Women don’t care about bad sex!

A lot of men can breathe a sigh of relief with the results of this scientific study: women don’t care if you’re a bad lay.

Seriously, this was the result of one study done by Kyle Stephenson, a doctoral candidate in psychology from the University of Texas at Austin. According to his study, one-third to nearly one-half of women report having sexual function problems but only 10 percent are worried about it.

Moreover, it’s only this 10 percent who experience both problems with desire and stress about sexual functions that are getting the bulk of research attention. (Which is proof positive that we shouldn’t believe everything we see and hear on TV.)

In an interview with LiveScience, Stephenson said, “We’ve assumed for so long that for both men and women, these problems were always depressing.”

However, survey data proved that notion wrong such that the question now becomes what happens “within the confines of a sexual relationship that makes these problems so distressing you want to seek treatment?” Stephenson said.

Earlier studies with sexual problems indicate that these are common in both genders—but the reason behind them are different. Sheryl Kingsberg, a psychologist at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio, said, “For women, the biggest problem is going to be desire.”

On the other hand, men report problems with premature ejaculation (with younger men) and erectile dysfunction (with older men), which are easy to to diagnose and treat, if the volume of spam mail we get is any indication. But this is not as easy to assess with women, given that their subjective experiences of sex may not match their physical sexual response.

This is explained by Leonard Derogatis, the director of the Center for Sexual Medicine at Sheppard Pratt Health System, who said: “Women might be having sex for a dozen different reasons, only one of which might be that it feels good and is satisfying. It’s a path to intimacy, it’s a path to fulfilling a role of the woman or wife, it’s a means to keeping her partner happy, and on and on.”

It’s this question of context of sexual desire that Stephenson and UT Austin psychologist Cindy Meston asked a survey of 200 heterosexual undergraduate women about their relationship quality and sexual satisfaction. According to their study, women who were anxious about their relationship with their partners were not as bothered about bad sex, preferring to have that little extra intimacy. But with women who felt secure about their relationships, the extra intimacy wasn’t much of a factor.

Stephenson noted that this was probably because women who were worried about their relationship were “relieved” to have the intimacy unlike “secure” women who preferred to have good sex. However, they also found out that intimacy did in a way protect women against distress over possible sexual problems.

In other words, just as long as your woman wants you, you can stink in the sack—but still be that godly stud in your head.

Many women who report sexual-performance problems aren’t particularly worried about them

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