Great Sex Secret (2 page)

Add to these four reports the fact that half of all new marriages end in divorce (with sexual unhappiness among the leading reasons), and we have the makings of a first-class

mystery. How can there

be such disconnect

The prevailing explanation

between the way sex is

for sexual unhappiness—that

supposed
to be and the

it’s caused by dual-career job

day-to-day reality in so

stress and empowered

many bedrooms? Why

women—is wrong.

are millions of people—

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T h e G r e a t S e x S e c r e t
especially women—so unhappy with sex? How can intercourse, widely touted as the ultimate expression of romantic love, be so disappointing?

The most popular theory is that unhappy or non-existent sex is a by-product of contemporary Western civilization—that the problem stems from two-career households and the stresses of children and modern life.

Jane Greer, the online sex therapist for
Redbook
, put it this way:

Marriage has changed. In the old days the husband was the breadwinner. The wife had the expectation of raising the children and pleasing him. Now they’re both working and both taking care of the children, and they’re too exhausted and resentful to have sex.

This is a plausible explanation: it
is
challenging for busy couples to carve out the time for sex—and muster the energy—when they come home from a full day’s work and have to deal with preparing dinner, bathing children, helping with homework, paying bills, and worrying about the Middle East.

But are stress and exhaustion really the problem?

Let’s face it; people are rarely too tired to have sex. Anyone with a functioning sexual anatomy, normal hormone levels, and the physical and mental health to respond to another person is a candidate for regular sex,
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no matter how busy life is. If this is true, something else must be going on in sexually unhappy bedrooms.

Here’s another idea: the smoldering anger theory.

Newsweek’s
article put it this way: “For many couples, consciously or not, sex has become a weapon. A lot of women out there are mad…men are mad too.” What are they mad about? The new family dynamic in which women are no longer second-class citizens and men are expected to make themselves useful around the house in ways that were unthinkable to their fathers. The cartoon character Marge Simpson passed these words of wisdom to her daughter, Lisa: “Marriage is a beautiful thing, but it’s also a constant battle for moral superiority.”

According to this second hypothesis, festering resentment drives a wedge between spouses—and sex becomes the weapon of choice. The woman withholds sex (“Not tonight; I have a headache…”) as a punishment for the man not carrying in the groceries and spending time with the kids, and the man retaliates by ducking his chores and playing even longer poker games with his buddies. In her book,
Against Love: A Polemic
, Laura Kipnis describes “the desire-free zone of long-term marriage”: Embarrassing, isn’t it, how long you can go without it, if you don’t remember to have it, and how much more inviting a good night’s sleep can seem compared to those over-rehearsed acts.

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Caitlin Flanagan, staff writer for the
New Yorker
and
Atlantic Monthly
, puts together the issues of exhausted two-career families and newly-empowered women and paints an even more vivid picture of the sexual fallout: Pity the poor married man hoping to get a little comfort from the wife at day’s end. He must somehow seduce a woman who is economically independent of him, bone tired, philosophically disinclined to have sex unless she is jolly well in the mood, numbingly familiar with his every sexual maneuver, and still doing a slow burn over his failure to wipe down the countertops and fold the dish towels after cooking the kids’ dinner. He can hardly be blamed for opting instead to check his email, catch a few minutes of
SportsCenter
, and call it a night.

The stresses of busy couples are real. So is the tec-tonic shift toward greater equality between men and women. Living in close proximity with another person for a long period of time—even someone you really love—has never been easy, and it’s especially difficult nowadays. Flanagan sums up the problem—and suggests a solution:

Marriage remains the most efficient engine of disenchantment yet invented. There is nothing like uninterrupted cohabitation and grinding responsibility to cast
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a clear, unforgiving light on the object of desire…The element that regularly restores a marriage to something with an aspect of romance…is sex.

Flanagan is suggesting that the way to escape this miasma of exhaustion and resentment is to
just do it
.

This sounds logical. Couples need to leapfrog over their daily cares and woes and have terrific sex! Then they’ll feel better—and get along better the rest of the time.

But it can’t be that simple. If jumping into the sack were all it took to overcome modern couple problems, people would have figured it out long ago. There’s got to be more to it than that.

Back to job stress and women being less dependent on their husbands. If these are truly the sources of the problem, then it would be logical that marital sex was better when women were full-time housewives and didn’t have to fret about a job outside the home. In the 1950s, middle-class women had less demanding lives and were less of a threat to the male ego. They had plenty of time to take care of all the household work during the day and focus on being sexually pleasing at night. But the evidence suggests that women were only pseudo-happy in the fifties; Betty Friedan’s trailblazing book,
The Feminine Mystique
, said that in this era, many women actually felt like “a passive, empty mirror.” And what’s more, the sex was lousy. Surveys and 1 4

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personal testimonials tell us that most women in this era found sex one-sided and unsatisfying, but were hesitant to speak up because they were economically and psychologically dependent on their husbands.

Speak up about what? About the fact that sex with their husbands was almost always a frustrating experience—

to put it bluntly, that they were not having orgasms during intercourse.

Nowadays, women are more empowered and independent. So have they spoken up and addressed this problem? Apparently a

lot of them haven’t. A

The real reason for sexual

consistent finding of sex

unhappiness is dissatisfaction

research is that between

with sex itself. Men’s and

65 and 85 percent of

women’s sexual anatomies

women do not regularly

just don’t fit together in a way
have an orgasm during

that readily satisfies both

sexual intercourse.

partners.

The evidence sug-

gests a radically different

theory about the sexual

malaise of so many couples today. Is it possible that the trouble stems from unhappiness
with sex itself
? Is it con-ceivable that this dissatisfaction has existed for centuries and is surfacing now (albeit indirectly) because women have more power and are less dependent on men? Could it be that what’s really driving the anger and resentment
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of many women is deep disappointment that, after a sexy beginning, their love life has become an “eighteen-mile rut” of frustration? Have we been looking in the wrong place for answers to contemporary sexual unhappiness? Could the root causes of all the complaints be a set of deep, built-in male-female incompatibilities—the ways in which their sexual anatomies don’t fit together—that make mutually satisfying lovemaking a challenge even under the best of circumstances?

These are important, troubling questions—and it’s amazing how rarely they are talked about. Even with sex, sex, sex all around us, there is very little honest discourse about what really goes on in bed—and about the ways in which men and women connect and don’t connect when they make love. For a sexually liberated nation, we are remarkably reserved about the most intimate details of sexual intercourse. How can this be?

Well, people are shy. Most of us are embarrassed to ask even our closest friends about what really happens when they make love. The average adult has had fairly limited sexual experience (between one and ten lifetime partners), and is naturally curious about what other couples do: Have they discovered something better? Do they have secrets they’re not sharing? But people very rarely ask such questions.

Furthermore, in conversations about sex, there is a built-in filter that keeps both good and bad news from 1 6

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being talked about very much. If people find sex disappointing, they are loath to admit it; if sex is amazing, people don’t want to seem boastful (only jerks brag about sex). So most day-to-day chatter about sex is pretty superficial, using humor to disguise discomfort and shedding very little light on what lovemaking is
really
like.

If couples turn to sex advice books and videos (which are easier and easier to buy), do they get better answers? With a few exceptions, the literature is quite unhelpful on the core issues, filling its pages and video footage with ever more exotic sexual positions, practices, and devices. And highly explicit erotica and pornographic materials propagate the myth of constant sexual ecstasy, endless lovemaking, and effortless female orgasms. Even if we find all this titillating, we know in our hearts that it’s not reality.

What about parents’ talks with their pubescent children? Basic anatomy may be described, awkwardly.

HIV and AIDS are often warned about, apocalyptically.

Condoms may be recommended, squeamishly. But parents find it really difficult to talk to their kids about intercourse and sexual pleasure, much less the challenges involved in making love with mutual satisfaction.

Maybe they don’t know where to begin. Maybe they are nervous about opening themselves up to questions about their
own
sex lives, past and present. And maybe
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they fear that such discussions will bring them face to face with the fact that their sons and daughters are growing into sexual beings. Kids are also quite adept at avoiding explicit sex talks—especially if it means thinking about their parents in sexual terms. Mom and Dad, like, “doing it?” No way!

How about sex education programs in schools?

Almost without exception, they have failed to deal forthrightly with sexual intercourse—just the plumbing, ma’am, along with assurances that sex is a mystical thing between a man and a woman that’s really wonderful—

but sorry, we can’t go into the details.

What all this adds up to is a societal failure to confront the most important “facts of life.” Almost all of us grow up without ever hearing a frank discussion of what’s involved in having mutually gratifying sex.

Caught between the myth that good sex just “comes naturally” and the emerging media consensus that sexless marriage is the norm, couples can be forgiven for feeling pretty confused.

And yet there’s a strong romantic current in our society, a stubborn belief that sex and love should go hand in hand, that primal sexual urges can somehow be yoked to love and that their union is true happiness.

Bringing these two strands together is every couple’s dream—but that means working out some very real male-female sexual differences.

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Are Men and Women Sexually Mismatched?

To understand these differences, we need to go back to the basics of human sexual anatomy and look at the way lovers have mated through the millennia. At the level of simple reproduction, our sexual anatomies are well matched. The aroused woman’s lubricated vagina is perfectly designed to welcome the aroused man’s erect penis. A man’s brain is hardwired to find the vagina’s embrace highly pleasurable, and during intercourse these circuits fire and most men have an orgasm after just a few minutes of intercourse. Millions of sperm are ejaculated, and if there’s nothing blocking their way and it’s the right time of the month, one of them has a good chance of reaching and fertilizing an egg. This design has worked very efficiently over the millennia—the planet now has six billion living souls.

But when it comes to sexual pleasure, men’s and women’s bodies are not such a perfect match. What is most exciting for a man—his penis thrusting inside his partner’s vagina—is often pleasurable for a woman (especially initial penetration, since the outer third of the vagina is most sensitive) but rarely produces an orgasm.

That’s because the clitoris—the woman’s primary orgasm-producing spot—is located a little distance from the entrance to the vagina. During penis-in-vagina sex, the clitoris is not directly stimulated, which is why most women report that they do not have a climax during
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actual intercourse. Alfred Kinsey, the American sex researcher, once said that believing that female orgasms can be produced through penetration alone is like believing that the earth is flat.

A second male-female

difference is that women

need a different kind of

Two factors—the location of

stimulation than men to

the clitoris and the type of

reach an orgasm—more

stimulation a woman