Why Women Have Sex (36 page)

It’s simply enjoyable to submit, when one has to be in control of one’s life all the time. When I have to spend all day every day fulfilling
responsibilities and obligations and taking care of business, it’s nice to just let go and give someone else complete and utter control. I also love the idea of someone wanting me so much that they can’t resist, and I can only submit.

—bisexual woman, age 18

Another woman expressed how sexual appeal, sexual submission, and sexual power were linked in her mind:

Sometimes being submissive turns me on. Not always. But I’ve wanted to have sex a few times so that my partner could be in control. It made me feel sexy and wanted and in control in other ways. I wanted him to be in control but it made me feel like I was in control too. Being submissive sometimes includes having my wrists tied down with rope or having my partner hold my arms down.

—heterosexual woman, age 33

A plausible explanation is that being submissive can cause a woman to feel sexually desirable, and her sexual desirability, in turn, gives her power and control over her partner. Overall, we found that two reasons women gave for having sex—“I wanted to submit to my partner” and “I wanted to ‘gain control’ of the person”—were related; statistically, they clustered together, suggesting that sexual submission can in fact be a means of gaining control.

Perhaps this is one reason why sexual submission is a popular sexual fantasy among women. A study of 141 married women discovered that the fantasy “I imagine that I am being overpowered and forced to surrender” was the second most common fantasy out of the list of fifteen, exceeded only by fantasies of “an imaginary romantic lover.” Other studies verify that a substantial number of women experience pleasurable sexual submission fantasies. One study found that 29 percent of the women participants had experienced sexually arousing submission fantasies, and another study found that 30 percent of women had experienced the sexual fantasy “I’m a slave who must obey a man’s every wish.”

Other women enjoy being sexually submissive not because it necessarily
gives them power, but simply because it gives them a change of pace from their usual style of interacting:

I act very outgoing and tend to take control of situations in my daily life. I really like sex where I am submissive because it is different than how I usually act. I trust my boyfriend to not take advantage of me so it’s easier to let someone else be dominant over me and not worry about being in control.

—heterosexual woman, age 28

In fact, control can sometimes be a burden, and some women experience relief in relinquishing it. Some women say they became annoyed with men who do not take control—men who can’t decide which restaurant they want to go to, what movie they want to see, what their life’s goals are, and constantly ask the woman what she wants to do. The sense of freedom gained from submissive role-playing comes across in these women’s accounts:

I wanted to display my submissiveness to my boyfriend as a role-playing game. We had been wrestling, and it started to get sexual. I had been in a submissive mood, and the thought and the physicality of him dominating me turned me on. He took four leather belts out of his closet and tied me to his bed. I felt completely out of control and like I didn’t have to worry about anything; where to put my hands, what to say, what to do. I let him take over completely.

—predominantly heterosexual woman, age 22

I am a masochist and a sexual submissive. . . . I was always scolded growing up for masturbating, thus I think I have associated sex with embarrassment and humiliation at times. I enjoy being called a slut by my partner, although I don’t really see . . . myself as needing embarrassment. It is a game, a way of getting out an urge.

—woman, age 31, sexual orientation not given

I am a submissive and enjoy being degraded in a scene. I only do this with trusted and respected partners. I would not seek to be degraded by someone wasn’t a steady partner.

—heterosexual woman, age 53

In our study, we discovered that a small minority of women reported that they had sex because they wanted to be punished:

There are times where I feel like I deserve to be punished. If my boyfriend comes on to me and I don’t want to have sex I won’t stop him. I want to feel used.

—heterosexual woman, age 18

I felt guilty for emotionally hurting my long-time boyfriend. . . . I guess I kind of wanted to let him hurt me physically to absolve myself of the guilt of hurting him emotionally. I don’t even remember what I did, to hurt him I mean, it was a long time ago. . . . I didn’t face him while we were doing it, I turned away from him, just told him I liked it better that way. I think he knew something was wrong because I typically tend to crave closeness. Somewhere deep inside he was aware he was hurting me, but I just begged him to give it to me the way I liked it, told him what to do, and so he did it. I felt just a tiny bit better after it was over. Like him hurting me physically evened the playing field a bit.

—heterosexual woman, age 20

Having submissive sex as a means to punish oneself is much less common than submitting to sex because it is psychologically linked to their partner finding them sexually attractive and irresistible. But stories like these open the door to the darker sides of sex, including the experiences of women who agreed to have unwanted sex because they felt it was not their right to say no, or because they felt they somehow owed the person. As we will explore in the next chapter, when these women reflected on such experiences, many said that low self-esteem and feeling worthless played a role in their sexual choices.

Pleasure cannot be shared; like Pain, it can only be experienced or inflicted, and when we give pleasure to our Lovers or bestow Charity upon the Needy, we do so, not to gratify the object of our Benevolence, but only ourselves. For the Truth is that we are kind for the same reason as we are cruel, in order that we may enhance the sense of our own Power.

—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)

 

We are sensitive to these concerns and deliberated much over them. In the end, though, we decided to defer to the voices of the women in our study. The fact is that many women, when asked what motivated them to have sex,
did
respond by saying they were deceived by a man, verbally coerced, plied with drugs or alcohol, or physically forced. These are not ways in which women
want
to have sex. But they are nonetheless some of the reasons women end up having sex.

There is another purpose in getting these darker reasons for sex out in the open. Highlighting these circumstances through the words of actual women who have suffered these experiences and framing these
first-hand accounts with scientific studies of their impact provides readers with knowledge that they might be able to use in their own lives or in supporting loved ones. Although societal awareness of rape has increased through college campuses and other public education projects, there is still an uncomfortable, sensationalistic, and sometimes blaming manner in the way rape cases are discussed and portrayed. Further, the experience of forced sex can shape a woman’s sexuality for a long time after the event, and the fear of forced sex can permanently alter a woman’s sense of safety and security.

For all these reasons, we would be remiss to ignore forced sex and pretend that it does not feature in some women’s sexual lives. We hope that by hearing directly from the women in our study, others who have experienced forced sex will learn that they are not alone in their experiences. And we hope that it gives women (and men) a few tools that will help to prevent these abhorrent acts from occurring to begin with. We start with a phenomenon that is astonishingly common: deception.

Tactics of deception are common throughout the animal world. Any organism that perceives can be deceived. Fishermen create lures that mimic tasty food, deceiving the fish into biting a hidden barb. Among scorpion flies, males lure females with dead flies, highly desired meals for female scorpion flies, for the purpose of gaining copulations, only to take the dead fly away after the male has ejaculated. Humans are no exception to the use of deception in the sexual battlefield.

A deeper, evolutionary understanding of why sexual deception and other dark sides of mating are so prevalent comes from
sexual conflict theory
. Whenever the evolutionary interests of a man and a woman differ, there is the potential for sexual conflict. Sexual conflict theory predicts that when these conflicts occur repeatedly over generations each sex will evolve adaptations designed to pull or manipulate the other closer to its own optimum. If women prefer to mate with men who have resources, for example, then it is sometimes in men’s evolutionary interest to deceive a woman about his resource holdings if that tactic succeeds in luring a
woman into a sexual encounter. It is also in women’s interest to detect deception and focus on honest signals rather than unreliable or deceptive signals. And indeed, we will see that women have a veritable army of defenses to guard against sexual treachery at the hands of men.

Evolutionarily, women hold an extraordinarily valuable reproductive resource: the joys and burdens of nine months of pregnancy in order to produce a child. So evolution has favored male strategies that succeed in gaining access to this valuable reproductive resource. The most common sexual strategy is
honest courtship
. Many men show genuine interest in a woman, and they display a diverse array of tactics to attract a woman, even in casual encounters or the early stages of a relationship: displaying a good sense of humor, showing sympathy to her troubles, showing good manners, being well groomed, making an effort to spend a lot of time with her, offering to help her, buying her dinners, and giving her gifts. Most men, of course, try to put their best foot forward initially, and perhaps do some minor concealing of weaknesses and tweaking of the truth. Small forms of deception are surprisingly frequent in traditional dating, as well as online dating.

Online dating sites have become an increasingly common forum for meeting mates, so it’s appropriate to enter the world of sexual deception through the lens of this modern mode of mating. One study estimated that 16 million Americans have used an online dating service, and of those, 3 million have entered into long-term relationships, sometimes marriage, with someone they met online. A recent study of online dating ads explored the extent to which men and women provide deceptive information about themselves. The researchers compared men’s and women’s advertised height, weight, age, and other characteristics with actual measured height and weight and independently verified age.