When It Comes To Sex, Do You Simmer Or Soar?

When comparing male and female sexuality, there’s no shortage of adages: “Men are like light switches - just flip them on and they’re ready to go. Women are like irons - plug them in and let them warm up.”

Or, wait: Is it that men are like microwaves - just push a button to turn them on - and women are like Crock-Pots that need to simmer?

Dr. Emily Nagoski, author of "The Good in Bed Guide to Female Orgasms" writes that “men are like driving standard transmission – if you move through the gears in the right order, you will get where you want to go – and women are like baking a souffle – the outcome depends on the ingredients and the chef, sure, but it also depends on the reliability of the oven, the altitude, the humidity of the day… more variables, more variability.”

Regardless of your metaphor of choice, the oversimplifications of male sexuality abound, as do the explanations:
• Evolutionarily, men are wired to spread their seed indiscriminately, while women are wired to cultivate.
• Psychologically, inside every man is an insecure little boy who needs constant sexual approval.
• Neurochemically, it’s the male “testosterone-brain” versus the female “estrogen-brain.”
• Behaviorally, men respond to simple cues like visual stimulation, while women respond to complex emotional cues.
• Inter-galactically, men are from Mars and women are from Venus!

Whatever the myth, we tend to view male sexuality as simple and female sexuality as complex. Maybe it’s true.

Lately, as reported in the Chart, there have been some really good books by really smart people that support this theory. In their book "Why Women Have Sex," for example, psychologists Cindy Meston and David Buss purposely excluded men from their research.

“We do bring in men occasionally by way of contrast,” they say, “but we wanted to focus exclusively on women so that the complexity of women’s sexual psychology was not given short shrift, so to speak.”

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