'Why Is He So Focused on My Orgasm?'

Source: Star Flame/Pixabay

As a psychologist, you might think I often hear women complain about their inattentive male partners' disinterest in their pleasure and orgasms. Surprisingly, more often, women talk about their partner's plaintive questioning about their orgasm because it feels less like an adult's interest in their pleasure and more like a juvenile request for unending reassurance.

Men are stereotypically thought to be narcissistic and self-centered lovers, focused primarily on their own pleasure and largely uninterested in their partners' experience, except as an instrument for their own gratification. One man told me that he thought of sex as "masturbation with a woman in the general vicinity." In contrast, when surveyed, men said that satisfying their partner was more important to them than their own pleasure and that what turned them on the most was depictions of intense sexual pleasure in women. Men's pornography reflects this powerful need to please in its images of women who are overcome with desire in response to their male partner's expert ministrations. How can men be both self-centered lovers interested only in their own pleasure and simultaneously be more focused on their partner's pleasure than their own? The paradox is readily resolved with the understanding that men's focus on their partners' pleasure is only partially an act of generosity and primarily an effort to stave off their own feelings of insecurity.

There is an old saying that women need to feel loved to want to have sex and that men need to have sex to feel loved. Feeling an almost desperate need for the affirmation that comes with sexually pleasing their partners creates a deep vulnerability for many men. Sometimes, the physical intimacy of sex is the only way that men can feel truly loved, but seeking that reassurance requires men to be vulnerable in ways that can evoke their deepest fears of abandonment.

Women's orgasms are critically important to men for similar reasons. Men often report feeling more masculine when their partner has an orgasm. Research suggests that the more insecure a man feels about his masculinity, the more critical it is to him that his partner has an orgasm. Women understand this and so have been known to fake orgasms to reassure their partners. One woman said, "If he doesn't think I had an orgasm, he won't give up, just keeps at me until I feel pressured." This kind of pressure is about more than generosity on the man's part. It can also reflect men's need to prove themselves adequate and worthy of being loved and to forestall their fears of abandonment.

As you would expect, men's fears of being sexually inadequate can have a significant effect on their relationships with their partners. Noted sex therapist Esther Perel says that men's reliance on sex to reassure themselves about their larger sense of adequacy leads them to be so other-centered in sex that they are afraid that if they truly inhabit their bodies and surrender to the experience of their own pleasure for just a moment, their partner will be hurt or angry, and will punish or even abandon them. As a result, sexuality for men is often filled with more anxiety than pleasure, more focused on performance and pleasing their partner, and their own pleasure is often overlooked. Men often approach women in a way that doesn't say "I want you" as much as "Do you want me?" Men are being careful, which is what they think they are supposed to do, but taken to extremes, this can be a turn-off for women, more like a little boy asking for permission than a man expressing his desire for them.

This is why men's sexual fantasies are often about women who are ravenous in their sexual desire. It is not just about power and control; it is also about anxiety. In these fantasies, the women's clear desire relieves men of worrying about whether their partners want them or if they will offend a woman with their own sexual desire. These fantasies allow men to set loose their own repressed sexual desire to focus on their own pleasure without the risk of being rejected.

Paradoxically, when women meet men's fantasies by being more open about their sexual desires, men can experience women's open expression of desire as a demand rather than an invitation, a command to perform, or to please her. History is full of examples of men viewing women's sexuality as dangerous. Delilah brought down Sampson by seducing him, the Sirens brought Odysseus to near ruin with their seductive cries, and Eve brought about humanity's fall by seducing Adam to eat the apple. Even today, athletes are superstitious about having sex before a big match, believing it drains some of the power they need to perform. Not surprisingly, these dynamics often show up as inhibited sexual desire in men. In one study, 15% of men in long-term partnerships reported they had lost almost all interest in sex for a period of three months or longer in the past year. This is not about aging; the highest rate was in men aged 35 to 44.

Somehow, we have managed to create a dynamic in which both men and women feel terribly anxious, deeply unsure of themselves, and cut off from their own sense of pleasure. The best we have been able to do is cobble together a narrative in which men are the sexual initiators to reassure them that they are in control, and women demur in order not to intimidate men with any open display of sexual desire. But then the women need to succumb to men's approaches, which reassures men of their adequacy and gives women permission to surrender to their own sexual desire.

Excerpted, in part, from Hidden in Plain Sight: How Men's Fears of Women Shape Their Intimate Relationships. (Lasting Impact Press).