Sex habits, meet ambiguity; oh, you know each other?
Why women have sex is a question that has plagued males since the beginning of time. That is, of course, when men can stop thinking about their own sex-drives long enough to consider those of their counterparts.
Could it be the possibility of experiencing multiple orgasms? Could it be for love and kinship, to connect with a partner, or a more innate reason, such as having children?’
Sigmund Freud called it ‘the great question.’ According to the book Why Women Have Sex, all of the above answers are correct. Women even have sex to feel powerful. Who would have thought?
University of Texas psychologists Cindy Meston and David Buss wrote Why Women Have Sex in an attempt to clarify the intricacy of female sexual motivations.
‘(It’s) an important step, they say, to better understanding how women can achieve sexual satisfaction,’ Jessica Bennett said in a Sept. 28 Newsweek article.
The book is based on five years of research and an online survey of 1,000 women. Types of sex that women have range from ‘altruistic sex (‘I felt sorry for the guy’) to revengeful sex (‘I wanted to get back at my partner’) to palliative sex (‘I had a migraine’).’
Why Woman Have Sex‘s pop-culture references, coupled with candid, honest quotes from real women, make the book somewhat entertaining, but overall it lulls.’
The most practical material in the book is direct quotes from women telling (potential) male readers how to lure them to bed. As every girl’s answer is different, men should take the advice with awareness of possible risks. If a guy looking for ‘pity sex’ acts self-deprecating, a more confident man might give him the slip in a bedding competition.
‘Sex has all kinds of utilities-it always has,’ sociologist Pepper Schwartz said. ‘People use what they’ve got, and sometimes, yes, women too use sexuality as a tool.’
My question is, what’s new about this? In a five-year study, two UT psychologists discovered that women have sex for a variety of reasons. An entire page of October’s Psychology Today is dedicated to how men and women remember their partners. Surprise: Men exaggerate while women are modest.
Stop the presses!
Writing about sex will always interest readers. In fact, a lot of you readers probably read this column because you saw the word ‘sex’ in the title, and that’s OK. It’s human nature to be interested in sex and sexual behavior.’
But it’s also human nature to be irregular, often conservative and sometimes spontaneous. So read up on sex for a number of reasons, but don’t use a book or article to dictate your mating game.
