50 Psychology Classics (36 page)

Women as well as men have orgasms during dreams: 65 percent of women had had sexy dreams, while 20 percent had experienced nocturnal dream orgasm.

The common view was that women are slower than men in terms of sexual response and time needed to elapse before orgasm, but the evidence was that in masturbation, women reported an average time to achieve orgasm of 3–4 minutes—not much longer than a man usually takes.

Despite a history of assertions going back thousands of years that masturbation damages your health, Kinsey found no evidence. The only damage that is done is psychological; that is, anxiety caused by guilt.

Males are easily moved to an erotic state through petting, but a surprising number of women do not get “turned on” sexually by the activity. Generally, while a man cannot help being turned on if given the right physical stimulation, a woman's erotic feelings depend more on her feelings about the situation.

Men's sexual feeling starts suddenly in puberty and rapidly climbs through the teenage years before leveling off in the 20s. A woman's sexual feeling is more like a slow climb, and her responses are more psychological.

Of the 64 percent of married females who had experienced orgasm prior to marriage, only 17 percent of their orgasms had been experienced through actual penetrative sex. The rest occurred through petting, masturbation, dreams, or homosexual contact.

Women are less aroused by breast stimulation than men are by giving the stimulation. Only 50 percent of women said they ever stimulated their own breasts as a form of sexual pleasure.

By the 1940s, much had been written alleging that premarital sex led to lasting regrets and psychological damage, particularly among women. Kinsey's research found that 77 percent of women who had engaged in unmarried sex did not, in fact, regret it.

Those who had had unmarried sex with more than one man were even less likely to regret their experiences. Kinsey concluded that some degree of premarital experience—“promiscuity”—could actually bring a healthier relationship when the woman did marry, as she would have fewer of the usual hang-ups about sexuality. Interestingly, 83 percent of women who had become pregnant as a result of premarital sex did not regret what they had done either.

By the age of 40, a quarter of all married women in Kinsey's surveys had had extramarital sex. Extramarital sex reached its zenith in the 30s and early 40s.

Younger women's lower interest in sex outside marriage was put down to greater sexual interest in their partner, and their young husband's demand for sexual exclusivity in his wife.

Despite the common perception that men like to have sexual affairs with younger women, many actually preferred them with older or similar-aged women, partly because they were more sexually experienced.