You realize that I’m speaking based on large scale studies on sexuality, right?
I realize you’re taking a positive study and making normative judgments in this thread.
The medicine you need is that kids, see, they don’t have these messy facts or studies to point to. They feel it, and that’s how it becomes true for them. :wally
I’m not entirely sure that your assertations of what ‘most women’ do when masturbating are correct, Zagadka.
We’re not supposed to use the “Putz” smiley in GD, erislover. It’s considered a form of “flaming.” See the stickey at the top of the opening page.
And what “normative judgments” is Zagadka making, simply by noting that studies show a typical (but not, of course, universal) scenario for female masturbation that is different from that for male masturbation?
Do you have a cite, or just an ancedote?
I’m not so quick to dismiss it.
If you are interested, take a look at this Frontline piece on PBS that aired a few years back. The “facts” of this case hard well documented, and the views of teenagers having sex are quite similar to those linked in the article to which you refer.
The times - they are a’changing.
Actually it’s that I think the attitude toward what women want is flawed because women are brought up being told what they want instead of allowing it to develop naturally.
I don’t know who they’re studying on, but I do know that my reality and women I know that are my age have a very different attitude toward sex, emotion, and that whole ‘candles, bathtub, romantic’ masturbation idea.
It’s tough when some published book doesn’t seem to fit the world I know at all.
“some published book”
lol
Yes, BrainGlutton, you’re right. Sorry, Zagadka.
But that goes to the very heart of this thread, catsix. Most parents don’t feel they can afford to take a completely laissez-faire attitude to their teenagers’ sexual behavior. They feel that would be as irresponsible as not teaching small children how to cross a street safely. They might or might not try to control their kids’ sex lives completely, but at any rate, they feel they definitely should be encouraging some behaviors and discouraging others. For some parents that just means teaching their kids about using condoms and how to avoid date-rape, and for others it means encouraging them to keep their virginity until marriage. So that’s the question: What behaviors should parents be encouraging or discouraging? What kind of sex life is emotionally healthiest for a teenager? Or is that a point on which it is flatly impossible to generalize? Is the optimal set of sexual behaviors different for each individual teen?
Isn’t everything, though, not just sexual behaviors?
Of course, but it is possible to generalize about many things, like what diet is best for a teenager in nutritional terms, and what level of education is minimally acceptable for a teen to get by in society as an adult. So why can’t we make similar generalizations about sex?
Because it tends to be a deeply personal set of impulses and needs?
Off the top of my head: there are wide differences in level of libido and resulting positive impulse towards sexual activity; there are wide differences in sexual curiosity; there are wide differences in susceptibility to social pressures involving sex and sexuality; there are wide differences in emotional needs for sexual relationships; there are wide differences in maturity; there are wide differences in rational decision-making capability. And that’s setting aside things like differences in past experiences, which can have a big effect, and the wide disparity in simple physical maturing ages.
I’ve had people actually tell me (as a for example) that what I really need to do is go out and seek casual sex so I can get rid of my “inhibitions”. I’m not “inhibited”, I’m just not terribly interested. Someone with a higher libido and different criteria for attractiveness in a sexual partner might have needs that could be met with fairly casual sexual contact; I know a fair number of people who that description suits.
Again using myself as an example: for a variety of personal reasons, I’m not willing to have sex with someone whose child I would not consider raising. (And at the moment I’m more strict than that; I will not have sex with anyone whose child I do not want.) My reasons for this particular decision are mine; I don’t expect anyone else to abide by them. Instead, I expect other people to set their own boundary lines where they find them comfortable, and acknowledge that they will likely set them in places where I would not.
And again, with myself as an example: In my teens, I was put in a situation where I was involved in sexual activities that I did not want and did not consider myself mature enough to be dealing with. I did not have the tools to get myself out of that situation without damage. I am highly reluctant to institutionalise any sort of “amount of sex teenagers should be having” because the feeling that I should be willing to participate in those things caused me some significant harm that I’m still dealing with over a decade later. What would have been useful for me would be to have the tools to evaluate what I wanted, including full information about the potential benefits and consequences, and to know how to make my preferences known.
I know people who were happily sexually active at the age at which I considered myself too young to have the experiences I was accumulating. I wasn’t, though. (I definitely had not hit the same points of physical maturity – my puberty was fairly late – and I was emotionally and mentally mature enough to know that this was something I was not ready for, but not enough to express that usefully.) And there’s no reason I ‘should’ have been.
I’ll have to call for a cite. I simply don’t believe that most women actually draw a bubble bath and start up the candles and incense so they can have an orgasm.
I’ve known many ladies who told me about female masturbation, and every single one of them laughed at this silly bath-and-candles story. It’s ridiculous, and I’d like to see your “large-scale studies” that say otherwise.
For christ sakes, bath-and-candles isn’t literal, and no, it doesn’t apply to all women. If I wanted to explain it to you in detail, I’d tell you to try reading a book on the subject. It is hardly the only book written on the topic, but it is the first scientific exploration of human sexuality. If you like you can go ask these guys, who probably know a bit more about sex than you, myself, or most other people on the planet.