Born sexual creatures, we are cuddled with love long before we reciprocate it.
Like sleeping beauty our sexuality awaits a Prince Charming. Yet many wish they had waited longer rather than feeling coerced into that special night. 30 % of all women did not want, or were forced to have, their first intercourse.
No wonder women are disillusioned about sex.
Pre-teen we here some facts of life and at once think ‘yuck that’s gross – er… tell me more.”
Then the blood of puberty sets us on a course of physical awkward on a path to hopeful lusciousness.
Since 78% of women hate their breasts, what hope has a fragile unformed self image have?
Memories of drunken smutty talk or wandering hands leave scars recalled with profound sadness.
No wonder women are disillusioned about sex.
It’s too much.
The buffed, tinted, rouged magazine images constantly shift the goal posts of beauty.
Over 300,000 breast enhancements were performed in the US in 2008. The same year, 40,000 were removed. So even adults are confused. How is a girl supposed to have a good body image?
No wonder the said “the sexual journey of a woman’s body is spent mostly yearning to be elsewhere.”
Self conscious, with alternating swings of extreme and intense solitariness, she may with draw and fail to develop the relationship skills needed with men.
Then struggling with low self-esteem she may believe sex is the only way to hold a boyfriend.
We fear being different, and sense it if our parents culture is not the norm. We fear rejection because we are not pretty enough for the in crowd.
Jenny tells me ‘everyone is doing it’, she is safe , she says, because she knows when she had her period. Misinformed youth need their parents and yet parents, church, Mosque (and whoever else)… tell me “Just say no.”
“Women often look back at their sexual adventures and misadventures during their teenage years and wonder, Where were my parents?”wrote Sallie Foley Sally Kope and Dennis Sugrue.
Like Sleeping Beauty, our parents tried to protect us from a death like curse. But hiding the spindles does not protect us from youthful curiosity.
It is ironic that the Bible is often used to encourage ignorance, and yet a casual reading of Torah shows any ancient Jewish girl would have heard a good dose of sexual law. Song of Songs is no book for prudes.
Yet, even if parents do talk, facts alone do not change behavior. We respond to values we see acted out by parents not open about sex.
True, we live in a world proclaiming loudly the message of sexual emancipation.
But society and biology tell a different story.
The Cathars had their own Sleeping Beauty, a protective belief in a pure divine feminine that fed into the Courtly love. In allegorizing and deifying love, the chivalrous tradition of knights in shining armour made love even harder to attain
For guys sex is a score, a rite of passage. A girl ‘loses’ her virginity. She is cheapened in some way. In n the back of her mind, good girls are not too interested in sex.
It’s not very ladylike. While we need to know about sexual privacy, we somehow get the message our bodies are dirty.
As Doris Lessing said of sexual freedoms, men “get erections when they’re with a woman they don’t give a damn about, but we don’t have an orgasm unless we love him. What’s free about that?”
“Lessing’s complaint describes a dilemma that many women still face in the new millennium”said sex therapist and relationship counselor Ian Kerner . “You may be free to pursue sex like men, but the deeper pleasures require some level of emotional attachment”
A female orgasm releases the same hormone that bonds mother and new born: oxytocin.
So a casual hookup may deceptively send women on a roller coaster ride of emotional involvement.
Our knowledge of sexuality has grown exponentially and yet 43% of American women aged 18 to 59 report a sexual dysfunction. Often women seek treatment because their men request it.
Unlike Sleeping Beauty, more women go to college and yet sex ignorance is rampant.
Still women prefer to be passive in the pursuit of love. Whether dating, or hooking up women more than men want a relationship and fear becoming emotionally involved with a partner who is not interested in them.
Sex is far more less genital than with men, which is why lesbian love strongly emphasizes holding, caressing, and talk.
Laboured under all this baggage it is no wonder women are cautious in sex.
But then there are hints of women’s great resiliency.
Ask a male pickup artist and he will probably tell you women have 80% of the power in a seduction setting.
“Guys don’t realize that women want sex even MORE than they do. They enjoy it more than we do, why wouldn’t they?” said seduction teacher Carlos Xuma “But they have a much better ability to control that desire with protective instinct.”
Why wouldn’t they? Because of that protective instinct and layers of cultural contradictions.
While men measure sexual desire by how attracted they feel, a woman will likely say she needs to feel attractive before she feels desire.
Rare is the women who communicates her own sexual needs to her partner.
We have been taught to distance ourselves from the ability to bond, trust, and to freely touch and be touched.
All skills needed in a successful sexual relationship.
When we feel attractive – when we sense we are loved, appreciated and supported by a man who seeks us for more than his two minute quickie – then we know we are attractive.
We feel desire.
80% of this self-talk is negative end), and only about 20% positive claim some scientists. With al our cultural baggage, no wonder the self talk about men and sex is negative.
No wonder women feel frustrated about sex.
“If you’re looking for someone that could help you get clear about where you want to go… feel comfortable, safe and motivated and get the results… I want to encourage you to work with Laura.”
- Jack Canfield
After rebuilding body esteem after severe obesity and multiple eating disorders; losing and keeping off 100 pounds for twenty-one years, Laura’s program Loving What You See in the Mirror offers a safe way for women to explore why we so often put ourselves at the bottom of the “to do list”, and what impact this has on our health and body image.
