The Kamasutra, India’s 3rd Century sex manual, says “holding a gold-plated peacock’s eye or hyena’s eye in your right hand makes you lucky in love.”
That sounds ludicrous, but it’s not so much more outlandish than the myth that all women are virgins when they marry. This was the belief publicly held in America when Alfred Kinsey published his book “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female” in 1953. And outrage greeted his announcement that half of married women weren’t virgins when they married.
Now, 50 years later, research at Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction continues to reveal misperceptions about sex in our culture. WomanNews discussed some of the more common myths with sex researcher Stephanie Sanders, associate director of The Kinsey Institute and associate professor of gender studies at Indiana University.
Sanders says common myths today “reflect current issues.” Just as America became fascinated by the television show “Sex in the City,” so Americans began to believe that urban singles, such as those portrayed on the show, are having lots of sex.
The fact is the majority of people in cities and elsewhere enjoy serial monogamy, and married couples report having sex more frequently than single people, Sanders says.
“Media portrayals of a highly sexualized culture don’t reflect how the majority live,” she says. “Some people may live that way, but the uncomplicated sexual portrayals of the young and beautiful are just not the reality.”
But they are how myths are made. Sanders says while “people realize TV is just entertainment and they like entertainment that isn’t necessarily like real life, it creates images in society that people hold on to.”
Still other sex myths are perpetuated through word-of-mouth and the Internet. For example, who hasn’t received an e-mail touting some product’s miraculous ability to enlarge a penis? Such e-mails encourage the belief that not only is it possible to enlarge the male organ, but also that women are more satisfied by a bigger size.
MYTH: A bigger penis is best in bed.
Not always, says University of Texas-Pan American researcher Russell Eisenman in an e-mail interview. According to Eisenman, “It is advantageous to define penis size to understand what really affects women.”
Eisenman found in a 2001 study that while size is not a factor if large is defined by length, some women thought that a wider penis is better in bed.
“I have found in my research that college women say that width of penis is important to female satisfaction. [They] do not say that length is. Yet, most people talk about length of penis and have no thoughts of width.”
Thus, Eisenman says, it’s a myth that length is more important than width. “It is probably also a myth that penis size is all important,” he says. “My message for men and women is, don’t get hung up over penis size. It is like the height of a person. It has some importance, but there are other aspects about a person that are much more important. As an old song has it, `It ain’t the meat, it’s the motion.'”
What are other misconceptions about sex? In an informal survey of a dozen women and four men ranging in age from 25 to 70, we found these beliefs to be some of the most prevalent:
MYTH: Women reach their sexual peak in their 30s or 40s.
Though the Kamasutra says women reach their sexual peak at 17, Kinsey believed women reach it later, in their 20s or 30s. Measuring peak by rate of orgasms, which women don’t tend to have as easily as men, Kinsey found in 1953 that little more than half of women had had orgasm by 20, three-quarters by 25, and about 90 percent by 35 years of age.
For many women, however, orgasm isn’t everything.
“Sex is focused on intercourse, which isn’t necessarily going to produce an orgasm for women,” Sanders says. “Women vary a lot. They can be highly satisfied without orgasm. Not all [women], but it’s not like a man who feels no orgasm, no satisfaction. For women, orgasm isn’t always the goal. They can have intense sexual arousal without it. The meaning can be very important.”
So how do women define sexual peak? Emily, a 70-year-old widow, defines it by variety, ingenuity and fun. She says she peaked after the age of 55, when her children were raised and she found herself single again.
“My work [is] done,” she says and she is free to devote more time and energy to her sex life.
Jane Juska concurs. At the age of 66, she ran a personal ad looking for sex.
Celibate for years, Juska did not remain so for long. Her experiences with multiple men, not all of whom she slept with, are chronicled in the book “A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance” (Villard).
Not surprisingly then, when a woman reaches her sexual peak depends on how she personally defines it: number of orgasms, frequency, level of interest or emotional intimacy–you make the call.
MYTH: The G-spot doesn’t really exist.
While some may never feel it, women do have a G-spot. The problem is finding it. German gynecologist Ernst Grafenberg was the first to formally locate one in 1950. Named in his honor, the G-spot is the female equivalent of a man’s prostate. In women, it is an erotic area located on the inner wall of the vagina. When stimulated, the G-spot can prompt some women to ejaculate a clear, semenlike fluid from the urethra. So not only is there a G-spot, women can ejaculate.
MYTH: It is impossible to enjoy sex after sexual trauma such as rape or childhood abuse.
Not true, says Wendy Maltz, sex therapist and author of “The Sexual Healing Journey: A Guide for Survivors of Sexual Abuse” (Quill).
According to Maltz, in the case of rape, some women need to recover physically before they naturally begin to regain an interest in sex. Others take longer, but with support and time, a woman can ease back into sexual contact and enjoy sex after a rape.
In the case of childhood abuse, it’s more complicated, Maltz says, “because early sexual learning was affected. But with help and patience, women can reclaim their sexuality as something positive.”
Perhaps the most popular sex myth of all is that everyone wants a great sex life. The pressure to have one seems ubiquitous in our society, coming from every corner: TV to tabloids, locker rooms to lingerie catalogs.
But Maltz says sex doesn’t have to be a priority for everybody. “Not everybody should have to strive for a good sex life.”
