The film ‘The Way We Were’ (1973) stars Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford (the Brad Pitt of my mother’s generation).

She’s the young woman from a humble back­ground driven by polit­ical ideals; he’s the young man from a priv­ileged family who has no ideals. Of course she’s a virgin and she ends up one night with him in the bed naked. He’s so drunk that he’s just thrown up in her bathroom.

Never­the­less she hopes that he will notice a naked woman lying next to him: she undresses and gets in beside him. Well we’re watching movies so, of course, he revives enough to climb on top of her.

It’s not clear what happens but enough for her to ask after­wards: “You realise it’s me, Katie?” Her main concern is not orgasm but that she should matter to him; that he should care about her as a person.

Instinct­ively we do not expect a woman to enjoy an equal sexual pleasure from sex. Neither do we expect her to approach sex insisting on her own orgasm before his. Nature has designed women to be more co-operative and accom­mod­ating than men.

When a woman has sex with a man she marvels at his ability to perform sexu­ally. We have no similar exper­i­ence. A man’s sexual passion for a woman can be intox­ic­ating. The marvel of sex, for a woman, is not her own arousal but that of her man.

Male sexu­ality and male sexual desire (fuelled by an appre­ci­ation of the female form) is the true glory of hetero­sexual sex.

“But, by and large, coitus in marriage occurs with a regu­larity which is not equalled by any other type of sexual activity in the female, … This suggests that it is the male rather than the female partner who is chiefly respons­ible for the regu­larity of marital coitus.” (p350 Sexual beha­vior in the human female 1953)

The woman’s sexual arousal is a different and less romantic story. Why do bridal magazines rarely discuss a woman’s aspir­a­tions for her sexual rela­tion­ship? Of course women think that to keep a man happy they must simply be attractive. So they diet, they elim­inate body hair and they put on make-up. The fact is that most men want a woman to be more adven­turous in bed.

Men feel guilty if it is suggested that women get less out of sex than they do. They shouldn’t. Women enjoy their chil­dren; men enjoy sex. The trav­esty of the sexual revolu­tion was that it set false hopes for women with sexual aspir­a­tions. Women cannot be men any more than men can be women. Neither can women hope to exper­i­ence sex the exact same way a man exper­i­ences it.

Sex is a gift that a woman offers to a man she loves. She offers her body for his pleasure without neces­sarily hoping for anything in return except his devo­tion to her. In the end, all any of us want is to be loved and appre­ci­ated — just in different ways.

Boys grow up trying to impress their fathers. Perhaps they don’t realise that girls are never able to impress men in the same way. When a woman offers a man sex, she can enjoy being the object of his sexual desire, the key to his sexual arousal and orgasm. The woman hopes for his ador­a­tion of her beauty and his appre­ci­ation of her ability to arouse him sexually. 

That sexual adula­tion is important because a woman worries that if it’s not there then he may be devoted to someone else. Sex is the baro­meter of the rela­tion­ship but more import­antly the sign of the man’s commit­ment to the woman and her goals for family. Sadly this novelty wears off and male sexual arousal is not so auto­matic after years with the same partner.

The couple’s sexual rela­tion­ship comes under pres­sure because men look to sex for their emotional sense of well-being. I have certainly ques­tioned why I have needed to make effort when I have less to gain directly from sex. It’s important for men to realise that over the longer-term they need to over­come their inhib­i­tions and commu­nicate over sex and rela­tion­ship issues.