want it more than women” but not nearly to the extent that many women would have us believe.
“Psycho-sociological castration” isn’t limited to women. Boys experience the repressive and inhibitive effects of societal expectations and moralities as well. So, while some females might be more dramatically affected than males by societal conditioning, I don’t see it as adequate to explain the marked gender difference in interest in sex (and I’m thinking here of this meaning “actively desiring sex with a partner” ).
What does seem to me to explain the marked difference lies in what’s elsewhere been mentioned to in the comments, women’s reproductive role.
Besides the obvious difference in testosterone levels between the genders (testosterone figuring substantially in libido); and that, unlike a man’s essentially stable hormone levels, a woman’s fluctuating estrogen/hormone levels can greatly affect and vary her libido; men and women significantly differ in that, while a man is primarily a gene-contributor and only secondarily what might be termed an “offspring nurturer”, a woman is dually a gene-contributor and offspring nurturer.
Her dual functions exert simultaneous affects on a woman’s sexuality — for, while a man is wired to assess women primarily for evidence of desirable genes to pass on to his offspring , a woman is wired to assess men dually, for both a man’s good genes AND for a man’s capacity to provide for her and her potential offspring.
It’s probably why women, though certainly visual, are not considered to be as visually-influenced as men when assessing attractiveness — men assess attractiveness primarily upon the visible physical evidence of a woman’s genes, but women assess men’s attractiveness not only upon visual traits but also upon attributes which make men potentially capable providers/caregivers (including financial potential, personality, social-status, and social dynamics).
All meaning, as that “lone toggle switch versus complex instrument cluster” analogy demonstrates, women experience sexual attraction and desire from a relatively much-more-complicated biology than men’s biology. In theory, a woman can, say, find herself sexually desiring a man for his physical appearance, yet feel equally repelled by him because of his behavior or attitude or indolence.
Which is why she marries the skinny rich guy with the big nose and screws the hunky gardener. She wants hunky kids, but she wants more support for them than the gardener can supply.
‘Zactly, Sailor.
I’ve said many times that, in some alternate universe more-nearly optimal for women, each woman would have, at the same time, 1) at least one committed, “sensitive”, wealthy, totally faithful-to-her man who would financially support and indulge her, give her his full attention and listen whenever she wanted it, hug her whenever she needs hugs, watch only the TV and movies she likes, cheerfully caretake her kids (including all kids she has by other guys) , fix her faucets and repaint her house, honestly not mind her getting fatter, and meet her hygiene and orderliness standards: BUT, for whom she has zero sexual attraction and with whom she never has to have sex……………….and 2) any and all the men for whom she does feel sexual attraction, with whom she can have whatever no-strings-whatsoever-attached sex she wants.
I have to respectfully disagree on something. The reader’s question (addressing Maggie) begins “I find it quite remarkable that you not only understand the changes that occur to a healthy male denied sex…”
What changes? The only change is you get hornier. That’s it. Sex is not a need like food is. Sure we want sex and lots of it, but if we don’t get any, then we can jerk it to porn and be done with it.
In fact, I find myself purposely avoiding women/relationships for periods of time because usually sex with a woman comes with a mental cost that exceeds the benefit, so on balance I am better off mentally. I know many guys who feel the same way.
Often times I think the man who goes without sex becomes wealthy 🙂
If I could afford escorts I would probably visit them occasionally (haven’t tried), but I would view it as hedonistic entertainment, not some sort of sexual healing.
G wrote;
Often times I think the man who goes without sex becomes wealthy
Sublimation. It’s all Sublimation. 😉
> Sex is not a need like food is.
Gotta disagree, big-time. Oh, sex is not a physical need, granted. But a man (or at least THIS man) cannot believe that a woman loves him if she consistently refuses to have sex with him. We NEED sex from a woman we love, or we feel a core, basic, primal rejection.
Well if you have a woman and she consistently refuses to have sex with you, then you don’t have a woman 🙂
If I had a girlfriend and she consistently refused sex I would feel rejected too. I’d try to resolve it, but if that didn’t work, I’d break up with her.
I understand what you’re saying, but I’m talking about something else. I mean if a guy is single and has nobody to have sex with, he will be just fine taking care of his own needs indefinitely. He is not going to lose his mind or suffer any health consequences because he is not having sex with a woman.
G, I think you need to read these two entries Maggie wrote:
A Whore In The Bedroom
Out of Control
” Most men can’t just turn off their sex drive ” I’m thankful I’m not most men. If men knew that women look for three things in a mate and took an honest look at themselves I’d bet most would give up looking and go home. If you are under five foot eight you are short by today’s standards, women want a feeling of security so they pick men that are taller than they are, the whole tight butt thing they like that’s tied to physical health, which means healthier offspring , the final thing is money, if your are wealthy she can build a better nest for those offspring. Guys they pick you, you don’t pick them.
Now from that list above, I don’t meet a one of those standards, and to top it off I’m in my mid forties so another strike, being too old, and with being old I know I won’t stand a snowballs chance in hell so why bother. My libido has just become another function I pay no mind to it until it makes me uncomfortable and just like urination or deification I go to the bathroom relieve myself and carry on. I kinda feel sorry for my gender, trying again and again only to meet rejection, but being to stupid to know when to give up and quit.
I think also, for women and men, the uses of sex is different. For a man, sex is usually an end in it]s self. He will do things to get sex. It’s sometimes the reverse for a woman, who knows he will do things to get sex.
When I first moved to the US, as a teen, I found that Jethro Tull was playing in a city over 50 miles away. I didn’t drive, and needed a way there. (I could have taken a bus, but that would have meant leaving the morning before the show, and coming back the next morning, no where to stay overnight in a strange city as a young teen.) So I flirted shamelessly with an older boy who had a car. He ended up taking me, although he cared nothing for Tull and their music. I had a great evening, his turned out to be somewhat disappointing.
This knowledge, that men will do things just to get sex, shows up in our primate relatives, too, so I would consider it a basic mammal trait.
So he took you to the concert in the expectation that it would get him laid?
Did it?
One thing missing from this. Sex is cheap for a man true, but false paternity is not. Love is not cheap. Attractive women have sexual power, but not “love power”. A man may allow himself to be manipulated readily for sex, or for apparent validation of his sexual attractiveness. But a man can’t be manipulated into love. A woman is either lovable to a man or not. Men may give their sperm away, but not so easily their hearts. Oh yes, proclamations of love from men are legion – but enduring truth behind such a proclamation is much more rare.
Many many times in my life have I turned away from the prospect of sex, because my instincts told me that love was also expected and wanted (even needed) and that was a cost too high to pay. Many men I know have had the same experience. Young beautiful women have sexual power because they also command love – men are willing to pay the cost of love for sex. They may still lust after older less attractive women (sperm being cheap and all) but since they are wary of love to them, they may avoid sex (unless it is very clear that love is not desired).
I sometimes wonder if much of the evolutionary psychology of male sexuality is written by nerdy men who have had no power to attract a woman’s love – whereas the men who have had more choices have no reason to be other than silent. If they were not, the power of female sexuality might be seen in a slightly different way.
But, of course all this is completely consistent with the demand by men for female prostitutes. There the cost in money is far cheaper than the cost of love they may risk elsewhere.
Maggie; I must disagree with you here
“Biologically speaking, poor mating decisions have absolutely zero negative impact on a male; he can dump sperm in unhealthy females, in females of different species, in males of his own species or even on the ground and there will still be plenty more where that came from. But for a female it’s the opposite; every mating choice may have huge (and in humans decades-long) consequences. The existence of birth control is irrelevant: I know it exists, and you know it exists, but our hindbrains don’t, and they carry on just as though every act of coitus could lead to pregnancy…which for men means the same in either case, but for women is quite different.”
Maybe in a HG this stands, but not in our society. If such were still the case(men having zero risk from a bad mating choice, and you know, not getting reamed in family court/divorce/child support. As well as women having all the risk from a bad choice) how come there’s quite a few women having children by men who are NOT good mating material at all(the old alpha vs beta paradigm)? With quite a few of the single mothers I’ve known, it seems they were anything but choosy, instead following their impulses and having their mating choices safeguarded by any range of options such as birth control/abortion/child support/wic/tanf benefits/so on and so forth. One way or the other there will be aid for a woman’s offspring, so it seems the opportunity cost of choosing an inadequate mate has gone down.
None of that has anything to do with evolution; did you miss the “biologically speaking” caveat?
@Maggie: yes I did :X, forgive me.
I didn’t know that the young Jane Goodall was kind of hot. Now, I’m neither a hot woman nor a world-renowned primatologist, but I do have one thing in common with Jane Goodall: as a youth, I would climb a tree and read Tarzan. It just seemed a cool thing to do.
This is entirely cross-cultural. What’s ironic is that for those who seek to deny any inherent gender differences, this might not be true. A lot of very masculine women (usually lesbians) and feminine men are hard-core-gender-denialists.
But in the larger scheme of things, their experiences don’t represenet the majority – in fact, they’re a tiny minority. They shouldn’t drive policy creation.
[…] More brilliance from Maggie McNeill. One of the best primers on male and female sexual behaviour I’ve read for […]
When it comes to being turned on sexually and romantically, are women more like switches and men more like rheostats/potentiometers, or is it the other way around?