The Guide to Getting It On (144 page)

Equally puzzling are rough-and-tumble men who become extremely nurturing and maternal when it is time to feed the baby. And if you assume that women are less aggressive or are the more nurturing sex, try talking to a random group of female lawyers, advertising execs or women in entertainment. While hormones may have some impact in determining male and female behaviors, what we learn from culture about our respective sex roles is clearly a large force in shaping the way we behave. That’s why it is hard to talk about the definitions of masculine and feminine unless we also know the particular country, culture and year.

From this Guide’s perspective, any culture’s definition of masculine, feminine and erotic is arbitrary, transient and often artificial. Nonetheless, people take these definitions seriously and get really bent out of shape if you ignore their local customs.

CHAPTER

71

Men’s & Women’s Experience of Sex

M
en’s and women’s genitals are generally found in a similar location: behind the buttons of a person’s blue jeans. But what about the way we experience sex? Do men and women experience sexual feelings differently? That’s what this chapter is about. But first...

Forget Everything Else!

Forget penises, vulvas and chromosomes. The biggest difference between male and female sexuality throughout the ages has been the fact that men don’t get pregnant and women do. Forget about how estrogen and testosterone impact our respective behaviors. Instead, consider how differently we might approach sex if men were the ones who got knocked up and had to carry a baby inside themselves for nearly ten months, and if men were expected to be the child’s primary caregiver for the next eighteen years.

Of course, there are other factors that influence men’s and women’s experience of sex. While many of these have to do with culturally defined roles and expectations, some reflect differences in biology. For instance, there are subtle differences in brain anatomy which may influence behavior. Consider how the female brain responds to the smell and taste of chocolate. Think of how different life would be if male ejaculate squirted out in ribbons of chocolate, or if the penis tasted like a really big Hershey’s Kiss.

There are also claims about differences in the behaviors of male and female newborns. The author of
The Guide
spent a number of years in graduate school holding and studying babies, from two-pound preemies to drug-addicted newborns of crack-smoking moms. He can assure you that the only difference between boy babies and girl babies that means a single thing is how the babies pee. Boy babies have the capacity to wipe out your favorite shirt, tie, glasses and notepad, while girl babies are more forgiving pee-ers. Working with boy babies requires a quickness of hand. Some women report this kind of skill is just as necessary when working with the babies’ fathers.

Perhaps a more relevant finding of infant research is that girl babies are every bit as strong and healthy as boys at birth, if not more so. Yet we often treat girl babies as though they were more fragile. Researchers have dressed the same baby as a boy and then as a girl. When caregivers thought that the baby was a girl, they said things like “Aren’t you pretty and dainty.” When they thought it was a boy, they said, “Aren’t you a big one; look at how strong you are.” And if you want to know the sex of a baby from ten yards away, just observe how its daddy plays with it; girl babies get an abundance of hugs and kisses while boy babies get the rough ’n’ tumble. With such profound differences in the way we raise our children, it’s hard to imagine how subtle variations in neurology or genetics even matter.

NOTE:
We use the term “opposite sex” when comparing men and women, yet there is not a single psychological test battery that can distinguish male from female test takers. Surveys on attitudes can pick up differences, but good luck eliminating the influences of culture on surveys. Also, the differences in attitude decrease when men and women are in mixed groups as opposed to just being with all men or all women.

Typical Male Erotica vs. Female Erotica

What happens to these babies twenty years later when they are having sex? Do the women’s experiences fall into the “pretty and dainty” category? Are the men’s “big and strong?” Perhaps not, but our culture does have specific insults that it hurls at women whose sexuality appears to be “big and strong” and at men whose sexuality is “pretty and dainty.”

To help illustrate possible differences in men’s and women’s experience of sex, we have included a few samples of pornographic writing. The following is a typical letter to a male magazine that is commonly used for masturbation. It had a monthly audience of around 5 million people before the Internet took the staples out of its spine.

It wasn’t long before a wet area began to appear in the front part of DeAnne’s bikini panties. I slowly started to pull them down, at first revealing a neatly trimmed patch of silken blonde down, then the glistening tip of DeAnne’s swollen clit, and finally the rest of her hidden steamy treasure. The mere sight made me so hot I nearly exploded.

DeAnne must have sensed my excitement. Without saying a word, she ripped open my bulging blue jeans and started ravaging my 9-inch cock with her pleading lips. Within seconds I was filling her hungry mouth with load after load of white hot cum. DeAnne kept sucking and slurping on my throbbing cock until she milked my big balls dry.

Okay, so getting your rocks off is the name of the game in traditional male porn, with the focus being on the particular body parts that get you there the fastest. The next two passages are from
Erotic Interludes,
a collection of women’s erotica—edited by Lonnie Barbach, Harper & Row:

J.B. tenderly caressed my breasts until I could feel the space between my legs grow warm and wet. His kisses were different than ever before, long and slow at first, then his tongue licked mine like fire dancing in the dark. His long, slender legs gradually, rhythmically inched mine apart. The tip of his cock played on my belly, and I couldn’t resist rising up to meet him, opening my legs as far as the backseat would allow. A soft flash of red filled my vision when he entered me, his kisses wild on my face. I remember only the sense of infinite motion that followed. (Written by Sharon S. Mayes)

Amy groaned with pleasure as his large hand cupped her gently and his third finger came to rest on the one sweet spot he knew so well. As he touched it she felt an electric current flow from his hand into her. His energy swirled inside her till the whole universe seemed to start spinning around.... The spinning sensation rose up and flooded her whole body, pushing at the boundaries of who she thought she was.... Finally, unable to hold the energy back any longer, she let it explode through every cell in her body, cleansing her with light and pulsating out into the room. (By Udana Power)

Blinding light? Infinite motion? This has a different edge than “Within seconds I was filling her hungry mouth with load after load of white hot cum.” Still, one female reader says that the samples of women’s porn “left me bored,” while she found the male passage to be “erotic for me until he wastes his cock in her mouth.” Several female readers have echoed this same sentiment. At the same time, a male reader says that he finds the women’s passages to be more erotic. Perhaps it’s not so easy to generalize about the preferences of men and women, although the samples could easily be tagged as
typical male
or
typical female.

Is It Really Different?

Are men’s and women’s experiences really different, or do they just use different words to describe them?

Researchers asked men and women to write a paragraph describing their experience of orgasm. A panel of judges could not tell the women’s descriptions of orgasm from the men’s. So much for those charts on orgasm that make men and women look like they come from different planets.

This isn’t what Madison Avenue wants us to think. Advertisers work hard to make us believe that men and women are very, very different. That’s because manufacturers can often charge more for products that are targeted to a specific sex, such as cigarettes, deodorants, and even hemorrhoid ointments which are for one sex only. It’s a little surprising that we haven’t seen toilet paper that’s made just for a man’s or woman’s “special needs”—although one manufacturer, Kleenex, did try to sell man-sized facial tissues, which really were better for jerking off into than normal-sized tissue.

How Men and Women Experience Visual Pornography

In research on pornography, college students have been hooked up to devices that measure blood flow in the genitals. They are then shown X-rated movies. Although these devices indicate that there was an increase in the blood flowing into the women’s vaginas, many of the women did not feel sexually aroused. Speculation abounds on why. It could be that women’s brains process sexual arousal differently than men’s brains, and that vaginal blood flow is not enough to stoke the fires of desire. We also know that males might not be as conscious of their own arousal if they didn’t have a penis that pretty much taps them on the shoulder when it gets hard.

Straight Women and Gay Male Porn

Some women who are totally straight enjoy watching gay male porn. They get very turned on by it. Also, different cultures have different versions of this. In Japan there’s a very popular form of erotica called Yaoi that’s been created for women by women. It’s made up of male characters who are romantically, emotionally and sexually involved with each other. The masculine-looking hunks are way more emotional, chatty, romantic and angst-filled than men are in real life, and they are constantly having idyllic gay sex with each other. You would think this kind of erotica would be a turn on for gay men, but it speaks so much to women that gay men usually dislike it.

Women Have More To Say

In studies about sex, we tend to ask women a lot more questions about their sexuality than we do men. Maybe the reason why researchers feel that women’s sexuality is somehow more complex than men’s is because they ask women more questions. Or maybe it’s because women tend to be more verbally expressive about their sexual feelings—we notice a huge difference in the length of women’s answers to our sex-survey questions on this book’s website than the men’s answers. The men tend to answer in monosyllabic responses. Is this a reflection of men’s actual feelings, or simply a reflection of how they express their feelings when asked by others?

While brain studies tell us that men’s brains are wired in ways that might make porn movies more of an obvious turn-on for men than women, a recent study from the UK found that women are looking at porn sites in far greater numbers than was originally assumed. While men might use porn to masturbate with when they are at the computer, porn might not inspire as great of a need for immediate sexual relief in women. Perhaps the sexual images that women see have an additive effect, and result in a woman feeling more horny over an extended period of time.

Role Reversal — Fingers up Men’s Rear Ends

Getting a finger up the rear during a routine physical exam makes many guys feel like they’ve been violated, yet they don’t think twice about sticking their own fingers up a woman’s vagina. Is possible that a woman’s experience of sex might feel more private than a man’s since her body is the one that is usually being penetrated? One woman reader comments:

"Even if he’s wearing a condom, it still feels like a man leaves something inside of me during intercourse. He’s got to have something I really want inside of me, or I won’t do it."

Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why alcohol is often the lubricant that makes hooking up and one-night stands more easy for some women. It helps level the physical and emotional playing field.

Intimacy in Men vs. Women

In our society, we often assume that women are better at intimacy than men. Is this true? The answer depends upon how you define intimacy. According to psychologist David Schnarch, women are often better at some levels of intimacy (sharing feelings, talking about how the day went, etc.), but when you get past the small talk, neither women nor men do particularly well with intimacy.