Men’s sexual arousal is usually easy whereas women’s sexual arousal and orgasm are not auto­matic so unsur­pris­ingly sex tends to focus on male sexual arousal.

A man’s orgasm (since it is usually co-incident with ejac­u­la­tion) is crit­ical to repro­duc­tion and so it makes sense that men are motiv­ated by erot­i­cism and able to reach orgasm easily.

Female orgasm, on the other hand, is not required for a woman to conceive. Even the wonders of modern contra­cep­tion cannot change women’s sexu­ality from what Nature intended it to be.

“…men and women are mani­festly not the same. And nor are their responses to one another.” (p6 The Bluffer’s Guide to Men 1998)

The fact that women masturbate less frequently than men (if at all) is rarely acknow­ledged. Even when it is, women are reluctant to accept that this fact indic­ates men’s higher sex drive.

Despite the contrast with male sexu­ality, where boys learn to masturbate in their pre-teens and where men orgasm easily (most of the time) with a partner, many women cannot accept that men’s sex drive might be stronger. The male and female exper­i­ences are so different that it makes it very diffi­cult for men and women to under­stand the other gender’s perspective.

“We have pointed out that … the incid­ences of responding males, and the frequen­cies of response to the point of orgasm, reach their peak within three or four years after the onset of adoles­cence. On the other hand, … the maximum incid­ences of sexu­ally responding females are not approached until some time in the late twen­ties and in the thirties, although some indi­viduals become fully responsive at an earlier age.” (p714-715 Sexual beha­vior in the human female 1953)

Male sexual arousal is much more automatic

Unlike boys, girls do not exper­i­ence spon­tan­eous sexual arousal and so they have no similar natural motiv­a­tion to invest­igate how their genitals might respond to stim­u­la­tion. If she is to discover how her sexual arousal works, a girl has to make a much more CONSCIOUS decision to explore her enjoy­ment of erot­i­cism and develop her fantasies.

So while most young men are quite natur­ally motiv­ated to explore their own sexual arousal and to reach orgasm through an appre­ci­ation of erot­i­cism and genital stim­u­la­tion, most young women are, just as natur­ally, more focused on exploring their emotions and rela­tion­ships with others. As a consequence, men and women approach sex from very different perspectives.

“…many boys, and nearly all girls, are taught that masturb­a­tion is evil, … This is nonsense, of course; masturb­a­tion has several very positive values, espe­cially for women.… In child­hood and adoles­cence it teaches a girl to explore her body and not to be ashamed of its shape, its texture, and its surfaces. It teaches her, espe­cially, not to be ashamed of touching and playing with her genitals. It does more. It helps a girl become aware of her response to sexual stimuli and to recog­nize the stages of sexual arousal. And it enables a girl to develop her own sexu­ality – to know what she enjoys and what she dislikes – which is important if she is to be fulfilled sexu­ally later.” (p107 EveryMan 1980)

Relat­ively few women masturbate and even fewer learn how to apply their orgasm tech­niques to sex. A woman who does not masturbate cannot know that she reaches orgasm with a partner because she has no way of knowing what orgasm is.

This prob­ably also explains multiple orgasms. Unless a woman knows what orgasm feels like (from masturb­a­tion) she can easily confuse sensa­tions of sexual arousal (or thrills of muscle spasms) with orgasm. My body’s reac­tion after orgasm is similar to a man’s. I feel completely relaxed and I do not have the ability to arouse myself imme­di­ately due to clit­oral sensitivity.

If a couple has some under­standing of the different rewards that men and women obtain from sex, they can make sure that there is a balance of giving and receiving in their sex life. If we under­stand how our partner’s responses differ to our own, the modern couple can aspire to ‘quality’ sex within the context of a positive and mutu­ally supportive relationship.