Think you’re turned on by the same fantasies that turn on most other women? Take my completely unscientific test and find out. Which one of the following scenes turns your button “on"?
#1. A swarthy, suave, and sophisticated man is escorting you to your car after a perfect first-date at a five star restaurant. You watch his huge bicep bulge under his Dolce & Gabana suit as he reaches for your door handle and pulls hard. Suddenly he grabs your shoulders and forces you into the driver's seat, all the while whispering naughty, filthy things in your ear. Just as you’re wondering if you should scream or moan, he pins you under his hard body and rips open your silk blouse.
#2. At last, you’ve got him, the most powerful man in your organization, the Executive Chairman and commander of your professional universe. It had started innocently enough. As you raced down the hall to your meeting, you stumbled over your 3” heels, flying into him head first, your hands reaching forward like Wonder Woman. He grabbed you firmly, gently holding you up by your waist. That’s when you looked up and your eyes locked. He gently brushed your hair out of your flushing face. You could feel his warm soft breath on your cheek. He smiled and asked your name, and a rush of exhilaration ripped through your body leaving you speechless. He led you into big corner office so you could "recover."
#3. It had been a demanding week, the worst in memory. The minute you walked in the house, the DKNY outfit starting coming off, piece by piece. As you passed through the kitchen, now clad only in bras and panties, you see his white-shirted back bent over a pot of bubbling sauce with a tasting spoon in hand. He turns, dropping the spoon in the pot, and runs to you, arms open wide. "Give me some good lovin' honey!" he says squeezing hard. You kiss him quickly and make a beeline for the bedroom, kicking off your Ferragamo as you stop at the threshold. He follows behind, his apron splattered with tomato seeds, two glasses of red wine in hand. As you throw yourself on the bed, stretching out spread eagle, he hands you a wine glass and crawls beside your exhausted body. “Is it okay if I give you a foot rub, hon?” he whispers lovingly.
So what will it be? The domination fantasy? The money-and-power fantasy? The adoring, cuddly mate fantasy?
If Marta Meana, a professor of psychology at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, had to speculate, most women would probably go with the “ravisher who is so overcome by a craving focused on the woman that he cannot contain himself.”
This, according to a recent New York Times article about the science of female desire. Meana explains further: “With apologies for the regressive, anti-feminist sounding answer, he transgresses societal codes in order to seize her, and she, feeling herself to be the unique object of his desire, is electrified by her own reactive charge and surrenders.”
Meana eventually puts that in terms I get: women want the caring caveman, she says. Qualities she adds that are embodied by the actor, Denzel Washington (What? Not Shaft?). “He communicates that kind of power and that he is a good man,” explains Meana.
Has Meana finally figured out what it is that women want? Probably not.
You see, ever since Viagra solved a man’s “floppy,” drug companies have been searching long and hard for the solution to flagging female desire. Oh sure they got compounds that can get your blood flowing and your down under parts lubricating, but desire? So far, nobody’s found that light switch, Meana’s singular observation notwithstanding.
I don’t know where you stand on the matter, but I have always got a wee little charge out of fantasies that involve less giving pleasure and more getting it. Intimate relationship, well, not so important here. (I refer the gentle reader back to scenario #1.)
Which means my British girlfriend had it right back in high school when we thought Lee overalls were the pinnacle of fashion (in a Huck Finn kind of way) and boys were worth dying over. We had spent the lunch hour debating, as usual, how best to rid ourselves of this confounded state, commonly known as “virginity.” (It's not such a big deal in Canada, where I'm from.) As she licked the chocolate pudding out of the bottom of its plastic cup, she looked up at me most seriously, her mouth ringed with pudding and uttered in her best British accent: “Don’t they know that women just want to be taken?”
Put that in a pill, you, you, drug makers.
© 2009 ZANTIUM LLC
About Pamela Tames
Everyone knows you only talk about sex in secret. Everyone but me that is. I’m Pamela Tames and you can hear more about my take on sex and the older woman at http://seasonedsex.com/. Who’s doing it, how they’re doing it, and what keeps them doing it. Now, for those all thinking, ‘that’s got to be one short website,’ let me respectfully say, ‘oh, so wrong.’ Just see for yourself.