Women’s chromosomes are different from men’s and that makes them less prone to dreaming about sex and more choosy about the men they fall for.
It is as rare to find a man who does not enjoy pornography and dirty jokes as it is to find a woman who does. Blue films, girlie magazines, voyeurism, writing graffiti on lavatory walls and recounting risqué after-dinner anecdotes are almost an entirely masculine phenomenon. When Beatrice Faust posed the question: ‘If women are going to have equality with men, why not have pornography for women?’ she admits that she was confronted with ‘many kinds of silence’ from her female audience. Women are simply not turned on by pornography; ‘their engines are similar (to those of men) but the starter-motors are very different.’ Why?
Beatrice Faust analysed this curious difference in the male and female approach to porn in an engaging thesis, Women: Sex and Pornography. The plain and simple answer is biological: women’s chromosomes are different from men’s and that makes them less prone to dreaming about sex and more choosy about the men they fall for. Men do not need much stimuli to be turned on, they can engage in sex with almost any woman regardless of mental or emotional appeal, whereas women, though capable of having sex with any man will only be roused by men they find attractive. Men respond to images, notions, dilly stories, women to sweet murmurings and the gentle touch. Hence the jingle:
Higamous hogamous,
Woman’s monogamous,
Hogamous higamous,
Man is polygamous.
According to Faust women wish to be loved in the manner they make love to their babies. Men, on the other hand, ‘enjoy sex so much and need intimacy so little that they cannot understand why a woman should quibble about such trivia as where, when and with whom she makes love.’ Hence, the conclusion summed up the saying: ‘Marriage is the price men pay for sex, sex is the price women pay for marriage’. Despite women’s lib, it remains a man’s world with a man-made four-point programme of four A’s prescribed for women: they must accept their men, adapt to them, admire them to boost their egos and appreciate them as bread-winners. We are back to square one.