Unlike emotional attachments, arousal is not caused by a specific person or relationship. The arousal is based on being able to see a person, to some extent, as an object. Arousal is achieved when the mind focuses on objects or concepts that a person finds arousing. Arousal mechanisms (erotic activations) involve physical attributes and the psychology of a setting or a lover.
Men naturally view attractive women as objects of arousal. Women accuse men of being sexist, but that’s how male sexual psychology works. Men can suppress their comments if they accept that women are offended by them, but they cannot change their innate sexual responses. Men can love a partner and still see her as a sexual object. Men are generally not turned on by a relative because of the emotional significance of the relationship.
Women’s nurturing instincts mean they identify with others. Men are more emotionally detached, which helps when men need to kill, as well as in sexual scenarios. Their sex drive causes men to respond to erotic rather than emotional stimuli. Men, who are born hunters and have a strong sexual desire, do not have the luxury of empathizing with their victims or their lovers.
In times past, acting was not a respectable (or even safe) occupation for a woman because any woman who exhibited herself (not involving nudity) was seen as a target for male attention. Later, the actresses were associated with prostitution. Women’s activities have often been limited because men see them as sexual objects. Women don’t want sex like a man does. Men have not suffered in the same way because women do not see men as sexual objects. Likewise, sex with a woman is not something most men try to avoid.
Men enjoy trying different positions for intercourse. The disadvantage of the missionary position is that it does not allow the man to see the genital action. Men are aroused by looking at their own erect penis during masturbation and enjoy watching their penis enter their lover’s body. Graphic images are considered by women to be crude, obscene and unexciting.
Women tend to see people purely in a social and relationship context. A woman lacks this ability to see a lover as a sexual object. In a real-life sexual situation, a woman is aware that her lover is a social person whom she loves. By masturbating, a woman is aroused by scenarios unrelated to her real-life lover and her sexual relationship. A woman has to contemplate surreal erotic themes to consciously generate the equivalent mental arousal a man needs for orgasm. This mechanism does not work in a social context.
Women’s sexual fantasies involve taboo subjects and engaging in surreal sexual activities with complete strangers. Women use fictional men in their fantasies who can be depersonalized and turned into sex objects to be used for arousal instead of human beings with their own emotional needs. Women’s fantasies provide a mechanism for women to objectify men. The men in women’s sexual fantasies are not men they have met or are in a relationship with. These fantasy men represent the male sexual drive or an erect penis that is part of a penetrative sex scenario.
In fantasy, a woman can imagine herself simultaneously as giver and receiver. Women’s fantasies are surreal because, in the absence of any sexual drive, women need to focus on the more indirect consequences for women that arise from men’s sexual drive. The use of fantasy allows a woman to be both the woman and the man on stage penetrating the woman. She may focus on male ejaculation as a means of producing her own sexual release.
Fantasy is a mechanism a woman uses to focus on a more psychological view of sex by being the object of the male sexual drive. A woman fantasizes about a man doing things to her because men initiate and encourage penetrative sex. A woman needs to see herself as sexually attractive and she needs to enjoy herself knowing that a man wants her sexually. A woman may enjoy imagining a man’s desire to penetrate her body. In her mind, she may also be the man directing the action and experiencing the pleasure.
Men enjoy sharing their fantasies because they expect a lover to participate in the activity they fantasize about. Women’s fantasies are not based on reality. They focus on impossible and unreal situations and people. A fantasy involves imagining impossible or unlikely things. Women’s sexual fantasies are purely a mechanism to enjoy orgasm. They lack all the practicalities of real life and the raw visual eroticism that men enjoy.
In her fantasies, a receptive woman focuses on the concept of penetration rather than graphic images. She focuses on a man’s sexual drive to penetrate her body. This is on a much more sexually explicit level than a romance novel. A sexual fantasy culminates in male ejaculation as a sexual release rather than the graphic images of creamy, jelly-like semen that gay men revel in. A receptive woman enjoys the idea of a man concentrating on his urgent need to penetrate her body. She doesn’t want to see a real penis or touch one with her hand or mouth to enjoy it as tangibly as a gay man would.
On the other hand, since there are marked differences between women and men in their response to psychological stimuli, it seems clear that these responses must depend on some mechanism that works differently in the two sexes. (Alfred Kinsey 1953)