RECLAIMING WOMEN'S DESIRE, ENTRY 13 thief #11 woman are (more) affected by negative messages

Women are (more) affected by society’s negative messages
I think women are as sexual (or more sexual) than men. “All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which in women is insatiable.” Malleus Maleficarum, 1487. And multiple organisms. Need I say more? But I will. Sex researchers, Masters and Johnson, state that women's sexual capacity “infinitely surpasses that of man” and hypothesized that left without any “regulation” women would have voracious sexual appetites. This regulation is the negative cultural messages that have attacked women's sexuality for ions. Masters and Johnson found that women have a “significantly greater susceptibility to negatively based psychosocial influences” and this creates “a natural state of psycho sexual social balance between the sexes that has been culturally established to neutralize womens biophysical superiority.” 
Negative cultural messages that suppress women’s desire have actually succeeded in separating women’s bodies from their minds. Studies that measure the relationship between the mind and body during arousal, called arousal concordance, such as those of sexologist Meredith Chivers, have found that heterosexual women are physically aroused (as measured by vaginal blood flow and lubrication) by a wider variety of sexual stimuli than men but when asked, they stated that they were not aroused.  The genitals of heterosexual women reacted to erotic scenes of men, women, couples and even apes, to a lesser extent and their brains did not even know it. Heterosexual men, on the other hand, were physically aroused only by women coupled or alone and their subjective reports of being aroused or not aroused mirrored their genital reactions. Culture has demanded that women ignore physical desires (as well as aches and pains). By ignoring our own needs we can better care for others in bed and otherwise (women do not know how to receive sexually. We are trained to give pleasure to others.) and we are better able to be controlled. The result is that we are now conditioned to be out of touch with our bodies and not able to tap into our desires. 
Even though women’s sexuality suffers more by arousal non concordance, we are all living too much from “the neck up”. Introspection is the awareness of what is taking place in your body, what it’s feeling. And it’s a lost art. We work when we’re exhausted, don’t eat when we’re hungry, eat when we’re full, endure unwanted touch, pass our days scrunched in front of a screen that doesn’t engage the physical self at all. We have little opportunity to practice and create competency in actually knowing what we feel in our body. All of this turns off the thousands of nerves throughout our bodies so we become insensate. We don’t know what is a yes for us or a no or a maybe. We don’t know what each of those feels like. Good news: sensation and pleasure can be learned. 
When I was 14 years old my doctor, a general family practitioner, sat me down and said the following: “When you’re ready to have sex it’s going to be great! However, listen carefully. Women need specific touches in specific places specific ways to feel pleasure. And men do not know how to please a woman, so you’re going to have to teach him, tell him and show him. If it feels good, keep doing it. If it doesn’t feel good, speak up."
I think this made a huge difference in my life and I only recently realized how unique this was.  My husband describes our early sex life as a constant tutorial of what I wanted. He said I was very vocal about what felt good and what didn’t. I don’t really remember this but that's probably because I didn’t think twice about it— I thought it was normal. And it should be. I credit this early explicit dialogue for setting the stage for our exceptional sex life. 
In Katherine Rowland’s book The Pleasure Gap, she states that “Low desire is a result of how, owing to the greater culture, we hold ourselves back, condemn our fantasies,foreclose on what we really want, and sell ourselves short on the idea that sex and love must look a certain way. Women push ourselves toward physical encounters that we either do not want or for which we have not allowed desire to adequately develop. Sexual healing and erotic growth have little to do with tricks or techniques or even how we choose to configure our connections, and almost everything to do with liberating the imagination, with sensing an internal flicker of I want that-whether that was painting with body fluids, being dominated, or just having missionary style sex that lasts longer than three to seven minutes- and feeling empowered to act accordingly.” 
To wrap up this chapter I want to leave us with one woman’s description of what it’s like to realize that her desire has been stolen, and start to reclaim it. For her, she had to focus on what it is to feel desire. In this culture, for all the reasons previously stated and more, in partnered relationships, women are often the lower drive partner and they do not get to steep in the sensations of desire. It is like being force fed your entire life and then suddenly being allowed to work up an appetite. She felt hunger for the first time and that feeling of hunger is amazing. Women who have experienced this transformation realize the centrality of sexuality in their lives.  “Sexuality has made all of my life so much richer, physically, emotionally. It is the cornerstone to me feeling alive and joyful in the world. And I would love to have that part of me turned on until I die.”

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