by Deborah J Fox, MSW
photo by Nadine Epstein, iShadowproject.com
Walking down the strip in South Beach one Saturday night, we passed a woman in her late 30’s dressed up for the evening, sporting a frilly, very low-cut blouse. I asked my husband, “What do you think she has in mind?” He didn’t skip a beat in answering, “Finding someone to have sex with tonight.” Although that’s a possibility, a likely intention I attributed to her was that she was looking to attract someone with whom she’d like to have sex with at some point, and perhaps a relationship. Looking through my husband’s lens, his thought was logical, just as if he was wearing a fig leaf would signal “looking for sex . . . now.”
Female sexuality has been largely misunderstood for millennia. There is no one version of female sexuality---it has its complexities. To clear up some common misunderstandings, here are six myths to reflect on.
If a woman doesn’t have an orgasm, it means her partner isn’t a good lover.
Orgasms for women are rarely just about stimulating an erogenous zone long enough for an explosion to occur. You’ve heard that the largest sex organ is what’s between your ears. This couldn’t be more true for women. Factors such as fatigue, stress, worry, conflict in her relationship are decisive in a woman’s openness to engage in sexual activity, much less have an orgasm.
Some women don’t relax easily which is a prerequisite for allowing an orgasm to happen. They might find relaxing difficult because they’re preoccupied with a problem they need to solve, or they have something stressful going on. It may be that they’re generally anxious and relaxation is a hard state to find.
Some women have negative feelings about their body and this leads to feeling tense. Some don’t find it easy to inhabit the sensations in their body---they’re more stuck in their heads. Some haven’t yet found their own physical path of increasing sensations that lead to orgasm.
Many women need to time to develop trust in their partner in order to orgasm. Climaxing can be a very vulnerable state for many women, so feeling safe and secure is paramount.
Women lose interest in sex after they’ve been married for a few years.
It’s not that women actually lose interest in sex, although it can look that way when peering through an uninformed lens. According to Emily Nagoski, Ph.D, a well-known researcher in female sexuality, a majority of women fall into the category of having responsive sexual desire, whereas only about 15% of women have spontaneous sexual desire. Spontaneous types are those who experience desire intrinsically and other factors are . . . . well, just factors. The majority of men are in this category. For responsive desire folks, context is everything.
Responsive women and their partners need to team up to create a context in which a woman will enjoy sex. As I said above, fatigue, stress and conflict are decisive in whether these women are going to enjoy sex. A man (spontaneous type) may approach his female partner for sex several hours after they’ve quarreled and she looks at him as if he’s sprouted a horn and a look that says, “Are you (insert your favorite four-letter word) kidding me???? I’m still furious with you!” That means “no.”
If fatigue is an inhibiting factor, creating a context might be, “Hey, I’ll wash the dishes and put the kids to bed. And then we can go to bed early?”, along with a warm bear hug and a wandering hand. Or, “Let’s send the kids out to the zoo with a babysitter for the afternoon on Saturday and spend some naked time together.”
Perhaps a better way to resolve conflict is needed so there’s not simmering resentment in the air. Maybe she needs a listening ear to help her let go of a problem at work. Perhaps she needs a conversation to problem-solve household and childcare responsibilities.
Women respond to being courted, attended to, flirted with. For sex to happen on Saturday, foreplay should start days earlier. What is foreplay? Foreplay is showing interest, being attentive, being emotionally responsive and affectionate.
In order for women to be able to focus on themselves and pleasure, they need some release from their caretaking duties. Without this understanding the myth prevails that women lose interest in sex. They do lose interest in the kind of sex they’ve been expected to enjoy – late at night when they’re ready to go to sleep, regardless of what else is going on for them. Despite the predominance of this style, it’s not the stuff of movies, porn or what the media promotes. Sadly, this truth for women is largely unknown by our sexually undereducated culture.
Vaginal lubrication is equivalent to an erection.
What this myth suggests is that if women are tuned on, their vagina lubricates. Wrong. Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t. This is called nonconcordance. It’s really important that this myth be dispelled. I’ve known men who disdainfully tell their female partner, “You don’t know your own body, you say you’re turned on, but your vagina isn’t wet.” A woman’s subjective experience is the one to pay attention to---just ask!
Women are less sexually adventurous than men.
Some women are less adventurous than some men, but this isn’t a hard-wired gender trait. It may be generations to come, if ever, before we really know the full answer to this question because the cultural factors are so strong in inhibiting sexual behavior. Women receive so many negative messages about their sexuality from their families, religion, media and peers. These messages are powerful and long-standing. The messages come via words, looks and inuendo. The mother who walks out of the room every time there’s kissing on a TV show conveys a negative message about sexuality. Those women who were taught that sex before marriage was wrong often concluded that sex was dangerous, creating inhibitions and sometimes actual sexual dysfunctions.
P.S. Plenty of men aren’t sexually adventurous.
Women become more inhibited sexually as their relationship becomes more serious.
The period of infatuation is fun, exciting and mysterious in its unique effect on us. It’s the time when sex is most frequent, regardless of being sleep-deprived or risk being late for work. It’s the time when uninhibited sex is at its height. Its life is time-limited though, usually about 6 to 18 months.
When infatuation begins to wane, inhibitions begin to appear. What’s happened is that those negative messages about sexuality or one’s body took a vacation during infatuation. Even the long-lasting impact of earlier trauma took that same vacation. When infatuation wanes, these inhibitions come out of hibernation.
Women just don’t like sex as much as men do.
This couldn’t be further from the truth. Women should be congratulated for liking sex at all! The negative messages that girls are bombarded with since they found out they were girls have created enormous barriers to feeling sexually comfortable. There are an astounding number of “good girls don’t . . . .” messages, all designed to modulate what might come naturally:
Don’t be too loud/expressive.
Don’t sit that way in a chair.
Don’t be “too much.”
Don’t get pregnant (which translates to ‘sex is dangerous’)
The boys won’t like you if . . . .
Have you ever heard a cliché of “girls will be girls” the way you hear, “boys will be boys?” No way!
A consequence for many women growing up is that sexuality didn’t become about themselves and their pleasure. With inadequate information about sex, young women are often left to apply to themselves what they learn from their experiences with males. If males just dive into erogenous zones at the outset of a physical encounter, then that’s what must be the way to have sex.
Women often aren’t exposed to what is more typical of female sexual response, especially beyond the infatuation phase of a relationship. What is portrayed in novels and on the screen is unfortunately a major source of information about sexuality. And that information is limited to sexuality typical of the spontaneous desire, and majority (young) male crowd.