What is a woman’s sexual nature?

 Prof. Dr. Shere Hite:

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Women are more excited by seducing and being seduced, teasing and playing, creating sexual tension and desire, than by a focus mainly on orgasm. This is in part because orgasm often does not end sexual arousal in women, the way it does (for a few minutes) in men. During sex, women generally like to roll around, enjoy full-length body contact, kissing, stroking and touching intimate parts of the other person’s body and being touched.

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Female sexual ‘nature’ seems multi-faceted. Women often say that they are not getting enough ‘foreplay’ with men Another part of sexual expression or ‘foreplay’ that women find exciting is ‘exhibitionism’ -- dressing up, displaying the body.

Eroticism is a vast, largely unexplored area which includes dressing up, playing, talking, making up stories, posing, inviting someone else to be involved sensually with you. Passion and desire are the objective, feeling one’s body come alive with another person.

Women want men to rethink their idea of sex, to include much more of this sensuality. Most now think sex with a man should mean forging a new definition of sexuality between them, rethinking the question of who orgasms when and how, the questions of which activities are included, experimenting together. Sex, as the first Hite Report proposed, is a cultural rather than a biological institution; our society’s idea of sex is formulated to suit reproductive needs, not ‘instinctive’ ones, and so can change. Will women now redefine sexuality? Women are making many changes in how they see and practice intimate physical relations – how they express and share their bodies. Though the choices are theirs, really theirs, it can still take some time to wake up and see that one is free, in charge of one’ s life, that all decisions are possible; like sleeping beauty waking up, after 2,000 years of misinformation women need a little time to begin thinking clearly. Unfortunately, women are currently encouraged to be ‘active’ in ‘male copycat ways’, not in their own new ways – for example, performing actions that demonstrate intercourse is making them more and more excited (may or may not be true), ‘initiating’ sexual activities long defined to be ‘sexual ’ by men, or actively ‘acting up’ (counter to the ladies-don’t-like 'sex', or Maria-is-pure-and-good stereotypes of women), wearing ‘sexy shocking outfits ’, etc.

In reality, being active in sex has an entirely different meaning for women, a meaning that is only beginning to unfold. The semi pornographic images of women visible on so many advertising posters and in television commercials (used by fundamentalists to point to ‘the decadence of the secular West’, and women’s ‘new selfishness’ in this environment) do not represent ‘who women are sexually’ but rather the use and selling of women’s bodies by a double standard tradition. It is no wonder, with female sexuality equated with what is shown in many ads, that some women today recoil, deciding ‘the old ways were best’, imagining that women were more respected then – whether or not this is historically accurate. One of the keys to female sexuality during the next hundred years, I am sure, will be that women will begin initiating a new type of sexuality – something that will cause a true revolution in sexuality, one that has as yet barely begun – despite all the courageous changes women have made in their sexual behaviour and private lives, and all the laughter at the sexual stereotyping of women. Women have hardly begun to show who they are sexually.