Is sex a need?
"He's a guy, you know? He has...needs."
Someone says this in my practice every single day. Every. Day. Usually from women. The belief that men need sex is so pervasive.
Nobody NEEDS sex. (I will die on this hill with scientific evidence to support my view wrapped around my still warm corpse.) Nobody has ever died from an unused erection. There is not a single case of this happening.
But EVERYBODY needs connection, belonging and a safe place to be vulnerable.
And sex is often a vehicle that men climb in to get those needs met. Why? Because that's what society told them to do, like we have discussed in our last few newsletters.
I have a theory that you can try on for size and if it doesn't fit for you, please feel free to throw it in the garbage. My theory is that men report "needing" sex less as they age, not really because of across-the-board differences in hormones, but rather because they have learned how to emotionally regulate in a broad range of ways, not just through sex. They can be softer and more vulnerable as they age because they have figured out the safe places to do so outside of just sex.
It makes me hypothesize about something. If men did the work of learning how to regulate emotions earlier, and women did the work of owning their own body and pleasure earlier (and I just want to add in here again, both of these phenomena have been ingrained in us by culture/ society), do you think we might have less arguments about sex frequency? Because sex would be more accessible for women who have sex for themselves and for pleasure and not their partner...and managing / expressing emotions would be more accessible for men so they wouldn't rely on sex so much to do it for them?
What do you think?
Best,
Celeste
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