The New Male Sexuality (24 page)

In recent times, the female definition of love has triumphed. Face-to-face intimacy is the standard against which men are judged; not surprisingly, they come out on the short end.

Both sexes need to understand the validity of both sides. Men have to understand the value of personal talk and sharing feelings. But men also need to articulate and stand up for their style of loving. Sharing activities, including sex, can also be healthy and beneficial. The advice and practical help men offer their partners is not to be sneered at. Given who men are, having sex with their partners often is a real act of love, one of the best ways they know to give love.

Because how men see things and act is so foreign to women, they need to explain themselves. The man who washed his wife’s car, for example, needed to realize that she might not see it as an act of love, and he needed to look for a way of explaining what washing the car meant to him. It can be done.

Women attach great importance to words and talking.
Big surprise, right? Aside from affectionate touching, this is the main way they relate and want to relate. Needless to say, men are a bit different. I got an important lesson in this matter from my son when he was nine years old. The two of us had been eating dinner and talking for about twenty minutes when he said: “I’m getting bored. When are we going to relate?” When I responded that I thought we had been relating, he replied: “No, we’ve only been talking. I mean real relating. Let’s wrestle.” It’s clear that for him, and for many males, talking has nothing to do with relating. Action is what’s important.

Women tend to be different. They love to talk with their lovers, and they tend to believe a relationship is working to the extent that they can talk. Even if there are problems, being able to talk about them suggests there is hope. When talking is rare or full of tension, women tend to lose hope.

Talking about what? you ask. Almost everything—your day and her day, your plans for tomorrow and hers, your hopes, pains, and fears, and hers.
But not quite everything. Women generally do not enjoy long conversations about things—cars, computers, and tools—and most women are not crazy for a lot of talk about sports. If these are among your favorite topics, you need to find some male friends. Women most certainly do not like these subjects to be brought up in the midst of serious, romantic, or lusty conversations.

Women love talk that includes compliments and appreciations and words of love. Here’s what one fifty-seven-year-old woman said:

I adore men who can speak up in all ways, and I especially like men who freely express their like, love, and lust for me. If I’ve spent two hours putting on my face and getting ready for a big night out, I love to hear how good I look. I know my aging body isn’t what it used to be, but I still have some good points, and I like a man who notices and says so.

And from another woman, thirty-seven:

I guess I know Rolph appreciates and loves me, and it’s obvious he depends on me a lot, but it wouldn’t hurt to have him say it once in a while.

I discuss compliments and appreciations in several later chapters. While on the subject here, however, let’s not forget specifically sexual compliments. This is one place where we can heal one another. So many women feel bad about their bodies. Most women in America have breasts that they consider to be too small, too large, or too droopy, and butts and thighs they imagine to be too big, too fleshy, and too jiggly. If you like your partner’s parts and tell and show her consistently that you do, in time she will see them in a new way, as this woman did:

I’ve always hated my butt. I thought it was humongous and was always careful not to let my lovers see it in broad daylight. When Aubrey said he loved it, I thought he was bullshitting. I mean, who could like such a thing? But he persisted in wanting to look at it, play with it, and tell me how it turned him on. Over the years I’ve started to see my butt the way he sees it, and I feel much better about it now. When he wants to have me from the back, instead of cringing like I used to and lobbying for an alternative position, I just put my butt up there for him and even wiggle it with some pride.

For women, sex has meaning only in the context of a caring relationship
. Surveys show that both men and women prefer sex in a loving relationship. But men also tend to view sex as a good thing in and of itself, regardless of whether it’s part of a loving relationship or if the participants have any other feelings for each other. For most women, sex devoid of some kind of relationship and close feelings is not appealing.

In one study among college students, 85 percent of the women said emotional involvement is a prerequisite for engaging in sex “always” or “most of the time,” whereas 60 percent of the men said “sometimes” or “never.” In response to the question of what would be the primary reason for refusing to have sex, all of the women answered “too soon in the relationship” or “not enough love/commitment.” Forty-six percent of the men, and none of the women, said they would never refuse to have sex regardless of anything else.

This difference is well illustrated in comparing the different erotic materials men and women favor. In the material men like, plots are flimsy and character development and relationships virtually nonexistent. Pornography focuses on orifices, organs, and positions, with vaginal sex, oral sex, and anal sex (and sometimes more than one of these at the same time); sex with one person, two people, and whole villages; sex with strangers, friends, and relatives; voluntary sex and forced sex; private sex and public sex—in short, sex in every combination and permutation. But the novels women like are about love and romance. There is sex, sometimes spelled out graphically, but sex with love, not just the conjunction of body parts.

What we can learn from all this is why casual sex usually has such little appeal to women. In order for them to want and have good sex, there has to be some kind of relationship in place, or at least the promise of one. And the relationship has to be in good shape. As a forty-two-year-old woman said to her husband in my office: “If I’m not feeling good about you or our relationship, the door to sex is closed.” She did not mean this in a threatening way, just as a statement of fact. Another woman, close to sixty, said something similar to her husband of over thirty years: “Things have been so bad between us about [problems they were having with one of their grown children] that making love is the last thing on my mind.”

Women like men who are fully present and accounted for.
Virtually every woman I’ve talked to said that they can’t abide men who seem spaced out or somewhere else when they’re together. As the comments below
make clear, women want someone who is alive in the moment with them, who listens, who talks, who pays attention.

I’ve had it with unconscious men. They’re not quite there when talking to you because their eyes are roaming around the room looking for someone prettier, they’re not quite there when at home because they’re trying to see around you to the TV, and they’re not even all there in sex. God knows where they are then.

I knew my husband was a keeper shortly after I met him. On an early date we talked about favorite junk foods, and I mentioned a kind of chocolate I especially like. The next time we got together, he brought me a whole box of chocolates, exactly the ones I had mentioned. I thought, “My God, a man who’s conscious and listens.” Didn’t take me long to realize that he’s almost always where he is and not like so many others who seem perpetually spaced out.

Women appreciate men who listen to them and take them seriously.
Listen to her and take her words seriously, especially when she says no and when she requests a change in what you’re doing. If she says she doesn’t want sex tonight, or that she doesn’t want to do a certain thing, make sure to guide your behavior accordingly. If she says she doesn’t want you to blow in her ear, then stop blowing and make sure to remember her preference. Many women feel they don’t get listened to sexually (and generally), and it drives them crazy: “I’ve told him a hundred times I don’t like him blowing in my ear, and here he is doing it again!” If there’s a big conflict about what she says—for example, if blowing in ears is important to you—then understand what she’s saying, tell her your thoughts, and see if something can be worked out. But don’t pretend you didn’t hear her. Learn to listen; better yet, learn to enjoy listening.

Whatever you do, absolutely abide by her sexual rejections. If she says she doesn’t want sex now, it’s fine to try to persuade her. But this must be tempered by an ability to hear her rejections and back off. Women are enraged by men who can’t take a no seriously and graciously.

When my husband is hot to trot, he just keeps coming on. First he tries verbal persuasion and, if that doesn’t move me, he escalates: I don’t really love him, I don’t care about his needs, that kind of thing. If that doesn’t do it, he gets demanding—I have a duty to have sex
with him—or tries the old his-work-will-suffer-if-he’s-carrying-around-all-this-tension routine. If none of this succeeds, he stops talking to me for a week. I really hate this shit.

I like a partner who can be sensitive to my needs while still being true to his own. I like to have my requests listened to and not to be forced into doing things I don’t want. In short, I like an equal relationship rather than a one-sided one.

Women are more receptive to making love when there’s an ongoing romantic/erotic connection
. Many women report that their men seem to be “seriously fragmented” or “compartmentalized.” One of them went on to explain: