One of the About Me questions that OK Cupid asks is:

True or False: Orgasms are the most important part of sex.

My answer would be False.

Someone once asked me why I don’t seem to apply any rules or guidelines as to when I have sex with someone when I had admitted that I, like most women, don’t orgasm via intercourse. They didn’t understand the point of having sex if that was the case. I explained that people have sex for different reasons. For the most part, I think, men have sex to release the poison, as they say. But I honestly believe women have sex for a variety of reasons, and only some of them actually have to do with gratification or pleasure.

I was listening to a woman talk recently and she was going on about how some of her male friends all like to describe her as a gay man with a vagina. Because, like, she’s soooooooooo like a guy when it comes to sex and she’s omigod super sexual blah blah. Frankly, admissions like that just make me sigh and roll my eyes. I tend to think in the majority of those situations, where the woman believes she is all super hyper sexual “like a guy”, she’s basing that assumption not on how men actually are, but how she thinks they are. There are obviously men who will sleep with anything with a pulse and don’t care if they actually like the person or not and don’t get attached, etc. But only a few of those men are actually proud of that. And those men would be either be emotionally damaged assholes or average douchebags. So I’m not getting why having a similar sex drive to a man like that is something to brag about. Most men, especially those who bed women they wouldn’t be seen with in the light of day (and we’ve all done that), keep that information to them selves. For whatever reason, some women absolutely lose all ability to filter their thoughts and determine what should be said aloud and what should be kept to themselves.  When women say things like how they’re so like a guy and can have sex indiscriminately, they’re actually telling people more about themselves than they realize. With that one statement alone, they’re letting people know that their opinions and ideas of men are based upon the fact that they have abysmal taste in guys and have been pumped and dumped more times than they care to remember.

Back to the original topic…why we have sex. Like I said, I think men do it mostly to get off. But since it’s far more difficult for a woman to orgasm through intercourse alone, I have to believe that there’s something else in it for them. For men, an orgasm is pretty much guaranteed. That’s not the case for women. Which leads me to wonder what, other than an orgasm, is a woman’s pay off for having sex. My belief is that the main benefit for many (but certainly not all) women to having sex is attention and affection. The sex is a means to an end. Which would make sense since I think the women who go on about how they are so “like men” when it comes to sex are actually seeking attention when that say such things.  They think it makes them sound more attractive somehow. And it does, only that attraction doesn’t last after the guy climaxes. Then he’s likely to look at the woman as rather lonely and sad, because he knows why she said what she said: to get his attention.

Now, I don’t think it’s a bad thing to have sex when what you really want is attention or affection. Sometimes we eat when we’re depressed, but convince ourselves that we’re doing it out of hunger. The problem, in my eyes, is when people don’t know why they’re having sex.  We’ve thrown around the term “self-actualized” here a few times. Being self-actualized means having a cognitive understanding of what motivates us to do and say the things we do. There is nothing more dangerous, to me anyway, than someone who doesn’t understand what truly motivates them. They’re a liability to themselves and to other people. It’s difficult if not impossible to reason with them.

Not knowing why you’re having sex is what most often leads to inordinate expectations, hurt feelings and defensiveness.  In the moment, we ladies like to believe that we’re there with that man because we want to get off. But, and let’s be honest here, how often does that actually occur?

I guess what I don’t understand is why it’s apparently so shameful for some women to admit that we have sex for any other reason other than an orgasm. Sometimes we want to be touched, or we don’t want to feel alone, or we want to be dominated. And sometimes we just want to  feel connected to another human being. Something about the experience of being penetrated, like the initial rush of pain that we might feel upon that first tentative thrust, awakens something inside of us.

Or is it really just all about the orgasm?