Hypocrites?

There's a familiar double standard that runs through the way some men talk about sex. A guy sleeps around and shrugs it off as just being a man. Then he goes to bed with a woman he privately labels as "easy," and later, swapping stories with his friends about women who are loose, he counts her among them. If she's one of those women, what does that make him? He got what he wanted and then turned around to shame her for giving it.

The logic gets darker in places where a woman who is raped, who had no say in what happened to her, ends up blamed for the crime. The man who assaulted her walks. She can be put to death.

Consider how arousal tends to work differently for each sex. Men respond more readily to the visual, to how a woman looks, to the fantasies they build around her. When she declines or pulls back, the man may accuse her of leading him on. Women, more often, get swept up in the romance of a thing, in the intimacy they picture ahead of time.

"Why can't a woman be more like a man?" goes the line from My Fair Lady, and you could just as easily flip it: why can't a man be more like a woman? The physiology isn't the same. A woman generally needs more time to be ready for intercourse, and more time still to reach orgasm once she's aroused. A partner who doesn't understand that can get impatient.

So some women fake it. She wants to please him, to keep the relationship steady, because the relationship matters to her. Putting someone else's needs ahead of her own is a pattern a lot of women fall into, and the bedroom is no exception.

Which brings it back to talking to each other. Couples sometimes assume the other person should simply know, by instinct, what arouses them. Men do this. Women do it too. Nobody is a mind reader.

It shouldn't surprise anyone, then, that when women compare notes, the subject of faked orgasms comes up, along with sex that wasn't really wanted, the first time especially. Men have usually had more solo practice at getting themselves to orgasm than women have, so a man can show up more ready than his partner, and he can make her feel guilty for not keeping pace with him.

Sometimes just being in a relationship carries an unspoken expectation that sex will happen. That assumption is where date rape can begin. Picture the ungracious version of the question, the "You wanna?" at the end of a long, dull evening where the man drank too much and barely paid attention to the woman beside him.

Are there tender, gracious men out there? Of course. The ones with rose petals and candlelight, the kind of setup that usually comes with a marriage proposal.

Setting counts for a lot. A fishing camp or a hunting lodge is a poor choice for a first time, before marriage or after. Back seats of cars rarely feel romantic, and neither does the standard bachelor pad. Up front, the steering wheel or the gear shift keeps getting in the way, and there's the smell of dirty socks and worn-out sneakers. A bare mattress that never met a sheet doesn't help, nor does a roommate snoring face-down in the next bed, or carrying on with someone else on the couch in the room next door.

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