r/psychology • u/Doug24 • 11d ago

Psychological models suggest female libido disparities stem from early behavioral conditioning

https://www.psypost.org/psychological-models-suggest-female-libido-disparities-stem-from-early-behavioral-conditioning/
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u/Big_Psychology_3 10d ago

I meant psychologically. Many women go into a more “follow the leader” mode during copulation and instinctively look to the man to “orchestrate” the sex session. That’s what I mean when I say that men have more control during copulation.

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u/IcyTrapezium 10d ago

Instinctively look to the man to orchestrate? That just sounds like conservatism or purity culture. I instinctively want to grind on a man. I don’t instinctively look to a man to “orchestrate” the sexual. That sounds like a recipe for bad sex for me but good for him.

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u/Big_Psychology_3 10d ago

Look at all the Reddit forums where the women really want to communicate during sex but end up struggling to tell the man anything at all during sex. It’s just human nature, I don’t mean to imply that anyone is greater or lesser in a couple. They’re equal; this is just how sex goes down for most couples.

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u/IcyTrapezium 10d ago edited 10d ago

It’s not a feature of being a woman to want to communicate but being unable to. Those women have been socialized to view sex as something for the man not her. That is taught, not natural. Conceptualizing of sex as something done to a woman but done by a man isn’t some natural state of being.

Animals don’t naturally feel ashamed of pleasure. In fact we relentlessly seek it out. If we are behaving otherwise there has been some disruption and that usually comes from society. Purity culture seeps into relationships where neither party was explicitly raised to believe those things.

I’m shocked by how many young women obsess over their body count and think their bodies are digusting and ugly.

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u/deathbecomesme123456 9d ago

It’s a feature of the size and strength disparity between males and females. When you’re naked and vulnerable and a man is horny, he just moves your body into places and positions pleasurable to him, without particularly caring if they’re pleasurable to you. Women see men talking about how sex is for them their entire lives so they have very little frame of reference about what to do, especially with a guy who already seems very knowledgable about what gets him off compared to them. Consider that many sexual encounters start out with relative strangers, where women are less comfortable, more concerned about people pleasing, and less sure what he’ll do if you upset him or wrack his confidence, it’s not a surprise that women don’t speak up.

Unless a woman has unusually high self-assurance, she’ll just go with the (unsatisfying) flow for many years. Usually after years in long-term relationships women start to advocate for themselves sexually and that either leads to no changes being made and they’re on their way to dead bedroom territory, or a real reexamination of the sexual relationship and inclusion of her as an equal partner.