The sex industry (pros­ti­tu­tion and porno­graphy) is a clear indic­a­tion that men’s desire to enjoy their own sexual arousal and orgasm cannot be satis­fied through their rela­tion­ships with women alone.

It’s easy for a woman to figure out that men want sex… but they also want to be loved and appre­ci­ated through their sexual relationship.

• Men’s sexual arousal is usually easy and imme­diate. Despite the evid­ence to the contrary they like to hope that a woman feels the same way about sex that they do.
• A man can feel that sex repres­ents the most important way of demon­strating that he loves his partner.
• At the same time, he perceives a woman’s enthu­siasm for sex with him as confirm­a­tion of her love for him.
• If a man wanted a loving, sexless rela­tion­ship with a woman he would never have left his mother.

Men need sex, both physiolo­gic­ally and emotion­ally, more than women. Men’s rela­tion­ships with others are not as emotion­ally intimate as women’s tend to be. So a man looks to the woman in his life for the emotional support he needs and sex is the mech­anism that men use to express their loving emotions.

“The failure of an unresponding sexual partner to provide these phys­ical or emotional stimuli may, on the other hand, do consid­er­able damage to the effect­ive­ness of the rela­tion­ship. … Such failure leads not only to disap­point­ment, frus­tra­tion, and a sense of defeat, but some­times to contrary emotional responses which become anger and rage.” (p372 Sexual beha­vior in the human female 1953)

Despite acknow­ledging this not incon­sid­er­able pres­sure on a woman to ‘respond’ to a man’s love-making, the male authors of Kinsey’s report never appear to consider the possib­ility that women might need to exag­gerate their sexual respons­ive­ness to meet male expectations.

How to pleasure a man

From early on, the sens­itive female lover learns how to pleasure a man, co-operating quite instinct­ively during inter­course by moving with the man’s rhythm.

She also learns how to play along with men’s sexual fantasies and acts out the part of the appre­ci­ative and responsive lover in order to help him reach orgasm. Some­times a woman may caress her lover’s body or make encour­aging noises to enhance the man’s arousal. Some women even exag­gerate their sexual arousal to the point of faking orgasm.

This explains why in the film ‘The Duchess’ (2008), Kiera Knightley playing the virgin bride, lies inert as her husband thrusts into her on their wedding night. Women only learn over time that responding as a lover encour­ages the male orgasm that nearly always ends sexual activity between a man and a woman. A woman appre­ci­ates that if she continues to be unmoved by her partner’s love-making, her man will feel that he is failing to please her or that she does not love him. By contrast, the mistress in the film has learnt to make the appre­ci­ative noises that sexu­ally exper­i­enced women often use as a male turn-on during sex.

“The fact is, we usually co-operate quite extens­ively during inter­course in order for the man to be able to orgasm. We move along with his rhythm, keep our legs apart and our bodies in posi­tions that make penet­ra­tion and thrusting possible, and almost never stop inter­course in midstream unless the man has had his orgasm.” (p107 The Hite Reports 1993)

Unless a woman learns how to orgasm during sex with a partner, the role of the female lover can become burden­some in long-term sexual rela­tion­ships. Even if a man never expli­citly acknow­ledges the assist­ance of a female lover, a woman has the reward of knowing that she has helped her partner find the sexual release that is so vital to his happi­ness. From a woman’s perspective, making effort to be more involved in ‘love-making’ reduces the sense of useless­ness that arises from parti­cip­ating in a sexual act in which (without the woman’s sexual arousal and orgasm) the woman is effect­ively merely a bystander.