Most women get great sensual pleasure from touching and being touched. Women find body contact and closeness are more important to them than they are to men, but they are not substitutes for orgasms. Women want both physical and emotional closeness and orgasms.
Many Western men are unable to enjoy touching, body contact, and caressing, and this is largely a fault of our upbringing. Small boys are taught that to show emotions, to show affection, and to enjoy touching other people diminishes their male identity. Real men – red-blooded masculine men – are taught to hide their emotions. It is weak and feminine to cry. Affection can only be shown in private: to show open affection makes a man’s masculinity suspect. Touching is something only women and homosexuals do. By contrast, girls are taught that women can show emotions: they can cry, they can show open affection, and they may touch people without diminishing their femininity.
It is a sad commentary on our culture that this is so. There is no biological difference between men and women in the need for bodily contact – but men are trained to ignore the important psychological values of touching and this can reduce their sexual enjoyment.
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Something must be wrong with the sexual relationships between men and women judged by the number of articles on ‘How to become a better lover’ which appear in magazines, or by the increasingly large number of sex manuals which are in circulation. Even more cogent to the belief that all is not well with our sexual relationships is the information that sexual problems occur in over 50 per cent of marriages. In many instances the problem is minor and easily solved, but in some the problem, and a lack of communication between the partners, can destroy the relationship, leaving bitterness and misery instead of love. This statement is supported by a recent survey of 100 middle-class marriages in the U.S.A. by Ellen Frank. All the couples believed their marriages to be happy yet, on questioning, nearly half the women had difficulty in reaching orgasm and more than half had difficulty in becoming sexually excited or, once aroused, of maintaining their excitement. The investigators found that more wives than husbands complained about sexual problems, and the women had far more sexual ‘difficulties’ than the men: 47 per cent found it difficult to relax, 35 per cent said that they were ‘disinterested’ sexually, 38 per cent said there was ‘too little foreplay before intercourse’, and 31 per cent said that their partner often chose ‘an inconvenient time’.
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The principal stimuli in this phase are those of touch and smell. Stimulated, initially, by the looks of the sexual partner, by his or her voice, in the plateau phase touch becomes as important. Stimulation occurs from the touch of the partner’s lips, the exploring tongue, the feel of a man’s penis and scrotum, or a woman’s breasts, body, and soft vulva. These stimuli enhance sexual desire, lifting each partner into the later plateau phase when the desire to reach orgasm becomes intense. The term ‘plateau’ is perhaps a misnomer, for sexual tension increases during this time; but a man who is a considerate lover and finds that his partner is not so aroused as he is will want to help her to reach his degree of sexual tension, and will consciously ‘hold back’, so that he remains highly sexually stimulated in the plateau phase, but does not enter the orgasmic phase too quickly.
The duration of the plateau phase depends on the urgency and strength of the sexual desire, on the effectiveness of the sexual stimuli given by the partner, and on the quality of the communication between the partners. If a woman is slow to reach the orgasmic phase, but does not tell her partner that she needs additional stimuli to bring her to orgasm, she can only blame herself, or her inhibitions, should her man reach orgasm and fall sleepily into the phase of resolution, without having helped her to reach orgasm to relieve her sexual arousal.
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The limbic area is closely connected with the hypothalamus where the gonadotrophin hormones originate. These induce the testes to produce spermatozoa and the sex hormones found’in men, and the ovaries to secrete the sex hormones which control the menstrual cycle in women.
It also seems, from experiments on male squirrel monkeys, that the messages from the sex centre in the limbic area of the brain which help the animal get an erection and have an orgasm are funnelled through the hypothalamus to the brain stem. It is probable that this also happens in man. A treatment of male sex offenders, practised at one time in Germany, was to implant an electrode in the region of the front part of the hypothalamus and to destroy the nerve pathways by passing an electric current through the electrode. The eleven men treated in this way by Dr Roder lost all their sexual drive after the operation, although they were unchanged in every other way and continued to secrete the male sex hormone, testosterone.
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The American surveys also revealed that adolescents in different social classes had different attitudes towards sexuality. Among young men in lower socio-economic groups there was greater sex segregation in peer groups. Masturbation occurred less often and started later, as it was considered ‘unmanly’. Sexual intercourse started earlier than in the higher socio-economic groups. It was often casual and exploited the women, the men being sexual adventurers who avoided any romantic attachment. Within the peer group each member tried to impress the others by his aggression, by physical display, and by his sexual successes. In modern terms, the young man was developing into a male chauvinist pig, who had a strong double standard of sexuality and who perceived women as objects for sexual pleasure.
In the higher socio-economic groups there was far less sex segregation and much earlier masturbation, which was accompanied by sexual fantasy. The young men had sexual intercourse later, often made romantic attachments, and found it less necessary to impress the peer group by physical display, aggression, or sexual prowess.
The differences in sexual behaviour between young women of different social classes were less marked. Women in lower socioeconomic groups masturbated less, but had sexual intercourse earlier and more often, although they apparently had less enjoyment from sex, reaching or being helped to orgasm less often.
It is interesting too that adult concepts of ‘bad’ when related to young adolescents of each sex were different. Adults accepted that a ‘bad boy’ could be bad in several ways. He could fight excessively, lie, steal, take drugs, or play truant from school. But to say a girl was a ‘bad girl’ meant that she was sexually permissive.
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