- 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.
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', Keira 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 learned 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.
