Why Women Are Louder in Bed than Men

by RedpoleQ

Why Are Women Louder in Bed than Men?

It’s an intriguing question and the book, Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships, offers a even more intriguing answer…

I read this book after watching a TED talk by one of the author’s called, Are We Designed to Be Sexual Omnivores which gives a very different interpretation of human sexuality from the standard evolutionary psychology perspective.

The standard narrative says that women and men strive to exploit one another in the mating market place.  Men exploit women (and other men) by trying to put in the least amount of effort into as many offspring as possible either by locking down a primary partner and devoting their resources to those children while trying to impregnate as many other women as possible.

Women exploit men by trying to lock down a primary partner who has resource value while simultaneously dallying with more genetically fit men who are less likely to stick around but offer supreme genes.  Hence, women settling down with a “beta provider” while fucking the alpha male on the side.

…as depicted in the standard narrative, human sexual prehistory was characterized by deceit, disappointment, and despair. According to this view, both males and females are, by nature, liars, whores, and cheats. At our most basic levels, we’re told, heterosexual men and women have evolved to trick one another while selfishly pursuing zero-sum, mutually antagonistic genetic agendas—even though this demands the betrayal of the people we claim to love most sincerely. Original sin indeed.

-Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships, pg. 60, loc. 1077-1081. Kindle Edition

In Sex at Dawn, the authors point out various behavioral and biological characteristics about men and women that don’t quite match up with this narrative and one of them is the difference in orgasmic patterns between men and women where women need more time to “achieve” them but can have many in succession while men finish more quickly and recover fastest with a new sexual partner.

The authors believe that this along with many other clues such as the makeup of sperm in men, point to a much more promiscuous lifestyle among our hunter-gatherer ancestors that changed when we humans adopted agriculture and with it the ideas of property ownership which they believe have extended to modern sexual possessiveness.

There are many examples and inferences drawn from studies of other apes like bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas and others, examining how their physiology and societal structures match up and compare with one another and with humans.

The main value in reading the book is in it’s challenge the standard narrative and the overview of the scientific research examined from a new angle.  In the video below, he explains what “female copulatory vocalization”–how loud women are as compared to men in all cultures around the world(ironic given that women claim less physical enjoyment from sex than men) suggests that our female ancestors enjoyed multiple copulations with multiple men successively.

Are We Designed to Be Sexual Omnivores?

[ted id=1931]

I highly recommend this book as its a fairly easy and very fun read, and really made sense of a lot of puzzle pieces that never quite fit together for me as I’ve deepened my experience with and understanding of women and female sexuality.

Get it from Amazon for your kindle, tablet, smartphone or in paperback: