Can we talk about the differences between women’s and men’s sexuality?

[IdaBWells]

I know this is a super tricky one but the fact is that women (as many of our current threads demonstrate, such as girls being sexually harassed in uniform) are the sex that are predominately harassed for sex and that men are much less discriminating in who they they will sleep with? Pornography is mostly made for men, not to say there aren’t women who are interested in porn but it’s something that pretty much all men are expected to be interested in.

I am NOT saying that women are not highly sexed or interested in sex but that men are much more aggressive in pursuing women and girls and see females as objectified sexually in a manner that women do not constantly see men. Of course women find men sexually attractive but they don’t have the desire to constantly want to touch them or harrass them.

So when we talk about people “identifying” as women when they are men why are we not allowed to openly discuss the fact that they are not going to experience their sexuality like an average women. For example I often see comments by MtoF trans people who want to be attracting male attention in the street in a way that most women find offensive.

I think the pervasiveness of the pill is also worth mentioning

my own experience and anecdotal experience from friends is that it kills your libido

quite hard to get in touch with your sexuality if you're medicating it away

The women I know aren't in the slightest bit interested in sex, and that includes the women I know who are in relationships. They just avoid it where possible and put up with it when they have to.

Actually I see your point here. It's just it works both way round. Regular sex could be either tea with milk or tea with lemon.

I don't read that as Micke contrasting 'vanilla' and 'adventurous' sex

I read it as contrasting sex with someone who is interested in your pleasure with someone who isn't

now don't get me wrong, I am no proponent of taking no responsibility for your own pleasure during sex

but I do think things like the thread on here recently about the pervasiveness of throttling during sex, with young men thinking it's almost 'standard' mean that maybe the social soup we swim in is making it hard for young men to care about or understand what brings pleasure to their partners

@NameChanger, yet upthread @DJLippy says she sees the problem as men not being interested enough in sex .

The women I know aren't in the slightest bit interested in sex, and that includes the women I know who are in relationships. They just avoid it where possible and put up with it when they have to.

I used to be one of those women. Two long term relationships, both started with lots of sex, then dwindling until it was months/years without sex.

Then I found a man who actually cares (as in genuinely cares) about my pleasure, who takes time to discuss what I want, who understands and picks up on bodily cues. We have sex twice a day, more if he's up for it.

If only more men would realise that if they actually cared more about their partners needs instead of sulking, they would get more sex.

Having said all that, I'm going back to entitlement. Men are only seeing the problem from their view - that women aren't up for it enough, and aren't up for the sex that men want to have at all the times they want to have it.

It's no wonder that many women don't actually want to have sex with their partners.

DieAntword wow. I wonder if he described himself as the "perfect gentleman" too?
I wonder if lesbians aren't the closest we'll get
Yes and no, Micke. I posted on here about somebody mentioning the difference sexually between a woman who has sex with men and one who is lesbian, and how each is in bed. Obviously it's a generalisation, but those who have/had sex with men in the recent past were more hurried and more focussed on genitals. Now most women aren't lesbians, and most lesbians aren't "gold star" lesbians, so we're talking about a tiny number of women who haven't had sex with men having sex with each other, in a more female way. I doubt that's the key to anything. The male gaze affects all women, not all in a sexual way but there is still a pressure to look as sexy and young as possible. Women internalise it and judge other women.
Now add in the longstanding but accurate trope about lesbian bed death. Women form relationships, men have casual sex. Stereotypes but with some truth in them. So gay men can have hundreds of sex partners and lesbian women get overattached to unsuitable partners (due to the emotional intensity, limerance, decent sex and a relatively smaller pool to fish from in the first place). There is domestic violence in lesbian relationships. Women stuck with each other long past the sell-by date. Once the LBD kicks in there is very little or no sex.
Also, lesbians have high rates of alcohol abuse and mental health issues. So yeah, being drunk, depressed, living with someone who has become a friend to you, with barely any single lesbians in your area, means no matter how amazing your sexuality might be, it's pretty much all in theory. So instead of your sexuality playing second fiddle, your sexuality is non-existent.
That sounds a bit cynical but it isn't meant to be, it's just that lesbians aren't the key to female sexuality. Mainly because it dismisses the sexuality of the vast majority of women too.

wow. I wonder if he described himself as the "perfect gentleman" too?

When I first came across that poem on the wall of Llanbadarn church I already knew about “incels” and I was just like... woah, there really is nothing new under the sun eh.

Merched LLanbadran

Plygu rhag llid yr ydwyf –
pla ar holl ferched y plwyf!
am na chefais, drais drawsoed,
onaddun yr un erioed,
na morwyn fwyn ofynaig
na merch fach, na gwrach, na gwraig
py rusiant, py ddireidi,
py fethiant, na fynnant fi?

Py ddrwg i riain fewiael
yng nghoed twylldew fy nghael?
Nid oedd gywilydd iddi
yng ngwal dail fy ngweled i
ni bu amser na charwn,
ni bu mor lud hud a hwn
anad gwyr annwyd Garwy-
yn y dydd ai un a dwy
ac er hynny nid oedd nes
ym gael un no’m gelynes
ni bu Sul yn Llanbadarn
na bewn, ac eraill ai barn
a'm wyneb at y ferch goeth
a'm gwegil at Dduw gwiwgoeth.

I suspect there aren't many of us who can read Welsh here. Coincidentally, my class tonight is meant to be on poetry. I can ask for us to look at this one, too...

it scans better in Welsh than it's English translation - only to be expected I suppose,

I've always been of the school of thought that behavioural differences between women and me are socialised, but I've reluctantly come to the conclusions that there are fundamentally innate differences in terms of male and female sexual behaviour. Not necessarily in terms of libido or desire for intimacy, but in terms of being prone to compulsive sexual behaviour.

Women could be utterly free to explore their sexuality with no judgement or preconception for a thousand years and I still don't think we would see women deriving sexual satisfaction by exposing themselves to men on the street, or secretly videoing men's toilets, or buying men's used shoes and underwear on eBay, or fetishisticaly dressing as men, or amassing thousands of images of child abuse, or kidnapping and imprisoning men for their sexual use or any other of the other sexual predilections that some men seem to be compelled to act on despite the social, legal and physical risks to themselves (not to mention the harm some of those actions cause to others).

Not all men are like that, but almost everyone who is like that is a man.

Women (in heterosexual sex, which lets face it is mostly PIV) are the penetrated partner.
Women do not have to experience pleasure or orgasm in order to procreate and procreation was a huge part os sex until very recently (the invention of and availability of contraception)
Men are generally stronger than women

All of these points have influenced women's sexuality since the dawn of time.
As PPs have noted it is nigh on impossible to separate social influence from women's actual sexual impulses.
I am heartened by the many posts I've read over the years by posters who have very satisfying sex lives, whose partners care about their sexual satisfaction and who appear to feel that they are fulfilling their sexual selves.
Can't say I have had that experience myself sadly.

Notdavidtennant That's the trajectory of my thinking, as well. And from an evolutionary point of view, sexual behaviour would be the most likely area for innate differences to exist, because sexual dimorphism is so strongly related to reproduction. While intellectual ability, on the other hand, would be one of the areas least likely to show any innate difference.

TinyWee "Can't say I have had that experience myself sadly." That's very sad but actually, I think, quite common too, at least in some relationships.

Fascinating thread, and great post Notdavidtennant. I do feel it’s impossible to look at certain statistics and truly believe differences in all kinds of male and female sexual behaviour are PURELY down to socialisation. For a start, if the high rates of sex offences committed by men were just down to power/entitlement/opportunity, I believe we would certainly see at least some similar offences committed by women in situations where they do have the upper hand - e.g. when caring for children or elders. Yet lone female paedophiles who prey on very young children (WITHOUT a male accomplice) are almost entirely unheard of.

It’s hard, as feminists, to talk about this for lots of reasons. Firstly, if toxic male sexual behaviour is innate to some degree, pushing to rid society of it feels like a completely hopeless endeavour. And of course, the idea that women don’t have/shouldn’t have a sexuality of their own has been used to justify treating women as sex objects for men throughout all of history. So it feels like a lot rests on maintaining the idea that there are likely no innate (average) differences between the sexes. But I actually think women are done a massive disservice by so many feminists refusing to admit what I believe most know deep down - that sex is simply a less pressing priority for most (not all, obviously) women, and that this is actually a real strength of women. The average man’s preoccupation with sex is so obviously a weakness. A PP put a similar point far more eloquently.

And I also believe that because we don’t talk about the possibility that there could be really fundamental differences in male/female sexuality that socialisation merely enhances, most women are doomed to eventually become stuck in relationships where sex is something they often grudgingly put up with rather than actively enjoy.

Meanwhile I do agree that female sexuality is so shaped by men’s desires that it is impossible to know what it is truly like. I certainly feel deeply alienated from my own sexuality. So I acknowledge that all of this is speculation.

Why do some seem to believe that having a high libido, being aroused by visual stimuli, and being willing to have sex with lots of different people is somehow better, to the extent that we are keen to come up with reasons why it's oppression that's made us not like that? Is it because we've been socialised to believe that whatever men want/do must be superior, and that to be equal we have to be the same as them?

It was kesstrel who said this and it really resonated with me. Not sure armbiut the next part of the post, which talks about evolution, as I’m resistent to the idea of putting you much stock in evolutionary explanations of modern human behaviour; but that first paragraph had me nodding along.

Also just to add that I think someone mentioned Esther Perel earlier and I also think she has interesting ideas about female sexuality, specifically that women on average may not have a lower libido but depend on newness to stimulate it - which anecdotally is in line with my own experiences and much of what I’ve heard from female friends. It’s very interesting because the stereotype is that men are the ones who are more likely to become sexually bored with a long term partner.

I'd agree with IrenetheQuaint

"As a matter of fact, I'd guess that women actually have a much higher libido than men -- how else do you explain the fact that women keep marrying into the class of people who keep trying to take our rights away?"

Surely this is about social conditioning and security rather than libido."

I'd be very surprised if women married for sex.

Indeed, Italian. Women in the past clearly HAD to get married as it was literally impossible for them to support themselves otherwise. Society was deliberately shaped around preventing women from being independent of men.

The days of e.g. women being paid half of what men earned for the exact same job or being banned from getting a mortgage without a husband are still well within living memory for many, and I believe the current cultural idea that getting married is the be all and end all for women clearly stems from this. Also, it is still much much easier to navigate the world if you’re in a couple, even in the UK. Absolutely everything is set up for couples, and being in a couple is the expectation.

I think sex has little to do with why women marry. I doubt most women married to men are having incredible sex.

women on average may not have a lower libido but depend on newness to stimulate it
That would make sense genetically, wouldn't it? Which is why patriarchal structures are as they are - to minimise the risk of a man raising another man's offspring unwittingly.
It's ironic that men refuse to marry, the majority of UK children are born out of wedlock and many relationships break down; being a stepdad is now more accepted. I even saw a meme about it. It had a man on an arrow that forked off in two directions. "27? Single? Here are your choices" one was "alone forever" and the other was "stepdad".

I doubt most women married to men are having incredible sex
Married people have more sex than the rest of us though.

Which is why patriarchal structures are as they are - to minimise the risk of a man raising another man's offspring unwittingly.

Yes - everything comes back to this! Unfortunately.

Married people have more sex than the rest of us though

But quantity isn’t quality, and for many women the quantity actually becomes a problem - just look at the amount of posts by women on MN who complain of being pestered for sex they don’t really want to have by their male partners, even when they have more urgent priorities like caring for a newborn or recovering from birth injuries.

kesstrel excellent post at 8.59 a.m.

BananaBonanza "By identifying some sexual traits as masculine and feminine we are encoding century's of sexual repression onto the next generation."

Only of it is not true that males and females experience sex differently.

If it is true we do experience sex differently then trying to persuade women to feel differently about sex might actually be harmful for them.

These are all generalizations and yet I think generally men do have higher sex drives, even in an egalitarian society it costs men less, I think, in physical terms, to have sex.

"Now what is inherently wrong in a fully consenting situation, a adult woman watching a video of people having sex...."

Well the evidence seems to be that some men who watch s lot of porn end up finding physical sexual relationships actually harder to maintain. So I would say there was something harmful in it. It dehumanizes people, IMHO. Would it do this for women, dors it do it for women. I don't know.

f it is true we do experience sex differently then trying to persuade women to feel differently about sex might actually be harmful for them

Really strongly agree Italian. IMO this is a major blind spot for much contemporary feminism.

Here's an example. If a woman "gives it up" on the first date, that is expected to mean the man will judge her, think less of her and be less willing to have a relationship with her. He won't turn her down, obviously.
I've been on dates with women who have never had sex with men who have said similar, that they'd like some more dates before we have sex. Now I see that as the woman not being that interested, after all, there's no social judgement from me and she knows that (we have probably discussed it). So I'm likely to disengage because her being so invested in heterosexual cultural norms is off-putting and I don't want to feel like sex is something I've been "allowed to do to someone".
My libido remains intact, so does hers, but the structure in which we live has affected us both even though no men were harmed in the making of this episode.
This was something that happened a lot when I was younger, firstly I don't think I'd let it bother me so much now (plus it could have been me who was unreasonable) and secondly older women tend not to give a monkey's about rules like that.