Hola Everybody,
It's Friday! Yaaay!
It's Friday! Yaaay!
As always, if you would like to be featured on my Friday
Sex blog, please feel free to contact me. The only requirement is that the
photos be sexy, as you perceive that to mean.
[note: the photo had to be removed due to um "rules"]
Now, on to everyone's
fave topic: SEX!
Sexual Peaks: Men and Women
Today's post has to be a quickie
(pun intended)!
I think that by now most of us have
the heard the cliché that knowledge is power. Clichés are clichés because for
the most part they are true. I would like to spin that cliché a little and add
that a little knowledge is a dangerous
thing. What I mean by that is that incomplete
knowledge is dangerous because it leads to erroneous assumptions.
The folk wisdom that women reach their sexual peak after age thirty;
men in their teens is one of those assumptions.
Mind you, after extensively
researching this area -- the published literature, reading through piles of “experts,”
Masters and Johnson, etc. -- I can't say I have come to a definitive
conclusion. However, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't question this
assumption. In fact, there are more reasons than not to be suspicious about
this often-cited “fact.”
I started where everyone should
start: I asked myself the question where
did this claim have its start. I was able to trace it to the famous Kinsey surveys
of more than a half century ago. Kinsey came about to this conclusion by simply
polling people on the frequency of various sexual behaviors. Based on the
number of times the interviewees said they had masturbated or had intercourse
or erotic dreams, Kinsey's crew figured that women reached their peaks in their
mid-to-late thirties --long after men.
Sexual peak is not a
clear-cut term, however. For example, the number of sexual experiences per year
may be different from how much one enjoys them, and this may be different from
how often one thinks about sex or how much enjoyment one brings to one's
partner. Who's to say which one these is most relevant to the idea of a sexual
peak period?
Even if we were to decide to limit
this discussion to one of mere frequency, the problem with using the
Kinsey-style method is that it's unclear whether women are said to peak later
in life for physiological, psychological, or social reasons. One possible
reason, according to a study on human sexuality, is that giving birth may help
women to become more sexually responsive because they develop more capillaries
in the genital area. However, the same researcher notes that a crying baby in
the next room may do far more to cool sexual desire than a few more blood
vessels could do to stoke it. In fact, a good number of women report a loss of
sexual desire immediately after giving
birth.
One of the better-known researchers
into sexual hormones and their effect on behavior is John Money (and with whom
I disagree with in other areas). He insists that how we are raised to think
about sex is more relevant than how much estrogen or testosterone we secrete.
He observes that while we need a little amount of hormone to get the system
going, additional hormone doesn't do anything. If women enjoy sex more, or
simply do it more, at forty than at twenty, this is probably more a reflection
of the time required to break free from early social conditioning about sexual
desire. According to my man Money, much of what we see as biological in women is
intertwined with the concepts of how girls are educated sexually.
Women are conditioned to think that
if they're horny that they're sluts. Women peaking later may be a consequence
of the time it takes to get over the more than twenty years of socialization
before they can learn sex can be fun. An even better case against a biological reason for a later
sexual peak is that from an evolutionary point of view it makes no sense for
women to become interested in sex just as they're nearing the end of their childbearing
years.
If the issue is socialization, then
the gap between men's and women's sexual peak should narrow (become more alike)
as the sexual double standards disappear. Sure enough, studies since the Kinsey
report are consistently showing that “women are reaching high levels of sexual
arousal at earlier ages.” There seems to be a leveling out between the sexes
these days in terms of enjoyability and frequency of sex. On the other hand,
women are less likely to report a physical motive (“I was horny”) until they
are in their late thirties. What all this points to is that there is a great
need for a large national study, but politicians are naturally nervous about
such a project and are resistant.
There is a more important question
with the claim that women reach their sexual peak at thirty-five or whenever: a
peak implies that something drops off after
that year. The opposite seems to be true. Women tend to develop a greater ease
and frequency of orgasm with more sexual experience. There is no evidence of a
decline after the so-called peak.
Physiological changes in men are
easier to predict than in women. Most forty year-olds ejaculate less than
fifteen-year-olds, for example. However, the context in which the arousal takes
place counts for a lot here. How can one
speak meaningfully about levels of sexual excitement without knowing who is on
the other side of the bed?
More importantly, the idea that men
have passed their sexual peak before their 20s should raise the question
whether a state of a perpetual erection means someone is at their sexual “peak”
in any real sense. The middle-aged man may win the race in terms of the sexual
satisfaction he gives and receives. In fact, a study of healthy middle-aged to
elderly men indicated that while sexual arousal and activity were lower for
older men, sexual enjoyment and satisfaction
did not show a decline with increasing age. Furthermore, masturbation
accounts for the majority of the huge surge early in life. That led Kinsey to
talk about men reaching their sexual peak in late adolescence. Is that the
measure of the kind of peak we're really interested in?
This much is clear from my
explorations academically and from personal experience: most men and women can
enjoy sex at any time from puberty until death. Some researchers have found
that some people don't reach their peak until they're in their late 80s! It
would appear to me that there is no evidence suggesting that biology is
dominant over social conditioning, psychological conditions, and individual
situations. Which to me means there are no fixed sexual prime years or peak.
Yes, sometimes a little knowledge
is a dangerous thing.
SEX IS GOOD FOR YOU!
My name is Eddie and I’m in
recovery from civilization…
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