According to studies I've read, 90% of women cannot experience orgasm from purely vaginal stimulation. Why? I have no idea. I have no idea why some women can achieve one from non-genital stimuli. No clue--I don't think scientists really do, either, though this study is clearly an attempt to start figuring it out. The end result is, again, the same--but the thing done to cause the end result is different. The majority of women require more complicated maneuvering than men do, is the short, delicate way of putting it. Now, I could go off on a rant about this, but it would get into sex and politics and all sorts of things in far too much detail for me to post it in open forum. However, I believe most men are ignorant on the subject; heck, I'm pretty sure most women are ignorant on the subject. They think something's wrong with them, but they're perfectly normal.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

For a woman to a much greater degree then men, they have to want to have intercourse for it to be pleasurable. My knowledge of this is admittedly second hand, but it comes from my frank discussions with my mother. Yeah we used to talk about things like that. From what she told me, mere stimulation is not enough. Which again makes sense in that a woman is in mostly the sellers position in the sexual economy. I think we should use different words for the male and female orgasm, they are very different phenomena.

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I don't think men get much pleasure out of an intercourse they do not desire, either. But, unquestionably, the mechanics and the hydraulics and the neurology of orgasm are much more straightforward in males. Which in turn makes men less likely not to be in the mood for intercourse than women...

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

Not so much straightforward as different. With men in general ultimate reproductive success means the most different partners. With woman in general it is the best partner. Of course reproduction isn't the only reason we want intercourse, but the principle still basically applies. With such differences, is it no wonder men and woman have such different thoughts and reactions to intercourse?

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It's a complicated mixture of physical factors and psychological factors, to be sure, especially for women.

However, I don't think I agree with you when you say that for men "ultimate reproductive success means the most different partners". If that were a biological imperative, shouldn't it apply to all males, regardless of species? But in many species of birds both sexes are monogamous -- and much more so than humans.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

No it doesn't. In many (all?) seahorses the male carries the eggs, that is a biological imperative for them. In all placental mammals the female carries the young, and provides nourishment and oxygen through a placenta, that is an biological imperative for placental mammals. If humans were naturally monogamous, we wouldn't have the divorce rate that we do, we wouldn't have too worry about our partner cheating on us, there wouldn't be cultures with polygamy.
I am not saying woman don't like variation, just that men can want it for it's own sake. Of course, not all the men that do, try, and practically none that do try, get it. But that doesn't disprove the fact that for a man to leave the most copies of his genetic material after he is gone, the optimal strategy is most woman, most times. Admittedly it is more complicated then that, unlike with most mammals, human males provide much more care for their offspring.

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No; I'm going to have to go with straightforward on this. The biological mechanisms are pretty direct for male stimulation, but take some extra attention for (most) females.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Suit yourself. As a male whose only direct experience with stimulation is masturbation, in general I guess one could say it is more 'straightforward" I guess. I felt (likely erroneously) that by 'straightforward' you where implying that the male system was merely simpler.

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I think I was the one who first used the term 'straightforward' in this thread, and I was referring especially to stimulation, not to the physical make-up (the organs) of the male reproductive system.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

Oh I am sorry. But you really didn't make that clear. Hydrolics in my view is a rather physical thing.

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Well, stimulation is physical. I just meant that it's easier to stimulate a male than a female.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

Fine, fine.

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"The same" in this case doesn't have to mean "identical"; close enough to have the same word applied (orgasm) is close enough, even if there are subcategories (different kinds of orgasms). The different reactions that different women have to different methods of stimulation of different spots (clitoris, G-spot, another at the back/top of the vaginal canal that doesn't seem to have a name), or of the vaginal lining in general, seem to correspond to the different reactions that different men have to different methods of stimulation of men's roughly equivalent spots (glans, another point just below & behind the glans, scrotum, possibly one more that got buried inside near the prostate gland). Aside from the fact that some people of either sex might feel almost nothing from one of them or might even find one of them painful, there's also the possibility of having different kinds of orgasms from different ones or by stimulating them in different combinations. (Check out "Cosmo". It's good for some amusingly nutty psychological stuff, but there's also almost always an article about not just having orgasms, but even specific kinds and what causes one kind but not another. I work at a convenience store, so it's easy to see how similar the headlines are month after month.)

The pattern I've picked up from women who talk about how difficult/impossible it is in any detail is that they seem to have only one idea of how sex is supposed to be done (meaning method, not necessarily position: in and out as fast and hard as possible, regardless of position; no other possible directions of movement, or other possible speeds, or other possible amounts of force)... and either can't think of doing it any other way or can think of more effective methods but think those don't count in some way.

Perhaps many men are stuck on the same idea as the only possibility as well. I don't know how everyone in our culture got this idea, but I notice that it corresponds with practically all of our language's slang ways to refer to sex, so it could be pretty deeply embedded, which would explain why people seem to think it's so automatic and requisite, and think of alternatives as difficult or obscure instead of merely different.

In that case, it would be not a matter of how difficult or easy it is for whom by nature, but a matter of choosing one method over others even though that method makes it that way... not that the right way(s) is/are so hard to figure out or to do, but that people just get stuck on one that's often the wrong one for the moment.

I'm a woman who's had a child and currently has a boyfriend with whom she's approaching her fifth anniversary. It's easier and simpler to stimulate a man than a woman.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

I am a male who (thankfully) has no children what-so-ever.

It is way easier to operate my equipment than to operate a females.

The biological imperative is different (as discussed earlier in the thread).

I believe that an accurate analogy would be this. (Completely work and School Safe, I promise).

Yes; I've seen that before. However, women have one switch that works quite well; we leave it in plain sight, too. How is it that men have such a hard time finding it?

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Uh... well... uh...

I dunna, personally I don't think it's all that complex. "Hey hun, does this feel good?"

"No, retard, two inches to the left."

That image is actually a comment on psychology, not anatomy. Everyone's anatomy is much simpler, more straightforward, and easier to figure out than female psychology.

OK, now this thread's turned into a standup comedy routine. All we need now is someone to talk about how white guys can't dance, and we'll have a whole evening's lineup on Comedy Central.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort