Week 3

After further thoughts on which text book chapter topic to create I have decided to go with Sexual Motivation.  The primary reason behind this is because I have recently read a book on sexual differences between males and females called Why Men Want Sex and Women Need Love by Allan & Barbara Pease http://www.peaseinternational.com/shopexd.asp?id=53.  Although its a pop psychology book, an extremely humorous one at that, it goes into some great details about research (with an extensive reference list) on the biological, physiological and psychological stages of lust, love and sex, more importantly it distinguishes the differences between the sexes and why we behave the way we do.  This will be a good starting ground for topics and journal articles.

This week was our first tutorial for this subject.  I found it to be very worth while as we formed groups that we will be using to help brain storm for ideas and comments on the progress of our text book chapter.  Sexual Motivation is a very interesting topic and has sprung interesting conversations with a few of my friends such as Why are some men more promiscuous than others? Further more why are we more attracted to some people, or so it seems the same type of people and not others?  I hope to shed some light on these questions in my chapter.

From reading the chapter on needs I think that its interesting to note that they classify sex as a need along side food and water when as matter of fact we do not NEED sex to survive, if we went on without food and water we would die, but if we went on without sex we would still live. Although Im pretty sure some men would beg to differ on that last point..  Furthermore what is interesting is why do two sexes of the same species vary so differently in their mating physiological regulation? As outlined by Basson (2001) men and women react completely differently to sexual arousal.  The correlation between mens physiological arousal and psychological desire is high where as in females it is low (Reeve, 2009) .  In a nut shell women need intimacy and men do not.  I will be analysing this further from an evolutionary perspective in my text book chapter.

Traditional Sexual Response Cycle 

Basson, R. (2001). Female sexual response: the role of drugs in the management of sexual dysfunction. Obstet Gyneco. 98:350-353.


Reeve, J. (2009). Understanding motivation and emotion. United States of America, USA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.