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All About The Penis Dealing with low levels of sexual desire in your partnerAll About The Penis Home PageAs many men will have discovered in the course of their relationships, women generally have a lower level of sexual desire than men. As a rule, women are also slower to arouse, masturbate less frequently, and want sex less often. The male sexual urge, the urge that not only means a man's penis is erect every morning when he wakes up but also makes him want to use it as much and as often as possible, is not usually mirrored in a woman. Obviously people have different libido or sex drive, which probably reflects some difference in their testosterone levels (in both men and women, since women's sex drive derives from the testosterone produced in their bodies). There is, by the way, no correlation between the size of a man's penis and his testosterone level. There may be a link between his sex drive and his testosterone level, though. A much better indicator of a man's sex drive than the size of his penis is the hairiness of his body: more hair might suggest he is a high testosterone male. Traditionally, male medical students wanting a romantic liaison would look for a woman with hairy arms or legs, knowing that she was likely to be higher in testosterone than her sisters and have a correspondingly greater interest in sex! As men, we often think we have to initiate sex, and difficulties can arise when our partners are not in the mood to respond to our sexual advances. But despite all this, research shows that 90% of women will come during sex if they receive twenty minutes or more of foreplay - where foreplay is defined as caressing, fondling, stroking, kissing and so on. One difficulty, of course, is getting over the hurdle of not feeling sexual desire in the first place. But "going to bed for a cuddle and seeing what happens" is a formula that removes pressure from both partners. The art of getting this foreplay right is to enjoy bodily contact while retaining sexual intent. This mean some focus on your part is needed: for example, try gently running your fingertips over her body, while asking her to "get into her skin" - which means, to focus on the points where your fingertips are making contact with her body. You can use different strokes, pressures, touches from your lips or fingers, or indeed any part of your body, to vary the stimulation she's getting. But one thing that you must feel is desire: your desire will act as a catalyst for hers. When she feels wanted, without overt sexual pressure, she's much more likely to begin to develop sexual urges. Initially, the twenty minutes of foreplay should be kissing and caressing on the non-sexual parts of her body, certainly not touching her nipples and clitoris or vulva, which she may well find irritating if she is not aroused. The penis cannot lie about desire, so if you have an erection, you can press it against her body to communicate your feelings. A great way of telling her how much you want her is to lie in the "spoons" position, your front to her back, and gently press your erect penis into her buttocks while stroking her legs. Subtlety is important, for you also want to convey the message that you love her and don't just want her as a sexual object. While you stroke and massage her, the focus of your attention needs to be on your hand, what you are feeling, and the message you are conveying to her, not on your own desire (which will increase as you help her to achieve greater levels of arousal and desire). Interestingly, now my partner has gone through her menopause, she finds that in addition to the indirect pleasurable stimulation of stroking and touching, she also needs a direct "hit", as she puts it, to her vagina, vulva or clitoris to kick start her sexual desire. This can be provided by a well-lubricated finger (lubricated mostly with saliva) gently running round her vaginal opening or her clitoris, or it can be my mouth on her vulva or clitoris: making a fast vibrating sound while applying my vibrating lips to the area around and even on her clitoris really gets her going! Another technique at this stage of sex which seems to work well for her is to stimulate both her breasts while kissing her clitoris. She tells me that her nipples are "a direct line to her clitoris"! When you're ready to put your penis into her vagina, it's important to be sure there is ample lubrication, and if there isn't, to add some, in the form of saliva or a small amount of an artificial lube like Probe or Astroglide. And to increase her pleasure, you might wish to focus on pressing against her G-spot with your penis as you thrust. G-spot stimulation is described elsewhere on this website. Another idea: try negotiating a regular "quickie" where the pleasure is entirely yours. With adequate lubrication, and minimal foreplay, you and your partner agree that you can enjoy coming inside her without worrying about getting her her aroused or having an orgasm. She doesn't, of course, have to just lie there like a log (though she can if she wants!): she can thrust her pelvis and move her body in any way that gives her or you greater pleasure. The quid pro quo for this might be a long session of slow, romantic lovemaking every so often where you focus specifically on satisfying her needs. Such quickies can go a long way to satisfying the needs of both partners and resolving issues between a man and a woman when they have differing levels of sexual desire. In her book Perfectly Normal: Living and loving with low libido, Sandra Pertot has put into print what many men instinctively feel about the women in their lives - that they have a low level of desire, at least compared to men. Buy the book here through Amazon.com. This is probably not a very surprising finding to most of us, but it's borne out by research conducted by Alan Riley, Professor of Sexual Medicine at the University of Central Lancashire. His work suggests that while men want sex on a 5 day cycle, women tend to want it every 10 days. This effectively means that men will want sex 5 days after they last had it, while their partners would be happy to wait another 5 days. That may seem problem enough, but it gets worse, for if she does have sex in response to her man's needs before the 10 days are up, her clock is again set back to zero. Five days later it happens again, and she still isn't ready for it: soon she may begin to think that she has lost her libido, whereas in fact the issue is actually one of timing. The problem is compounded by the fact that men can become aroused very quickly, partly because they are primed with sexual thoughts most of the time anyway, while women find it much more difficult to move from a non-sexual situation to a sexual one. But that isn't the whole story. Evolution favors a high level of male rather than female libido, since that's all that is necessary for effective reproduction; in fact, there's no real need for female libido at all, unless the females are doing the sexual selection of their mates, rather than vice versa. Even so, some women do report feeling sexier during the ovulatory phase of their cycle, which is what you'd expect if their biology is telling them to get pregnant. Of course libido varies between women, and there are some odd effects which are harder to explain in a logical way, such as women feeling horny during pregnancy (high levels of hormones, perhaps) or after the menopause (no fear of pregnancy, perhaps). An important point may be that women need to know it's OK to experience a low level of sexual desire from time to time. And when a woman or a couple see a sex therapist and are given some kind of schedule or program designed to help a woman to recover her sexual drive it can be counter-productive, since this inherently assumes that the woman must fit the male model of sexual desire. Such expectations can be a cause of huge sexual upset between couples, and cause further problems of resentment and anger. There is, however, one clear message in all this: that men and women must respect each other's sexuality and find ways to accommodate it. Such a process requires honesty and openness, with good communication between the partners. Perhaps the surest way of stimulating a woman's sexual drive is for her partner to make sure she feels loved and desired, fully appreciated for her true self as a woman, rather than simply desired as a sexual object. According to Edward Laumann, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, reporting in 1994, about 33% of women said that they considered themselves to have a low libido. More recent studies have reported that about 20% of women believe they have a low libido. Another view That's a pretty amazing statistic. After all, we are all supposed to like sex, aren't we? And yet there is a problem here. The fact that a person wants sex less often than someone else does not prove they are abnormal, nor that they have a low libido - they may have exactly the right libido for them. Yet if you happen to be a woman with a man who wants nothing more than the opportunity to put his penis into your vagina at least once a day, while you want to enjoy penetrative sex once a month and cuddles and intimacy the rest of the time, you certainly might come to the conclusion that you have a low libido. If you then met a man who wanted sex once a month, but desired physical intimacy and cuddles the rest of the time (perhaps even if he was masturbating from time to time), would you still consider yourself to have a low libido, or would it not even occur to you that there was a problem? But people's sex drive varies from week to week and year to year. As we all know, it varies with stress, life events, a woman's point in her menstrual cycle, our location (like being on holiday), how tired we are, how much we have drunk, and so on. And desire is not always an urgent need for release - it can be a subtle, almost emotional thing, a desire for union with a partner rather than a rampant thrusting session. And sex may mean something different for each person over a period of time: for example, sometimes my partner wants quiet, contemplative sex, sometimes she wants rampant penile thrusting, sometimes she just wants connection. While I can accommodate her needs, my own desire pretty much always stays the same: at least at first, it's the desire to penetrate, to give her pleasure, to build up her pleasure and mine, and finally to ejaculate inside her while maintaining an emotional connection. Men and women may have different ideas about what is desirable sexual behavior. Men, in general, are more likely to seek experimentation and novelty than women, but some couples stick to a tried and tested routine while others constantly seek to broaden the boundaries of their sexual repertoire. In the face of such obvious differences, it seems absurd to suggest that there is one standard of sexual normality to which people should adhere. The equally obvious conclusion is that rather than trying to change someone's level of sexual desire, therapy might focus on changing their expectations about themselves and their beliefs about what is normal. However, when all that has been considered, the question remains as to whether there are still real differences between the sexes. I have said elsewhere that men generally have a higher level of sex drive, seek out more sex, more sexual stimulation, and have more orgasms than women. But is this just sexual stereotyping? After all, there are men who have a low libido, like quiet or brief sexual encounters, and perhaps even a few who don't need to achieve orgasm during intercourse. An article from pioneering sex therapist Robert Birch on low sexual desire - in both sexes. An article from a commercial company on hormonal issues in women around the time of the menopause. |
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