Tabby’s Deep Dives 5

Great Sex from a Woman’s Point of View

How our sexual needs differ from men’s and how to work around it.

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There is plenty of opinion to be read around what men think of as good sex, but not so much about what women think of as good sex. The reason for this is because we are discouraged from talking about sexual pleasure to such an extent that if we do, we can find ourselves being challenged by other women. A powerful tool for understanding why this happens is sexual scripting theory, which was developed about 25 years ago and has provided an incredibly useful framework for describing sexual behaviors and attitudes ever since.

Sexual scripts can be helpful, but often they serve to reinforce power imbalances, and some of the worst offenders are taken for granted. One example is the script that men should initiate sex, and another is that women have not enjoyed sex if they have not had an orgasm. The pressures acting on us from the media are so great that in 2020, it is becoming difficult for many women to distinguish their natural feelings about sex from what society expects them to believe. No wonder a lot of us are screwed up.

To give an idea of how difficult this area can be to understand, a couple of studies have identified that women care so deeply about how satisfied their partners are about sex that it strongly influences their own level of satisfaction. In other words, if we judge that our men haven’t enjoyed themselves, then it reduces our own level of enjoyment.

Why we fake it

Now picture a couple where a guy who worries that he comes too soon is partnered with a woman who has difficulty achieving an orgasm. If he is scripted to believe she must come in order for her to have enjoyed sex and for him to be a successful lover, then they are in a mess. This script is so common that I have a friend who is contending with it right now. She tells me that her enjoyment of sex has been spoiled almost entirely because she has to work out when her man is going to come so that she can fake her orgasm a couple of minutes before. He won’t discuss the situation, because ever since leaving college as a sporting superstar, part of his confidence has rested on his reputation as a stud. The crying shame of it all is that according to her they are having perfectly good sex, and he takes about 7–8 minutes from penetration to orgasm, which is fine, but neither of them are able to enjoy it.

The trouble with research into sex is that numbers are much easier to measure than feelings and so investigations into this area have traditionally relied on tools like Likert scales (think, ‘strongly agree’, ‘agree’, ‘somewhat agree’, ‘neither agree nor disagree’, etc., and you are an expert on Likert). Likert scales make it trivially easy to gather information on how often women come, and how many times a week couples have sex, but researchers have few tools suitable for investigating how women feel about sex. Emotions are diaphanous things, and measuring them is like trying to quantify how erotic the view of an erect nipple is under a layer of sheer nylon.

How much of a problem is this? There is plenty of research in the US to suggest that scripting is a huge issue for women —for a start, lots of us are having sex when we don’t want to. Why? To meet the demands of scripts that we must please our partners, or to satisfy the ‘men have a biological need to come’ script, or to meet the ‘men need more sex than women’ script. Sex should be a shared experience, but very often women allow the balance to drift away from them.

Different expectations of good sex

The problem with a lot of the scripts I have mentioned above is that they are gender binary, and being raised within this framework causes men and women to grow up with different expectations of sex, the catch being that these expectations have been loaded against women. However, teasing apart the tangled web we have created, strong themes emerge which are independent of scripts: women enjoy sex best in the context of a good relationship, and in addition to valuing sex for pleasure and arousal, they enjoy it as an opportunity to share feelings, bonding, romance, and creativity.

I remember the first time I discovered this line of research — I immediately thought of my addiction to dreadful romantic fiction, and how once you stripped away all of the scripts with which the writing was overlaid, it broadly spoke to the values listed just above.

The dimensions of women’s enjoyment of sex were investigated in a paper published a few years ago, and since I have never seen a better summary I will repeat them here:

1. Emotional connection and relationship satisfaction (including wanting their partner to feel good).

2. Being in the mood, wanting sex (desire), being aroused, physical pleasure and orgasm.

3. Comfort and naturalness.

4. Control over sexual scripts.

I wouldn’t disagree with the ranking of any of those, and I would point out to any male readers that they are in the order in which the women in the group ranked them. More than half the women rated good sex mostly in terms of line 1, emotional connection and relationship satisfaction, with less than half putting physical pleasure and orgasm above it. Some of the women didn’t even rate physical pleasure and orgasm as being important. In other words, while we care about sex, we care more about sex being caring.

Comfort and naturalness

Comfort and naturalness is all about the need that women have to feel calm and relaxed in order to appreciate sex. For many of us, sex is highly contextual, and while there are some women who enjoy nothing better than casual sex with a stranger in a hallway, the majority of us are completely the opposite — we enjoy sex best as part of a flow of events. Having a lovely day with a caring and supportive partner, sharing a meal, and watching a movie cuddled up will very often lead us naturally into really enjoyable sex. Orgasm as a by-product of that sort of flow is much more satisfying to us than having it happen any other way, mainly because the orgasm is in the context of great sex.

Line 4 is once again about the dreaded scripts. Whether women understand scripts or not, we find sex much less enjoyable when we are pressured into it, and also when we feel that we are expected to behave a certain way during sex. We don’t tend to find sex as enjoyable when we have to be passive, or when we are dominated, nor do we when we are enacting fantasies, nor when attempts are made to ‘spice things up’ over which we do not have control. Yet with partners who are enlightened enough, many of us can get a tremendous amount of enjoyment out script-free sex. What a novel thought.

Control can occasionally work the other way too, and women who are used to being in control — which is many, if not most of us — can find occasionally find it highly erotic to have sex in a situation which we know to be safe, and in which we can give up control to a partner whom we trust absolutely. The reason this situation can be erotic is because we spend so much of our time prioritizing caring for others over ourselves that we get an almost (if not actually) guilty burst of pleasure when the roles are reversed. However, in my experience, and that of my friends, opportunities like this are rare, and to be honest, many of us value nothing higher than sex that goes with the flow, as described above.

Sexual pleasure

If there is a piece of research that desperately needs to be done, it is an exploration of what proportion of men see sex as a partnership, and of what mechanisms they use to judge their partner’s pleasure. I have actually been asked, ‘Was it good for you?’ a few times, and have been stunned into silence on every occasion. It took a while to dawn on me that while men have an obvious end point for whether sex worked for them, a lot of them were absolutely hopeless at reading the signs in me, other than whether I had come or not.

It is fabulous that men have discovered that the female orgasm exists, but a lot of them still don’t understand it. My views on what constitutes awesome sex tend to discount orgasms, because I come really easily, and usually have full on majors, but they don’t tell the entire story of whether a romp in bed worked for me. If I was one of the third of women who rarely or never have orgasms, then counting my orgasms wouldn’t tell the story of what worked in bed for me at all, could it? So there are other talents that should form part of the toolkit of anyone who aspires to become a rewarding lover of women, but those talents will need to be tailored to every woman — because we are all different. One of those talents is understanding the four dimensions of sex I highlighted above, because if, as a lover, you have a comprehensive grip on those, you are half way there. Another is learning to read your lover’s responses — which is rewarding in itself, there being few stories more interesting to read than a thoroughly aroused woman.

Good sex

As a friend memorably pointed out, having sex when you are a woman can feel like an uphill battle in which the odds are completely stacked against you, but it doesn’t need to feel like a fight at all. One of the keys lies in understanding what your priorities are in sex, and where your choices fit in the four categories described above. This is difficult for many of us, because we are so used to our own wishes being controlled by scripts that it can be hard to accept that instead of being complex sexual beings, we are perfectly ordinary ones who are bound by a complex set of rules.

A lot of doors can be opened by working out what scripts are driving your partner. If he is a ultra-traditionalist male who pays little attention to the emotional connection and relationship needs that you major on, you have an opening to explore there. Reaching back to one of the earlier articles in this series, some women have such highly developed ‘brakes’ relating to sexual activity that our ‘being in the mood’ agenda can appear to be unreachable, especially if we have to care for children, hold down a job, and run a house. But, there are circumstances in which we can be got there, particularly by someone who takes a share in looking after the kids, listening sympathetically to us bitching about work, and helping around the house.

In some cases, our experience of sex can be impacted by factors outside of our private lives. It is quite common, for example, for stress to cause many women to close down sexually, while it can have the opposite effect on others, who value contextual sex in those circumstances on the comfort and naturalness agenda. In these examples lie clues to why our scripts can be inappropriate, because they are fixed, whilst we are diverse and our life circumstances are ever changeable.

My personality has not altered over the past decade, but the arc of my sex life has changed completely. I remain an attractive, but assertive woman, with a postgraduate education and a business to run. In bed though, I have gone from being subjected to scripts to being in charge of them, and if I don’t care for the selection on offer, I have learned how to write new ones in cooperation with my partners. If you read Complications, the new scripts have been highly unconventional, but they have most definitely worked for all of us.

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