Sexual Desire Versus Sexual Satisfaction

What Motivates this article:

“The perception they have back home, if the girls are not circumcised, they will be very active sexually, and they will lose their virginity. And that’s a shame. Back home if you don’t have your virginity when you are married, that’s a shame to you, that’s a shame to your family, a shame to your neighbour, a shame to everybody!” (Ethiopian mother, Koukoui et al., 2017, 5).

“My daughter, she’s a teenager now. She’s starting to tell me ‘mom, my friends have boyfriends you know’. (…) In my time, at 15, we didn’t even think about boys, and we feared our parents. But this is not the same generation. So that’s what I’m afraid of. And above all, I tell myself that my daughter wasn’t circumcised. According to what we hear, people who are circumcised and those who were not, it’s not the same thing. Those who were circumcised can wait. But it’s the opposite for those who weren’t circumcised. So that’s what I have in mind when it comes to my daughter, and I won’t stop talking to her. She knows that to us, some things are sacred.” (Malian mother, Koukoui et al., 2017, 6).

“Here in Canada it must be cut off! It protects and prevents girls from going out with boys. She’s going to go out and only stay with her friends, it’s better! I’m in favour of that. I’m against the fact that here, they’re really in a hurry! And it’s not clean on both sides. So they should do it in Canada, because I see that here, young people are very eager. Over there [Egypt] the youth are with their family at home. But here, some parents let their daughter go anywhere! It’s not good. So it’s better to do it here than over there” (Egyptian mother, Koukoui et al., 2017, 6)

What the above quotes are referring to is the removal of the clitoris and often labias of the girls’ genitalia to prevent them from exploring their sexual desire outside of marriage (through the practice of female genital mutilation [FGM]). Experts note that there are several ways to stop this practice including passing local community-sensitive legislation, training healthcare providers and building the capacity of the healthcare system, delivering health education, engaging the community through gender-sensitive programming, utilizing the popularity of religious and cultural leaders who can influence adherents, using social media and marketing to raise awareness, and formally educating girls and protecting their right to education (Matanda, 2023). I am working with a team of 10 other artists to create an album supporting advocacy to end FGM and I write this article to demystify women’s anatomy and sexuality. 

The album is called ‘Budding Orchid Apartheid’ because the orchid has been denoted by many to be the flower of the vulva. We seek to raise awareness about how young girls’ bodily autonomy is under attack through systematic, social denigration and devaluation. The girls’ genitalia are regarded in many communities as not worthy of serious consideration other than to permanently transform them to fit cultural mores.

Here is our team.

Sexual Desire and Sexual Satisfaction

This article, I am interested in exploring sexual desire and sexual satisfaction. Berg and Denison (2012) write on this perplexing tension: FGM is supported by some community circles to undermine girls’ sexual desire because their bodies at birth are perceived to create social problems (e.g., community members seek to remove the clitoris to uphold social order), but other social circles in the same communities are challenging FGM because it impairs sexual satisfaction (e.g., community members work to protect the clitoris to protect social order). So much could be said about the social, interpersonal, and political benefits of sexual satisfaction. In this newsletter, I will try to unpack some research findings on sexual desire and what makes people feel sexually satisfied.

I’d like to highlight some of the most interesting findings of Mark et al. (2014) on sexual desire. The authors ask the question, what exactly are people desiring in sexual desire? Their study focuses on individuals and couples that are in long-term relationships over 3 years. Most of the couples seek primarily a heterosexual relationship, however some seek or have fulfilled bisexual, lesbian and gay encounters. The first finding of their study is that sexual desire is not always a desire for sex. Sexual desire is also the desire to impress a partner, feel closer to a partner, feel love and intimacy, experience or express affection through sexual intimacy (Mark et al., 2014: 2). Sexual desire is a longing for what we currently do not have (Levine, 2002).

The key finding of many experts is that sexual desire is not necessarily goal-driven. Sexual desire might lead to the pursuit of sexual activity or it may lead to the pursuit of other kinds of activities (Meana, 2010). There are very few studies on the object of individual and couples’ sexual desire and especially the ways that a couple’s dynamics around sexual desire affects overall desire in a relationship (Mark et al., 2014, 2). The researchers are exploring what people report that they desire when they say that they experience sexual desire (3). For the men, they desire pleasing their partner, their own personal pleasure, sexual release, and orgasm. For women, they desire intimacy, feeling sexually desirable, seeking emotional closeness, and wanting love (4-5). I find it very interesting that men rate pleasuring their partner very high on their list of sexual priorities. Incidentally, it is very difficult for men to pleasure their partner if they are unable to feel or derive sensation which leaves them feeling deeply unfulfilled. 

It is instructive that men and women derive very different outcomes from sexual intimacy. Mark et al. (2014) found that couple disagreement on their collective desire for intimacy is more highly correlated to how the woman desires and that couple disagreement on their collective self-confidence is more highly correlated to how the man desires. What this means is that couples’ struggles with intimacy are tied to what and how the woman sexually desires and that couples’ challenges building self-confidence as a couple are affected by what and how the man sexually desires (7).

A significant percentage of the variation in men’s sexual desires (17%) are tied to the different ways that the couple pursues sexual desire. When men have a higher need compared to their partners to feel sexually desired (where women might already be more highly inclined to feel sexually desirable), the desire that they have for their partner increases. Entire industries are built on women’s desire to be sexually desirable. To get a sense of how much woman want to be desired, and how companies profit off of this proclivity, think of the predominance and unrelenting advertising around cosmetics, fashion, plastic surgery, and different aesthetics work like lip and buttocks injections to achieve the coveted BBL (breasts, butt, and lips). What is often ignored by many industries and social narratives is that men also have a deep need to feel desired. When their feeling of being desirable is higher than their woman partner’s feeling of being desirable, they are more attracted to their partner. Men’s confidence affects how attracted they are to their partners. Very fascinating. Conversely, when women’s need to feel sexually desirable is higher than their partner’s need, the man’s desire for his partner decreases (Mark, et. al, 7). What I read from these findings is that when men feel less desirable, when their confidence in their desirability is low, they feel less inclined to engage in intimacy with their partners. The impact of men’s confidence in themselves is highly understudied which is surprising give the incredible impact of their sense of confidence on the sexual experiences of their relationships.

If the couple disagrees on the importance of desiring sexual release, touch, and excitement (e.g., the woman pursue non-penetrative and non-touching intimacy too frequently), her sexual desire for her partner is lower. Women want touch. If women aren’t trying to touch their partners, this could indicate that her sexual desire is low. When women have a higher desire than their partner for sexual release (a hallmark of men’s desire), touch, and excitement, their overall desire for their partner increases. Comparatively, when the man’s desire for sexual release, touch, and excitement is higher than the woman’s, the woman’s desire for their partner decreases. What I read from these findings is that if women don’t seek to climax, to be touched or their desire for these things is lower, they have a lower desire for their partner.

When we talk about FGM and manipulating the sensation of women, we are talking about a war on sexual satisfaction writ large. Proponents of FGM want to reduce the girl’s and women’s sexual desire, but if she loses feeling, is unable to climax, and does not desire to be touched, she has a lower desire for her partner. If her partner is a man and does not feel desirable and derive the confidence from feeling desirable, he has less interest in his partner. Proponents of FGM are therefore not only reducing women’s sexual desire and satisfaction through this horrible practice, but also reducing men’s sexual desire and satisfaction. There is a reason that human beings are born with the bodies that they have been given. These bodies serve a purpose. Gaining knowledge on human desire will help advocates of #endFGM to create even more compelling presentations about why the practice should be eliminated.

Works Cited

Berg, Rigmor C., and Eva Denison (2012). "Interventions to reduce the prevalence of female genital mutilation/cutting in African countries." Campbell systematic reviews Vol. 8. No. 1: 1-155.

Koukoui, Sophia, Ghayda Hassan, and Jaswant Guzder (2017). "The mothering experience of women with FGM/C raising ‘uncut’daughters, in Ivory Coast and in Canada." Reproductive health 14: 1-11.

Levine S.B. (2002). Re-exploring the concept of sexual desire. Journal of Sex Marital Therapy. 28: 39–51.

Mark, K., Herbenick, D., Fortenberry, D., Sanders, S., & Reece, M. (2014). The object of sexual desire: Examining the “what” in “what do you desire?”. The journal of sexual medicine. Vol. 11. Issue 11: 2709-2719.

Meana M (2010). Elucidating women’s (hetero)sexual desire: Definitional challenges and content expansion. Journal of Sex Research. 47: 104–22