Men are more limited in their sexual approaches, Women are more flexible

Between two contrasting ideas- that women are hornier than men, and that women do not get there easy- we find it difficult to nail women’s sexuality to a constant.

Not that a constant is necessary to be defined, or is there at all. Female sexual desire has clutched itself in its own grip- women have been chanting all the while with a rosary of religion and culture in their hands , oblivious to the fact that each bead is a dense ball of repressed sexuality. This sexuality is as active in its hide-out as it is low in the light.

The female sexuality is confined but primaeval to the core, even though there is a gap between the experience of desire and its physical and behavioural expression.

Though it can’t be overlooked that the social constraints and controls on female sexuality have not made women less sexually desiring than men- the acceptance of the social outlook has moulded them into passive beings most of whom have not yet had communion with their bodies and desires. To allow this female sexuality to escape the rigid limits of a solid, hard and rough cage, the string needs to be broken and the beads need to fall off onto the floor of an equal plain that would be the nourishing soil for the seeds of sexual desire.

Daniel Bergers writes “While men have been known to wear their sexuality on their sleeves, women have been taught and trained to be more coy.”

However, it becomes very clear from various experiments and studies, among them those carried out by Meredith Chiver -an inspiring woman achiever who has taken to unravelling female sexuality, that the passivity alluded to female sexuality is far from accurate.

A study by Meredith Chiver in which men and women were exposed to visual stimulus debases the notion that women take more time to get going. The study showed that women were as sexually interested as men.

The female sexual desire gets its profoundness from biological aspects. The female body getting multiple orgasms is one thing the male body will always be jealous of.

The rawness of female sexuality, its intensity comes from the capability to have multiple orgasms while males usually experience a rest period, or the “refractory period” after ejaculation , before they can become erect again.

Female sexuality is proactive if the restraint is removed. Studies show that while heterosexual men become aroused by women’s bodies and homosexual men by men’s bodies, heterosexual women tend to get aroused by both male and female bodies if they are presented sexually.

Lesbians, however, are more aroused by erotic depictions of female bodies.

Other studies show that whereas men are more limited in their sexual approaches, women are more flexible. Men are seen to develop responses to atypical situations, partners or objects; women, who should rather be considered inspirational women who aren’t afraid of expressing their high sexual drives, get attracted to both sexes, which is not true for men. If this is caused by biological factors and anatomical differences is still a shaky area, but the role of society and its gender differences and sexual repression can’t be denied.

Sexual scientists have suggested that for women, sexual desire might be more directly connected to erotic physical stimulation rather than to sexual thoughts like happens with most men. Female sexual desire, thus, is directly attached to the body and is as raw and sensual.

The social factors cause women to experience physical pleasure, in the form of self-stimulation and other sexual stimulation, much later in their life than men.

Studies show that women mostly experience sexual desire after they establish a relationship with a partner, which leads them to experience the relational aspects of sexual desire before physical pleasure. However, by the time they reach middle age, men are observed to become more interested in the relational aspect of sexuality whereas women are more interested in attaining sexual pleasure!

What we essentially derive from these studies is that the notions of passivity attached to female sexuality are baseless and do not stand any ground.

The female sexual desire does not only respond to the male sexual desire but is proactive.

Women are primaeval in their rawness, only they need to break the string of that rosary of chastity that’s thrust into their hands- and maybe use those hands for better purposes! Many inspiring women achievers have come out and talked about female sexuality. Recently, Kangana Ranaut, a top Indian inspirational woman actress, in an interview with Barkha Dutt, another inspirational woman achiever, talked about how women who accept and express their sexuality are labelled as “sluts”, and this is the mentality coming from patriarchy that has led women to lock up their sexuality in an unknown place.

But, what I would conclude with is that this caged, compressed sexuality constantly exerts pressure on the walls of its prison from which it comes out with an explosion of desire- raw, primitive proactive, wild and immediate- from time to time.