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"While most men are 'preheated,' most women warm up to sex slowly."
Alamy
While most men are "preheated," most women warm up to sex slowly. Learning the reasons for this difference can help men become better lovers.
Most men over 50 can remember experiencing libido as a strong drive — akin, almost, to hunger: They felt horny and went after sex. (Indeed, some still do.) But recent research shows that women experience libido as an urge far less compelling than that. In a landmark study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1999, for example, University of Chicago sociologist Edward O. Laumann revealed his findings that 30 percent of women have low or no libido. (This sexual desire difference is one of the most frequent causes for women and couples to seek sex therapy.)
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But there was also a silver lining: If these women have sex and enjoy it, they eventually experience desire.
The overlooked key to women's desire
In 2000 and 2002, a University of British Columbia psychiatrist named Rosemary Basson interviewed hundreds of women who reported feeling "erotically neutral" at the start of sex. Only when they started making love — and enjoyed it — did they warm up and feel actual desire.
In the years since then, other researchers have corroborated her findings. In the largest study, a survey of 3,687 women, Portuguese sex researcher Ana Carvalheira found that women who said that sex preceded desire outnumbered those who reported desire first by a margin of 2 to 1. Today, sex therapists increasingly accept Basson's view that for many (if not most) women, desire is not the cause of sex, but its result.
But if women don't feel lust before sex, why do they make love? According to Basson, it's not primarily to have orgasms, but rather to share intimacy. This means men become intimate to gain sex, whereas women have sex to gain intimacy.
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