What Women REALLY Want
It’s the sexual question that has kept men enthralled.
Even the granddad of psychiatry Sigmund Freud, who thought he knew a lot about sex, admitted to a female student; “The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is, What does a woman want?”
Now a new breed of female researchers and clinicians is coming ever closer to finding the key to womens sexuality – and as a recent Oprah show related – the answers are raising eyebrows. It’s not, it appears, mind-blowing sex.
Oprah’s show was sparked by a The New York Times Magazine article exploring female sexual arousal “What Do Women Want?” in which female sex therapist Dr. Marta Meana claimed that when it comes to sex, what women really want is to be wanted. “Being desired is the real orgasm,” she says.
Being Desired Biggest Turn On
Dr. Meana, a professor of psychology at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas has been studying women and sexual desire for 20 years. She says that while moments of pleasure are great, it’s the anticipation and buildup to those moments that really excite women.
“I’m not knocking orgasms,” she says. “But being desired is extremely arousing for women. The reason for that is that being desired means that a man doesn’t just want to have sex. He wants to have sex with you.”
This desire to feel desired explains one of the most common female sexual fantasies—being dominated by an attractive man.
“When women talk about domination, what they’re trying to communicate is ‘I was so wanted by someone I wanted,’” Dr. Meana says. This fantasy is not about coercion or violence.
Keeping Mystery Important
On the other hand, some women don’t want sex at all, and Dr. Meana says that doesn’t necessarily mean a relationship is in jeopardy. “Bad sex happens to good couples all the time,” she says. “No sex happens to good couples.”
Many women in long-term relationships get worried when they feel the passion start to fizzle, but Dr. Meana says that can be fixed. “Passion is dependent on novelty, discovery, desire,” she says. “What happens in relationships is we fall into these old patterns, and we start thinking we’ve figured everything out about each other, and we really haven’t.”
Happily married women often face a paradox when it comes to sex because the very thing that makes them happy—closeness with their partner—is what gets in the way of desire.
“[In a study I conducted], the couples were in each other’s lives so much that they’re almost the same person at some point,” Dr. Meana says. “There’s no sense of otherness, no mystery, no excitement.”
