Men hope a lover will enhance their sexual arousal

The sex industry (prostitution and pornography) is a clear indication that men’s desire to enjoy their own sexual arousal and orgasm cannot be satisfied through their relationships with women alone.

It’s easy for a woman to figure out that men want sex… but they also want to be loved and appreciated through their sexual relationship.

  • Men’s sexual arousal is usually easy and immediate. Despite the evidence to the contrary they like to hope that a woman feels the same way about sex that they do.
  • A man can feel that sex represents the most important way of demonstrating that he loves his partner.
  • At the same time, he perceives a woman’s enthusiasm for sex with him as confirmation of her love for him.
  • If a man wanted a loving, sexless relationship with a woman he would never have left his mother.

Men need sex, both physiologically and emotionally, more than women. Men’s relationships with others are not as emotionally intimate as women’s tend to be. So a man looks to the woman in his life for the emotional support he needs and sex is the mechanism that men use to express their loving emotions.

“The failure of an unresponding sexual partner to provide these physical or emotional stimuli may, on the other hand, do considerable damage to the effectiveness of the relationship. … Such failure leads not only to disappointment, frustration, and a sense of defeat, but sometimes to contrary emotional responses which become anger and rage.” (p372 Sexual behavior in the human female 1953)

Despite acknowledging this not inconsiderable pressure on a woman to ‘respond’ to a man’s love-making, the male authors of Kinsey’s report never appear to consider the possibility that women might need to exaggerate their sexual responsiveness to meet male expectations.

How to pleasure a man

From early on, the sensitive female lover learns how to pleasure a man, co-operating quite instinctively during intercourse by moving with the man’s rhythm.

She also learns how to play along with men’s sexual fantasies and acts out the part of the appreciative and responsive lover in order to help him reach orgasm. Sometimes a woman may caress her lover’s body or make encouraging noises to enhance the man’s arousal. Some women even exaggerate their sexual arousal to the point of faking orgasm.

This explains why in the film ‘The Duchess’ (2008), Kiera Knightley playing the virgin bride, lies inert as her husband thrusts into her on their wedding night. Women only learn over time that responding as a lover encourages the male orgasm that nearly always ends sexual activity between a man and a woman. A woman appreciates that if she continues to be unmoved by her partner’s love-making, her man will feel that he is failing to please her or that she does not love him. By contrast, the mistress in the film has learnt to make the appreciative noises that sexually experienced women often use as a male turn-on during sex.

“The fact is, we usually co-operate quite extensively during intercourse in order for the man to be able to orgasm. We move along with his rhythm, keep our legs apart and our bodies in positions that make penetration and thrusting possible, and almost never stop intercourse in midstream unless the man has had his orgasm.” (p107 The Hite Reports 1993)

Unless a woman learns how to orgasm during sex with a partner, the role of the female lover can become burdensome in long-term sexual relationships. Even if a man never explicitly acknowledges the assistance of a female lover, a woman has the reward of knowing that she has helped her partner find the sexual release that is so vital to his happiness. From a woman’s perspective, making effort to be more involved in ‘love-making’ reduces the sense of uselessness that arises from participating in a sexual act in which (without the woman’s sexual arousal and orgasm) the woman is effectively merely a bystander.

Excerpt from Jane’s book Ways Women Orgasm (2011)


  1. I read an article recently that disagreed with Kinsey’s view of sexual orientation. Kinsey’s research was quite a bit more rigorous than anything you could ever do with a survey. My impression is that orientation might have more to do with people’s sense of having a distinct sexual identity than with their orientation per se.

  2. Great – at last someone who respects Kinsey! I am interested to hear your opinion. Very few people ever comment on sexual topics. I agree that modern surveys are rubbish – there’s no money for sex research!

  3. I’ve long been an admirer of both his moral courage and the way he intuitively understood statistical principles like distribution. Most people can’t get it even if you whack them across the head with it.

  4. Thanks Jeffrey – you are literally the first person who has had anything positive to say about Kinsey. He has been ignored rather than replaced with new research. This is why we have no reputable sex research today.

    I also think that there are very few people who are interested in the kind of explicit sexual phenomena that Kinsey wrote about. Everyone (even men) seem more at ease discussing relationships & the misinformation about female orgasm.

    Thanks so much! Jane x