Why are demands about male sexual performance quite so acceptable?

oh...is my husband reading this thread?

Really, Honey, I was just trying to help...

This is so wrong. Male and female mouths, from a kissing point of view, are extremely different. Women, in general, have narrower lips, narrower mouth, softer lips, smaller teeth, teeth closer to lips, less prominent chins, less prominent noses, soft skin around lips, no bristley facial hair around lips, smaller tongues, less inclination towards shoving their tongue down your throat, less likely to attempt to devour you: lips first, less inclination towards sucking your tongue so hard you want to hit them and less likely to kiss brutally at all.

In my experience it is very rare for a women to be a bad kisser and not at all uncommon for males to be.

For women, it is very common for it to take many minutes to even get to the point where sexual release is even possible, and only about 25% of women even achieve orgasm from penetration alone. If the guy doesn't take his time and help things along, then, in my mind anyway, he's going to get critiqued negatively.

In a man's eye, all a woman has to do is lay there and he can get off. Whereas, quite a bit of work is required for her to get off. That's why it is "acceptable" (for lack of a better word) for male performance to be talked about or used as a measure than it is for a female as I see it.

I'm so tired of all the world's premature ejaculators using this argument. Men's mechanisms are physiologically simpler, but that doesn't make men any less susceptible to the downsides of the emotional and mutually participatory aspects of sex (and the upsides!), not to mention simply not being "in the mood." Frankly, it can be difficult to..um... finish with a woman who's "just lying there" or some equal indication of not really being into it, like obviously faking reactions, etc.

There are plenty of lazy, selfish, unimaginative, and passionless lovers of both sexes in my opinion.

Completely OTM.

And it's even more complicated than that. Good lovers fit with each other. A good lover isn't going to be good with everyone in the world. Everyone has preferences and styles and all kinds of nearly intangible qualities and ugly baggage that they bring to bed with them, and good sex takes two. I've been a terrible lover with some women, for reasons that I like to think had to do with both of us. We weren't on each other's frequency, for whatever reason. And that's what makes good sex so good -- when everything clicks, you don't know exactly why, but it does, and it's fantastic, and it's rare and (if you'll forgive me) quite special.

My thoughts on the rest of the thread/topic are...I think they're too bound up with personal things and I can't comb them out.

I missed this before, but I think Lara's on to something here, so to speak. If it takes a woman a good deal of time to come through penetrative sex and the guy's not a heroic sexual athlete, be fucking (and I use the word advisedly here) creative.

Wrong. Bateman's Principle is a fundamental tenet of reproductive biology.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bateman%27s_principle

It's weird, I started this thread after I'd been dating someone for a long time, because I was in a position to start new things and kinda thinking about the logistics of it. But I don't think I've thought about this at all since then. I suppose it's the kind of thing you think about exactly once and then are more or less over. It's kind of a nice day as a man when you have an experience not go entirely well but then can be pretty sure it wasn't to do with you, and was just, you know, general no-fault non-clicking.

Haha, I like that this is being used as a serious example.

What, once every 75 years?

That's the case in the abstract, anyway, but it seems like real life isn't particularly vexed by that, so I don't know that it's a very big deal. Kind of funny, though.

I'm not, not when it happens to me. But I don't go around with a bullhorn about it, and anyway, I have to blame myself a little, too. I'm not sure of the woman Nabisco is describing, who talks a lot about what man is pleasing her or not. That's not acceptable at all by my standerds. That's just kinda bitchy.

True. Real life has too many other things to be vexed about.

I never said they were the same thing, I said that the notion that it was nothing but socially-constructed crap is wrong (ref: Bateman's Principle).

it seems like real life isn't particularly vexed by that

try if you can not to have sex with her.

the undergrad who invariably sits next to me at the cafe and talks REALLY LOUD into her cellphone about her love life

That may be solid evidence that most of us should have by outgrown this whole thread topic.

Humans form family units because we are intelligent and can pass on knowledge to our offspring, thereby increasing their overall level of genetic fitness. Animals species that don't rely on shared knowledge are better off abandoning their offspring rather than expending energy to care for them. In that case, the best way to maximize the survival of their genes is to mate as much as possible -- a quantity over quality scenario. All of this is deeply rooted in biology ... biology dictates the social structure, not the other way around.

Humans can overcome being complete slaves to Bateman's Principle, but it would be silly to claim that it has no bearing on human reproduction considering the habits of most mammals (males take on limited roles in parenting). Perhaps more importantly, women produce hundreds of eggs in their lifetime and males produce hundreds of millions of sperm per day, which is basically all the proof we need that the principle of "sperm is cheap" holds considerable biological significance for humans.

Sorry if all this is obvious to everyone, but I do think that the influence of biology is understated in discussions such as these.

For example, if we posit that women have a nurturing instinct, and this is why they nurture, then the circularity and non-explanatory trickery is all too clear. If we twiddle our thumbs, it's because we have a thumb-twiddling instinct. If we don't, it's because we have a not-thumb-twiddling instinct. Buses arrive in threes because they have a herding instinct. If they arrive separately, it's because they have a separation instinct.

Reading back through the thread, there's plenty of this kind of reasoning. No offense to anyone - it's really hard to avoid in the absence of biological structures we can see and give a name not immediately referrable to the effect we are trying to explain.

Reading back through the thread, there's plenty of this kind of reasoning. No offense to anyone - it's really hard to avoid in the absence of biological structures we can see and give a name not immediately referrable to the effect we are trying to explain.

er...come again.

A woman can mainly (but not only) come through oral sex. Not my words, but some sex expert's words.