- Reviews & Essays
- In Defense of Difference
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Click hereFrom all sides come assurances that women and men feel the same about sex.
Today's novels, films, and TV shows depict woman after woman longing for no-strings-attached sex, just as men do. Such scenes are rarely credible, but audiences accept and even demand them: it's what they want to see.
The news media seek out surveys and studies, no matter how dubious, suggesting women want sex as intensely, as frequently, and with as many different partners as men do. It's bullshit, but it keeps audiences tuned in. Feminists who once insisted women were essentially different from men (you remember the women-read-romance/men-read-porn argument) now say we are the same. This change of stance, perhaps more than any gain in the struggle for economic or political equality, has resulted in the mass popularity the movement enjoys today.
In conversation by water coolers or at cocktail parties it has become fashionable for women to brag about their lusts while the men, who cannot be so open with their feelings without being thought pigs, encourage them or at least refrain from asking them to back up their words with action. It's like a new form of chivalry.
The belief that women feel the same as men do about sex has become "politically correct." As with all things p.c., heretics must suffer the consequences, in this case being thought "unable to accept women's sexuality" or naïve, while the faithful pat themselves on the backs for their sophistication.
It is not difficult to understand why so many people want so badly to believe women and men feel the same about sex. Men like to imagine their lust is fully reciprocated: it is flattering. No woman likes to admit that she does not understand male lust, much less acknowledge that it dwarfs her own.
Feminists have come to realize that if we admit that women and men feel differently about sex, we will have to acknowledge that this difference gives women an enormous sexual power over men. This would undermine the easy male-oppressor/female-victim narrative and hopelessly complicate the struggle for equality. The truth is that we will never achieve equality until we first accept the reality of difference. Womanizers often soothe a guilty conscience by telling themselves that their victims just wanted a little sex, the same as they did.
Pious men like to suggest the world is full of nymphomaniacs because the illusion of omnipresent sexual temptation makes them appear all the more virtuous for resisting it.
A man and a woman who have just fallen in love don't like to think of the gulf of difference that lies between them, and even long-time couples often cannot find the courage.
There are many reasons for denying difference. Probably the main one is the simplest of all: so many people are pretending that women and men feel the same about sex simply because it is now the thing to do.
The trouble is that women and men are not the same. When it comes to sex, we're different. We think differently. We feel differently. We behave differently. To pretend that we are the same, as we are doing now more than ever, is a lie, and this lie is hurting many people.
We are misleading young women and men both about what to expect from the opposite sex and setting them up for terrible hurt.
We are encouraging men to leave women they love in a quixotic search of a sexual freedom that does not exist. We are assuring women that they understand male lust when they cannot, no more than a man can understand what it means to give birth to a child, and thus creating much MISunderstanding, just where sympathy is needed most. We are feeding the bitterness that so many women today feel for men, and vice versa.
The myth of sameness is the social problem of our time. We have not even begun to tackle it. The first step will be admitting that this problem exists.
Literotica is, I think, a good place to start. This is one of the few places where the differences between male and female sexuality are accepted, if only indirectly, through the reverse mirror of fantasy.
The stories here are fantasy, blatantly so. Unlike more mainstream or "serious" literature, they make little if any attempt to represent a sexual reality. Just the opposite: their purpose is to help us to escape that reality, and by serving this purpose they reveal an honesty about our sexuality that is increasingly rare.
To put it plainly, the stories here are filled with female characters who lust as men do (or better yet, even more than men do) because such women are no where to be found in life. We come here to escape into a world where women and men feel the same about sex, and by doing so we reveal just how different our feelings are.
I write to ask you to please take this honesty, already rare, a step further.
At some point today or at the very latest tomorrow you will encounter a film, novel, television show, blog post, news program, magazine article, or conversation in which yet another woman is portrayed as though her lust is basically the same as a man's. Unlike the stories here at Literotica, this portrayal will be meant to be taken more or less seriously as a representation of reality. It is meant to teach us the supposed truth of our sexuality. It is meant to convert us to the ideology of sameness.
You will know this portrayal is a lie, and most people in your life will know it too. The trouble is, no one is admitting it.
I ask for YOU to admit it. You will risk ridicule, no doubt, but, please, be brave and admit it.
If you are a woman, say, "I am a woman and women do not feel nor behave that way," and if you are a man say, "I have never known a woman who behaves that way."
Admit it. Point out the lie of sameness to anyone who will listen. Defend difference.
- COMMENTS
Suite21menalmost 12 years agoWhat I know is that a man's genitals are made known to him every day. His cock grows and shrinks through the course of the day depending on his hormones and temperature not letting him forget.
He (even She) assigns names such as Willy, Johnson, Mr. Pube, Junior, whatever. His cock is referred to as his 'other brain', 'thinking with his cock'. Then to pee, he has to hold it so the stream goes where it is supposed to. With all this stimulation, he then feels obligated to use it.
Being a male, I have no idea how a woman's genitals feel during the course of their days, but I know they are hidden inside, rarely have names and don't have be held while peeing.
Anonymousalmost 12 years agoTo the author of this, since when can one person(I.e you) know what a wide group of people all want?
cupcakesparkyalmost 12 years agoBut I'll grant you that generalizations are often based on truth. The problem is, when you say "men are lustful" and "women are less (or not) lustful", the people who don't fit that generalization are left in the lurch. As in ALL things, there is a Bell curve. There are people of both genders who fit into the lustful camp, and others who have little interest in sex.
I am a woman whose marriage ended, in large part because my husband was lustless. For some reason, the lustful and the lustless often are a couple. Opposites attract?
Anonymousalmost 12 years agousually i take a look at a sentence or two of these essays, expecting something badly reasoned, too general or just plain crazy but yours was well written and i agree with it. we sure are different. women produce one egg each cycle; men produce millions of sperm a day. some have proposed that our bodies and all our psychology are just a biological means for getting our genes out there. most men need to get off a lot more often and urgently than most women do. it's possible that a lot of so-called "gay" men are just men who like the easy sex that gay encounters provide. and there was a movie a few years ago in which a female character got to be a man for a few days and confessed that she had no idea about the strength of a man's sexual drive until she got to experience it herself. women by nature, being the mothers, tend to be more conservative and more realistic. they need to raise their young. it's not surprising they want a committed partner who will provide a safe environment for the family. but i believe that men, too, want committment. that is, with the right woman. our random selection process makes meeting the right person difficult. it happens, all the time, as we witness in happy marriages, but most marriages are not that and fall in the middle of the bell curve of something tolerable, an arrangement both parties can live with. marriages at the lower end of the curve end one way or another. those at the high end make our lives, by nature fillled with suffering and loss, as good as it possible to be and often provide real happiness for some lucky couples. that's something to shoot for.
oldguyflalmost 12 years agoI was born in the late 30's and there seems to me to be a difference in women of my age and younger women in the way they approach sex but of course that just might be the one's I have known.
Without a doubt our wiring is: Men, sire young. Women, build nests.
There are exceptions to every rule but if you could establish a set of trend lines I think the difference would show.
Anonymousalmost 12 years agoNo two women are the same. There are women out there with higher sex drives than most men have just as there are women out there that would be happy to go thru life with no sex. You only have to attend a few real large couples swinging parties to realize women can go all night with many different men and enjoy themselves totally and that men for the most part have neither the ability nor desire to do the same. As in all the other cycles women go thru the sexual cycle responds to the monthly cycle so that many women are most active during the period they would be most likely to be made pregnant, a carryover to basic genetic links. And many women once taken by one man can and will like, females in the ancient clans, will sexually couple with many males to insure they are impregnated. This is a natural action of the female and being on birth control does not alter the natural actions. Society has decreed a married woman be faithful to her spouse but we all know how well that works. And if you assume men commit more adultry, if you omit same sex groups, then committing adultry with that male is a female. And since many men committing adultry have many different partners one must accept maybe the number of sexually active high drive females is greater than assumed. One must also account for the higher sex drive in females is from the ages of about 13 (puberty) to the early 40s and then usually drops after that. The book Human Sexual Response actually statistically gives a more valid set of statistics on female behavior.
Anonymousalmost 12 years agoOne can observe a basic difference in real sexual attitudes by taking note of the fact that there are many more women prostitutes servicing men than there are male prostitutes (gigolos) servicing women. This discrepancy is at least one reliable indicator of the different levels of sexual drive in the two sexes. It appears that women can more easily than men to take sexual activity or leave it. Apparently the whores, full time, part time, or just poor underfunded USA college coeds earning their college expense money, can separate their sexual proclivities from love or other emotions. Obviously some whores never have an orgasm, but quite a few of them do and enjoy their work with no emotional attachments. Certainly the financial rewards for high end "escorts" is worth the effort and many of them actually love their "work".
Before making "scientific" judgments, one should try to explain the whore "discrepancy" of women vs men.
Anonymousalmost 12 years agoI've met plenty of beautiful young women who are focused on their careers or on just plain having fun and definitely just want NSA sex. I've also met more than a handful of men who desire romance and intimacy with committment over a one night stand. People are different and only when we realize this will we be able to put aside knee jerk reactions to stereotypes that lead to disharmony.
Sidney43almost 12 years agoNicely written essay, although necessarily general in nature. As others have pointed out you cannot put everyone neatly in a box and call it a day. Men tend to look at sex differently, particularly when younger and the hormones are raging, something to do with the urge to procreate before they die young as our distant ancestors did. Women "tend" toward settling down with one man, although there is less pressure on them to do that these days. Women reach the peak of sexual desire later in life, which may have something to do with the "biological clock" that we hear about often enough.
Sex has become more recreational in nature for a number of reasons, better contraception, better education on the subject, smaller family sizes, changes in the type of employment, etc. Changing societal mores have allowed women to feel better about sex with multiple male partners, although while we call the male counterpart "womanizers", we don't refer to these women as "manizers", which some of them may well be. Women also are more likely to pursue a career than in the past and for the same reasons that men look for casual sex without commitment, women do the same.
Whether this has any long lasting effect on the psyche of women who embrace more frequent sexual partners, I have no idea. The divorce rate is high, unfaithfulness in marriage is common according to polls and clearly this is not the society of our parents, although all of these issues existed in their day. I suspect a lot of what we read about is misleading, polls are often taken with a viewpoint in mind and the mindless pap on TV and movies is about as close to fantasy as what we read here.
I suspect that some of the talk around the water cooler is from those people who like to project an image, that may not be entirely truthful. Some of them may well be totally honest about their life, but most of the people listening and walking away would not be comfortable doing the same things, even if they think about doing it.
One last comment; life in small town America, is often quite different than in a large urban area. Not to say that the same games are not played and that people do not have sex, but everything is less anonymous. They are different cultures and so when you talk about this subject that is another factor to consider.
