What is romance for women: a necessary formality or a powerful sexual stimulus?
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Flowers, evening walks, candlelit dinners… Romance plays such a big role in a relationship that the question arises: is it possible to exclude it? The answer was found by Dutch scientists in a 2014 study led by Marieke Dewitt, Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Maastricht (Netherlands).
According to the Intense Motivational Model, sexual desire is manifested through a sexual stimulus, such as seeing a naked partner. Feeling the reaction of the body, the brain increases attraction and there is a desire to have sex.
However, the sexual stimulus differs between men and women. “In one study, women were asked to watch a pornographic film,” says Marieke Dewitt. – The participants were physically aroused, but emotionally they did not feel anything. Later, women were shown a pornographic film with a romantic plot: the participants reacted to it not only physically, but also emotionally.
Marieke Dewitt concluded that for women, the sexual stimulus works when there is a romantic context. This hypothesis formed the basis of her research. During the experiment, 86 men and 78 women watched three videos: the first video they watched a couple having sex, the second video contained romantic clips from the films Titanic and Indecent Proposal, the third video was a fragment from a documentary about the history of England. After watching, study participants talked about whether they felt sexually aroused and how much.
Even watching a documentary turned men on more than watching Titanic and Indecent Proposal.
It turned out that the greatest desire for intimacy in women was caused by watching excerpts from the films “Titanic” and “Indecent Proposal”. Men, on the other hand, felt more sexual desire after watching a video of a couple having sex. Surprisingly, even watching the documentary turned men on more than watching Titanic and Indecent Proposal.
Marieke Dewitt explains: Women use romantic emotions as a trigger for sexual fantasies and subsequent physical arousal. Perhaps the roots of this phenomenon lie in human nature. Men who are initially prone to active procreation do not need a romantic stimulus. And women have long been responsible for caring for the family and offspring, so the emotional component of intimacy is more important for them than the physical one.
At the same time, women love to have sex no less than men, and get great pleasure from it. “If you create the right romantic context, women will probably experience even more pleasure from sex than men,” concludes Marieke Dewitt. “It’s just important for women to feel emotional closeness for arousal.”