Do Women Enjoy Sex?

Posted by Jew from Jersey
5 May 2022

Men have all the genetic complexity women have, plus the genetic traits found only on the Y-chromosome. So you might expect men to be more complicated than women. But of course, the opposite is true. Men’s enjoyment of sex is particularly simple. It consists of the physical orgasm, preceded by a series of weaker but similar impulses that lead up to it. All women have the physical capacity to experience sexual enjoyment in this same way. In fact, they may be capable of experiencing it even more frequently and intensely than men. But most sex women have is probably not enjoyable to them at all, or at least is not enjoyed by them in this way.

If I had to guess, I’d say few women enjoy even half of the sex they have, most women far less than that, and some not at all. It is just something they do to get along in life, like taking out the garbage or paying taxes. For the most part, they don’t mind too much, but occasionally it can become unbearable. Prostitutes, famously, tend to hate their customers. Even married women and women in stable relationships may eventually come to feel, especially after they’ve had children, that enough is enough, they’ve paid their dues, and their husbands should just back off and leave them in peace. Women employed in certain professions may find it acceptable for a while to trade unwanted sex for career advancement, but may later grow to resent this, either because they’ve already attained their career goals or because they’ve despaired of ever attaining them.

But even when women truly do enjoy sex, I don’t think it’s usually in the way men do, in terms of an orgasm. I don’t think men can ever be certain of whether a woman has had an orgasm or not. The movie When Harry Met Sally got that one right. Husbands who say “My wife always has an orgasm when we have sex” are clueless. I suspect the average age at which women first have an orgasm is much later in life than people usually assume. I also suspect many women never have one. But even when women do have orgasms, it’s bound to not be as central to their experience of sex as it is for men. We’ve all heard that women may experience multiple orgasms and longer and more intense orgasms than men, but the women with the most numerous and awesome orgasms may not necessarily be the most sexually fulfilled women. I think women’s entire frame of reference for enjoying sex is completely different than men’s.

For a man, sexual pleasure is much the same from the moment he first discovers it as a pimply schoolboy to the day he dies, possibly a well-respected patriarch. He may no longer be able to do it as often as in his youth, but in bed, he’s still the same schoolboy. It takes men a lifetime to learn something about how to attract women, but it only takes them the first five minutes of adolescence to learn pretty much everything about how to derive their own pleasure. For women, it’s the other way around. They learn how to attract men in the first five minutes of adolescence, and then spend a lifetime learning how to derive their own pleasure.

A woman’s discovery of sex in her youth is a social one, it is what makes her from a girl into a woman. Boys spend their entire lives wondering if they’re men, but a girl knows she’s a woman the moment she can turn heads and influence the behavior of socially prominent adult males. A girl who just yesterday was ignored as a child is today treated like royalty by every kind of male she knows. It’s like she’s a celebrity being hounded by paparazzi, and she hasn’t even done anything in her life. And she knows she could command similar attention from any kind of man. No matter how rich and famous, he too could not help but look at her “that way” and soon be maneuvered into paying tribute to her in other ways.

This is why adolescent girls often ignore boys their own age. This is sometimes put down to gender differences in “emotional maturity.” But what it comes down to is women parlaying their sexual capital into social capital via men who have it. And few young men have much social capital. Young prostitutes, especially in the high-end market, may even find prostitution fun as long as their customers are of an increasingly impressive social caliber. A nineteen-year-old call girl whose clientele is ramping up to include politicians and CEOs does not tend to experience her work as degrading. The job only becomes a humiliation as the quality of clients stagnates or declines. A smart pimp or madam will spot the “mean” look a young prostitute is starting to develop and immediately demote her to a lesser tier of clientele before the brand is damaged. Some women even find working in porn “empowering” until they have to work with less attractive men at which point they start to develop a “burnt out” look. Women in entertainment and other “glamorous” industries frequently use their sexual charms to obtain sexual favors. As long as they can solicit such favors from men they find sufficiently impressive, they may actually see themselves as the ones who have the upper hand and see the men as the ones being manipulated. It is only when they must seek favors from lesser men that they tend to experience the industry as demeaning to women. In fact, the confound in women’s minds between sexual power and social power is often so strong that even women in completely non-sexual and non-glamorous lines of work will tend to find their own careers less rewarding when the quality of men in their dating life eventually deteriorates. This can be true even if the men they are dating have no connection whatsoever to their professional lives.

The initial thrill of social power is what women first experience as sexual enjoyment, in bed and out. Some women will use this power more wisely than others, but it is for all an awesome power that cannot help but produce immense excitement and satisfaction in the one wielding it. Perhaps it is more pleasurable than an orgasm. Most men will never find out because they will never know the extent of it that even the plainest of women has in her youth.

It is doubtful if many women have an orgasm during their first years of sexual experience. And even if they did, they’d hardly notice. They are experiencing the excitement of being able to arouse and satisfy men who to them seem larger than life. It makes them feel special, it puts one over on their girlfriends, or it will allow them to secure commitment or social prestige from the men. This can be thrilling, even if they experience little or no intimacy or any physical pleasure of their own. There may be a long learning curve before it ever occurs to them that there is anything more to sex than this.

Occasionally, women will regret sex with men they thought were famous or otherwise impressive, but later turn out not to be. The sex that seemed exciting at the time appears disgusting in retrospect once a woman comes to believe the man is not who she thought he was. So it goes without saying that the thrill of sex wears off once a woman lives with a man long enough to see him worn down by the travails of life. This is why women often stop enjoying sex soon after marriage, but then magically enjoy it again when they meet someone new. Men seldom tire of sex with their wives in this way because to them the wife is still the same physical wife and sex is still the same physical sex. Also, sex is so hard for most men to obtain that they’re usually cringingly grateful for any crumbs they’re given.

When a woman gets married, she’s expected to give up her amazing powers cold turkey. It is brutally difficult for a young woman, the apple of all men’s eyes, to transition into being a wife who must abjure such attentions. In the past, the wedding ceremony was supposed to help in this transition. The entire community assembled to close the door on the bride who would now be alone with her husband. This was the other bookend to the debutante’s “coming out” party, where she was first introduced to society as a marriage prospect. Her courtship season was expected to be exciting but short, to conclude before “the bloom was off the rose” and before her reputation suffered any loss. The “coming out” ball was also a social event that introduced her to the type of men she might realistically expect to marry if she acted in a tactful and timely manner. Sexual interest from men outside this circle might be exciting, but it would not lead to marriage, and would in fact damage her prospects. Marriage was then a happy conclusion to a successful and short courting season, whence began a lifetime of discreet and intimate married sex that constituted the bulk of a woman’s sexual education and sustenance. It was also the beginning of her life as a mother, and her years of parenthood would also be her peak sexual years, with the man who was also the father of her children.

A number of factors have severely impacted the significance of marriage, in particular the fact that women can now drag out their “courtship” season to include as much of their adult lives as possible and in particular most or all of their peak sexual years. They no longer restrict themselves to men who realistically might marry them and they don’t worry much about reputation. And it is this that now constitutes the bulk of a woman’s sexual education and sustenance. If only women could extend their fertility and youthful looks forever, they would spend their entire lives in an endless quest for more stimulating beaux. In the absence of any restrictions or expectations, marriage is forced on a woman only by her own fear that she will soon no longer be able to have children, or no longer be able to attract the kind of men she’s grown accustomed to. Thus marriage is now no longer a cornerstone or even a capstone in a woman’s life, but a tombstone, the swan song of sex. The man who marries her is the undertaker and her children the pallbearers.

If a woman thinks of sex as something you do when you’re young to turn heads and make other women envious, she will experience motherhood as something completely antithetical to it. This uncomfortable conflict is sometimes blamed on “religion” or on “society” supposedly telling women to be mothers and that sex is dirty. But in traditional religious communities there is probably less of a perceived contradiction between motherhood and sexuality. Ironically, it is the modern secular world that has disconnected the two. Here, women are encouraged to pursue sex in the manner of adolescents well into their adult lives, leaving marriage and childbearing to the latest possible moment. The result is that sex and singleness become associated with youth, while marriage and having children are what you do when you’re too old. Married women can now often be seen engaging in increasingly embarrassing behaviors, often in groups, trying desperately to regain some of the exciting sexual attention of their youth. It is clear that this is the only kind of sexual enjoyment they know or are capable of.

This view of marriage and motherhood as the opposites of sex can lead women to resent their husbands and also to compensate by seeking greater intimacy with their children. The husband will find that the children have replaced him as the object of his wife’s desires. The wife will transfer her rivalry with her girlfriends from the husband sphere to the children sphere. And the children will never really be allowed to grow up. Their mother will not discipline them, will not let her husband discipline them, and will not form a bond with her husband against them. To do that would be to treat them as one’s children and she doesn’t really want them as children, she wants them as lifelong companions. She dreads the day they no longer need her because she does not see her husband as her lifelong companion and has no real bond with him. She is essentially a single mother with a ring and a bill-paying roommate who can be trotted out in a tux for social occasions. Some women even claim that it is somehow impossible to even think of sex when you’re a mom. But this runs counter to all of human history. It is in fact a very recent invention intended to keep unwanted husbands at arm’s length. The husband is not only not desired, he is the hated gatekeeper of her unsexy mommyhood. She has lost her youthful looks that once could turn so many highly-placed male heads. She is in fact in mourning for the men whose heads her looks used to turn. The fact that her husband still finds her attractive can never be a replacement for this loss. Her husband’s desire is like an insult added to the injury. It is like a consolation prize for someone who used to win blue ribbons.

When a woman develops an aversion to sex with her husband, he will embark on a wild goose chase to find the cause of the “problem.” His wife will encourage this because it helps distract attention from the fact that her desire is just fine, it is just invested elsewhere: either in the children, in some kind of fantasy life, or actually with other men. Men have trouble understanding this because their own sex drives are always in the open. Husbands are often shocked at what their “asexual” wives get up to with other men. Pickup artists say married women are actually easier than single women because a married woman always compares you to her husband. The only way the husband will ever get his wife interested in him again is if he is on the verge of leaving her. Only in that moment does he have a chance to seem exciting again.

Learning to enjoy sex in a long-term marriage with a husband who is not rich and famous and endlessly exciting is a task that many women may simply not be capable of. And wives of the rich and famous get bored, too. It requires that a woman make common cause with her husband in the face of everything, including her own children. It requires that she take her husband’s opinions seriously. It requires that she invest her social efforts on his behalf against the world, and not on her own behalf against other women. Finally, it requires that she see sex as something her husband does for her to affirm her femininity, not something she does for him to affirm her popularity.

A wise and lucky woman will learn to derive pleasure in the new world she creates with her husband, and from her children and grandchildren as they grow up. Physical orgasms will become more important to her and her husband will continue to see her as she was in her youth. But even then, her pleasure may be meager compared to what she enjoyed in the years of the first flowering of her womanhood... Never again will she wield the sexual equivalent of nuclear weapons over the entire male population. By the second half of her natural life, she will be seen by most men as she herself has always seen most men, invisible.