NSFW (if you want) - Men, when did it dawn on you that women like to be intimate too?

I was raised with the idea that women can enjoy sex as much as men. I then grew up around women who were as sexually expressive as the men around me. Finally, I married a woman who enjoys sex more than anyone else I’ve ever met. I feel bad for those men and women who are raised with the idea that women do not—or even should not—enjoy sex.

As for when I realized that there were women who wanted to have sex with me specifically, I became inexplicably popular almost overnight during high school. Let’s just say that that a few of my classmates were quite forward about their interests.

I did use to think it was only men that wanted sex, but that was only in my teens.

Dawn on me? I would not call it dawning. I always thought they should, but the truth was that I never met one that did until I got sick. Then I met a number of them and they told me they liked sex and they made it sound as if they liked it as much as I did. So I started to believe.

Who knows? Without the internet, perhaps I would still be in that hell where I believed I was wrong for feeling so sexual all the time. I’d still be hoping it would go away. But now I realize I have been mismatched. It’s not that there was anything wrong with me, per se. Of course, it’s hard to come to grips that you are not matched well, sexually speaking, but at least it’s something to stop blaming yourself for being a sexual deviant or something. Sexual deviance meaning you like sex, which, until that point in my life, I thought no one else did.

For me it was in college when a woman grabbed my crotch and unzipped me while I was kissing her. Before that my experience was with women that seemed to fall into some “traditional” paradigm where I initiated or led, and she followed or responded.

It was a pleasant surprise.

Historically, women have had to depend on men for resources and marriage was pretty much the only path to security. Women who had sex outside of marriage faced some serious consequences, and there’s still a double standard today. If things were more equal (women earning equal pay for the same work, equal proportion of single mothers and fathers, same social consequences for casual sex) women wouldn’t be under all this pressure to keep their sex drives under wraps. A more equal society would mean more sex all around. Everyone wins!

Censored by me

My first girlfriend was quite the horn-dog. I was taught to treat women with respect, and she was quite frustraited by it. Things worked out.

@filmfann I’ve run into those women as well, one actually said, “It’s ok to disrespect me sometimes.”

Uh, no problem, I guess….lol.

I was around six & this girl from my neighbourhood willingly complied when I asked her the classic line “I’ll show you mine if you show me your’s”
We were such an innocent group that this episode passed by without unnecessary drama…..much.

I grew up in a suburb of a large city, in a strongly ethnically religious area. The girls all saw themselves as ”<religion> American Princesses” and it was far beneath them to say, much less to anything intimate.

I didn’t see eagerness for intimacy until after college. (I could say, after my first marriage :-).

@filmfann But doesn’t your experience speak volumes about what some people take “treating women with respect” to be? If your girlfriend wanted sex, but you thought having sex with her would be disrespectful, then we have gone beyond respecting her and her boundaries and into paternalism (“tut, tut… I know what’s good for you better than you do, and it isn’t sex”). It winds up being disrespect masked as respect. I find it very interesting how difficult it can be to teach young boys boundaries without making them think that all women are frigid.

Just to be clear: I’m not trying to say anything bad about you or your parents here. I think this can just be a genuinely difficult thing to teach young boys no matter what. It may even be that we—the (once) young boys—are the ones who misinterpreted what our parents were saying, interpreting it as more dire than they intend because we lacked a context through which we could relate to what was being said (if we were taught very young) or because we had already formulated our own ideas based on media impressions and peers (if we were taught later in life).

@Blackberry But when she says “it’s okay to disrespect me,” surely what she means is “you’re being overly prudish for my tastes and need to break through some of your misconceptions about women.” She doesn’t want to be disrespected—not genuinely, at least, though perhaps she might want you to act as if you do as part of some fantasy—but rather wants you to stop acting on certain ideas of what it takes to respect women.

@SavoirFaire That makes more sense.

@SavoirFaire I wish I could give you a thousand GAs for that.