A young and sexy woman complained about the male atten­tion she got every time she left the hostel on 42^nd Street, Manhattan, dressed in her high heels and low cleavage. Yes, well… It is relat­ively easy for a woman to attract a man’s atten­tion by enhan­cing her looks.

It is more diffi­cult for her to cash in on the advantage by enjoying orgasm during sex. Women are not auto­mat­ic­ally aroused as men are and so do not have the same sex drive to orgasm during sex. A woman is rarely seeking sex in the sense that a man does.

Natur­ally a man assumes that a woman who has made herself attractive must be inter­ested in sex. Since men never put on make-up or dress provoc­at­ively we might think they are never inter­ested in sex.

Of course this does not follow. The sexes have comple­mentary roles. Women attract atten­tion and then men make an advance. So women’s bodies are a sexual commodity in a way that men’s rarely are.

Men want control in sexual situ­ations because (1) inter­course relies on their sexual arousal and (2) their perform­ance (ability to orgasm and ejac­u­late) ulti­mately leads to reproduction.

A man selects a woman he finds attractive (which explains why some women encourage male atten­tion) but a woman chooses the man she wants. These beha­viours are funda­mental to our dating and mating rituals. Rich men prefer young and sexy women over successful women. So our hetero­sexual society tends to judge women by their looks before their achievements.

Women have lower sexual desire

One year at college I lived with six other female students. Two of them were always enter­taining young men in their rooms. The rest of us assumed that they must have been having sex with at least some of the stream of men who came through our flat. My conclu­sion was not that they achieved sexual satis­fac­tion with these men but that they enjoyed being so popular.

Most women need a stable rela­tion­ship in which there is a high degree of trust and good commu­nic­a­tion if they are to orgasm during sex. Young women often lack confid­ence and being promis­cuous is an easy way to be popular, with men at least.

“Although it is commonly believed that most males prefer sexual rela­tion­ships with distinctly younger part­ners, and although most males are attracted by the phys­ical charms of younger females, data which we have on our histories show that many of them actu­ally prefer to have coitus with middle-aged or older females. …

Older females … often have a better know­ledge of sexual tech­niques.” (p417 Sexual beha­vior in the human female 1953)

Women’s diffi­culties with sexual arousal and orgasm are often blamed on low libido but women natur­ally feel lower sexual desire than men as evid­enced by:

• our enthu­siasm for erot­i­cism, either visual porno­graphy or erotic stories;
• our will­ing­ness to indulge in sexual fantasies;
• the pleasure we obtain from admiring the sexual attrib­utes of the opposite sex;
• how frequently we masturbate and our motiv­a­tion to initiate sex with a partner.

The oldest profes­sion (pros­ti­tu­tion) says it all: a relat­ively few women provide sex for many more men. Of course the women are shamed for making money out of men’s need. Yet men often compensate women finan­cially for sex — not an indic­a­tion of equal pleasure. Even in our supposedly liber­ated times over 90% of the Internet provides some form of sex for men.

Inev­it­ably there must be some women who are sexu­ally insa­ti­able and some men who are unmoved by sex but these indi­viduals do not represent the ‘norm’. Most women never talk about lost sexual oppor­tun­ities. They talk about commit­ment and trust. This enormous gap between the sexes means that most women remain terribly naïve about men’s sexual desire.