Why Women Have Sex (8 page)

Sexologist John Money believed that we all have a unique template of what we find attractive, a “love map” as he called it. Our “love map” is what guides us to find our ideal mate or, as some like to believe, our “soul mate.” According to Money, love maps are formed starting in childhood and are based on our experiences and people we knew early in our developmental past. The nice blond grocery store clerk who always gave you candy—check in the blond hair column. The way your beloved father was always the one holding the floor and telling stories—check in the extraversion column. That miserable old bearded doctor who never
smiled and always poked you with a needle—forget facial hair and maybe even doctors. In a sense, these childhood experiences condition us to find certain features attractive or unattractive.

Jim Pfaus, a biopsychologist from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, has shown that you can even condition sexual preferences in rats—who do not tend to pair-bond—by associating a certain partner feature with a satisfying sexual experience. Perhaps to the envy of some human women, female rats display complex behaviors that allow them to control virtually all aspects of sexual interaction with male rats. They have a particular preference for controlling the pace of copulation, which releases opiates in the brain—a reward mechanism. By pairing paced copulation with an almond scent, Pfaus and his research team were able to condition in the female rats a preference for almond-scented sexual partners. After a period of time, even when the female rats were free to copulate with any male rat, they sought out almond-scented mates.

Some researchers believe that all information gathered while growing up is imprinted in the brain’s circuitry by the time of adolescence. While it would be impossible to find a perfect match on all counts, when a sufficient number of “hits” line up with your love map, then attraction blooms. In addition to explaining the wide and subtle variability among women in what they find attractive in mates, love maps can also explain why women tend to date the same “type” of partner over and over again.

The underlying motivations for what women find sexually attractive remain partly subterranean, out of conscious awareness. Women are drawn to the scents and sounds of sexiness. But they do not always know why some men excite their senses while others turn them cold. Women know they find the faces and bodies of some men hot and others not, but remain largely unaware of the hidden adaptive logic behind their desires. Their attraction toward more masculine men at ovulation and less masculine men when not ovulating reveals a secret rhythm of mating wisdom, even though most women remain unaware of these monthly adaptive shifts.

Electric flesh-arrows . . . traversing the body. A rainbow of color strikes the eyelids. A foam of music falls over the ears. It is the gong of the orgasm.

—Anaïs Nin (1903–1977)

 

Without a doubt, Viagra-like drugs create sexual arousal more easily in men than in women. But, as we shall see, it has nothing to do with women needing love to get pleasure out of sex. Many women in our study described situations where they had sex simply because it feels good:

I have in the past had sexual relationships with men who were strictly friends just for the pleasure of having sex. In terms of emotions, there really weren’t any except the fear that the guy might end up wanting more.

—heterosexual woman, age 27

And sometimes pleasure is their top priority:

Sex for pleasure is the main motivation for most of my experiences. I cannot imagine going into a sexual situation without expecting a pleasurable experience, it wouldn’t make sense to me.

—predominantly heterosexual woman, age 36

In fact, of all the possible reasons women gave for having sex, “I wanted to experience the physical pleasure” and “It feels good” were two of their top three. These were also two of the top three reasons for having sex endorsed by men.

So, is it true that men are more pleasure-driven to have sex than are women? Not according to the women quoted in this chapter. Women of all ages described deriving sexual pleasure from genital and psychological changes that occur during sexual arousal and orgasm, and from receiving sensual touch. In this chapter we explore in depth what happens to a woman’s mind and body that makes having sex feel good.

I was in a nonsexual relationship for thirteen years. After that ended, I needed human touch to be reminded that I could still feel. Sex and physical pleasure helped me feel human again.

—heterosexual woman, age 42

The skin is a woman’s largest sexual organ. It comprises an intricate system of nerves sensitive to changes in temperature, touch, and texture. The areas of the skin that are highly responsive to stimulation are often referred to as the “erogenous zones” because they lead to sexual arousal and pleasure. The most commonly cited erogenous zones are the neck, earlobes, mouth, lips, breasts and nipples, genitalia, buttocks, inner thighs, anus, backs of the knees, fingers, and toes. For some women, however, virtually any part of the body can be an erogenous zone. Regardless of which area of the body is involved, sexual pleasure can be intensified by the sensation of having one’s skin touched, whether from the slightest tickle and tease of a feather being brushed across a cheek, from the warmth and tenderness of sensing bare skin next to bare skin, or from the giving or getting of a massage:

Sex encompasses a lot of physical pleasure. Just the touching of one body to another is pleasurable, similar to getting a massage or receiving a hug. Kissing brings feelings of warmth and arousal, and genital contact and/or vaginal penetration brings upon orgasm. The combination of all of these factors makes sex more desirable to me than masturbation.

—heterosexual woman, age 28

A woman’s nipples and areola, the colored area surrounding the nipple, are supplied with numerous nerve endings that make them especially sensitive to touch. When a woman’s breasts are stimulated through touch or massage, blood flows into the breast tissue and tiny muscle fibers enable the nipples to become erect. This can cause the nipples and areola to become even more sensitive, and can add to a woman’s overall experience of sexual arousal:

Bumping into him again was perfect timing. . . . I was between regulars, so was he. . . . All I could imagine was the feel of his hands on my body, in my body . . . the stretch, the filling sensation as his cock entered me. . . . I asked him if he’d like to come over for a couple of hours . . . I could feel the moisture seeping into my panties . . . the clenching deep in my groin . . . the sensation of my nipples rubbing against my shirt. . . . Sex is for pleasure, he was a sure thing. It was as simple and as complex as “I want you.”

—heterosexual woman, age 41

The sensitivity of breasts varies greatly between women. In a study conducted in the Meston Sexual Psychophysiology Lab, 82 percent of the college women surveyed said that nipple or breast stimulation either caused or increased their sexual arousal. In comparison, only a little over 50 percent of men find nipple stimulation sexually arousing. For 7 percent of the women (and the men), however, stimulation had the opposite effect—it decreased their sexual pleasure. Some women have nipples that become so sensitive during sexual arousal that even the slightest amount of touch can be unpleasant or painful. One factor is breast size: Smaller breasts are often more sensitive than larger ones. Breast sensitivity can
also change over time in a woman as a result of hormonal changes during the menstrual cycle, pregnancy, and menopause. As a woman ages, her breast sensitivity tends to decline. That women more than men find nipple stimulation a sexual turn-on is likely related to the fact that starting at puberty, the sensitivity of all areas of a woman’s breast becomes significantly greater than that of a man’s.

Does it matter who the nipple stimulator is? Not really. Although some women find breast stimulation sexually pleasurable only if it is done by their partners, most women who enjoy the sensations find stimulating their own breasts, or even having their breasts or nipples sprayed by water in the shower or brushed by clothing, to be highly pleasurable.

Of course, while the skin may be the largest sexual organ, it isn’t generally viewed as the focal one. And with feelings of sexual arousal, changes occur in the genitals that can create all sorts of pleasurable sensations for women.

When a woman is sexually aroused, blood travels to the pelvic areas of the vagina, labia, and clitoris, and to other regions such as the urethra, uterus, and possibly even the fallopian tubes and ovaries. This pooling of blood in genital tissue is referred to as “genital vasocongestion.” In a nonsexually aroused state, a woman’s vagina is the approximate size and shape of a cooked cannelloni noodle—without the filling. It is four inches long, with ridged, horizontally wrinkled walls. As vasocongestion occurs, the inner two-thirds of the vagina expands considerably in length and width, allowing for the accommodation of a penis or another stimulating object. The upper part of the vagina balloons out, the uterus elevates, and the lower portion of the vagina swells. These changes decrease the vaginal opening and ease the vagina’s ability to hang on to any object that enters it. The inner labia, or lips, double or triple in thickness as they fill with blood, which in turn pushes apart the outer labia to make the vaginal entry more accessible. As sexual arousal increases, the clitoris increases in length and diameter and hides under its hood to protect itself from too much stimulation.

Vasocongestion also leads to vaginal lubrication. Most people think
that vaginal lubrication comes from a gland inside the vagina, but it does not. When a woman is physically sexually aroused, the pressure of blood engorgement in her vaginal tissue actually squeezes lubrication into the vagina. Even when a woman is not sexually aroused, tiny droplets of lubrication slowly seep through her vaginal walls to keep the sides of the “noodle” from sticking together. Consequently, vaginal engorgement and lubrication are closely related, and both are signs of genital sexual arousal in women. Some researchers have measured genital arousal by having women insert a tampon when they are not sexually aroused, and then removing and weighing the tampon after they experience sexual arousal. How much more the tampon weighs after arousal demonstrates how much vaginal fluid has been absorbed by the tampon. This is a clever but not terribly accurate way of measuring vaginal lubrication. More often, genital arousal in women is measured in the laboratory with a device called a
vaginal photoplethysmograph
. The device, which looks like a clear plastic tampon, contains a photosensitive cell that measures, from within the vagina, the amount of light reflected from vaginal walls, which indicates the amount of vasocongestion.