Sex Starts In the Brain

Sex “begins in the brain” for both males and females. Although arousal has the same starting point for both sexes, there are some differences when it comes to “what” will arouse them.

Anne Moir and David Jessel, in their book Brain Sex: The Real Difference Between Men and Women suggest women feel emotions while men see body parts. This is why women are not turned on by anatomically revealing pictures of genitalia while men are highly stimulated by them.

Sex researchers and biological evolutionists say this is because there are significant differences between the male and female brain. This means that in most cases, men and women do not behave, feel, think, or respond in the same ways to the same kind of stimuli.

The male brain is believed to be highly specialized, using specific parts of one brain hemisphere at any one time. By contrast, the female brain uses both hemispheres most of the time. This may be why women are so much better at multi-tasking.

Men tend to block out unrelated information and distractions. This makes them ideal candidates for seeing sex as a mode of immediate gratification.

Women naturally see “the bigger picture” and take every possibility into consideration. Even while in the throes of orgasm, a woman is able to see the two of you walking down the aisle, having children and dying in each other’s arms. This is simply too much for the more linear male brain to handle.

Men are able to compartmentalize information, stimulus, emotions, relationships in their brains, while women tend to link everything together into one big kitchen sink of feelings, issues and plans. The result is that men are able to have sex without being connected emotionally or even being attracted to an individual while a woman is practically incapable of that.

Another difference is that men have as much as 20 times more testosterone in their systems than do women. This makes men typically more aggressive, dominant and more completely focused on the physical aspects of sex.

In men, the dominant sense is vision, which is typically not the case with women. This is perhaps why our society places so much emphasis on a woman’s appearance. All of a woman’s senses are, in some respects, more finely tuned than those of a man with the sense of touch being very important but all of the senses being more equal to one another than a man’s.

Of course all of this has a great impact on the way men and women view sexuality and intimacy. No wonder there is so much strife!