Guys have to realize women get horny, too

（Mainichi Japan） January 6, 2008

"My boyfriend is a high school teacher. He uses birth control without fail and is never demanding. I love that about him, but when I try to initiate sex, he always gives me really dirty looks. He doesn't seem to understand that women get really horny at times, too," a woman who'll turn 23 next month wrote to me in an e-mail.
Women do have sexual urges. It's really tough for the woman that she has to get her partner to understand something as basic as this. But in our world, what's regarded as perfectly normal for men can attract some unsavory attention when women want the same thing. Even though men and women have different body structures, do their sexual urges differ?
Judging by recent research that shows there is a difference between the sexes in the part of the brain called the hypothalamus, it would seem so. I'll go into difficult medical terminology for a second, but the brain has what's called a genital center. In it, there is what's called the sexual dimorphism nucleus, which is the medial preoptic area's nerve nucleus, which can be found in the hypothalamus.
The sexual dimorphism nucleus differs greatly in size between the sexes -- at least twice as large in men as in women. As the brain is structured with such large differences between the sexes, there are significant differences between male and female sexual behavior. It should be noted, though, that this is all going on in the brain.
You can measure whether sexual arousal has occurred by checking the amount of blood that has flowed to the genitals. There have been experiments to check the difference between men and women. One test showed pornography to both men and women, and found there was no difference in the level of arousal. Women became aroused when they watched pornography. However, those women who had been told in advance that they were going to see a porno movie showed an increase of blood that proved there was added arousal, while men did not become aroused until they actually saw the movie. Women's sex is strongly mental, while men's is presentational. Because of this, it's hard for other people to understand a woman's sexual urges.
In Masters and Johnson's "Human Sexual Reaction," the American sex academics point out that men quickly attain pleasure and rapidly lose interest once orgasm has been attained while women take long to be pleased and it takes them more time to come down once they have achieved climax. Brain waves have also confirmed this. There is no way to measure how much pleasure is gained, but it is a fact that the female orgasm is much more pleasurable than the climax experienced by men. Brain waves called theta waves differ in how they materialize in men and women and while women are going through orgasm, theta waves appear throughout the entire brain, while in men they are only in one little area only one-tenth of as active as in women. If a man experienced a female orgasm (which is, of course, impossible), it is said that the shock to his brain would kill him.
Considering these matters, let's get on to how the young woman should approach the boyfriend who doesn't like it when she says she's horny. Women get aroused, even though it may be difficult to tell on the surface, so it's important that she lets her boyfriend know those times when she really feels like sex. While enjoying the afterglow of sex, she should mention that the enjoyment and pleasure they just felt is the reason why she sometimes really wants to make love to her boyfriend. Everybody is gentler and more receptive after sex. Her boyfriend may listen and act on what she says during their afterglow period. It might be a good idea for her to prepare him this way.
Rather than letting him know directly that she feels like sex, don't you think it's a better idea to wait until a time when you are both receptive to each other? Rather than directly coming out and saying she wants sex, she should use a subtler way to get her message across. Maybe, the couple could work on creating signals that show to their partner that they're in the mood, maybe by playing footsies. She may do well by becoming a woman who treats a man's heart gently. (By Dr. Kunio Kitamura, special to the Mainichi)
* I used the book "Sekkusu no Subete ga Wakaru Hon (Everything There is to Know About Sex)" as a reference for this column.
NOTE TO READERS: Dr. Kitamura is on holiday this week. This column originally appeared in Japanese on the now defunct MSN-Mainichi Interactive site on June 18, 2004.