Women Find Their Own Sexiness To Be A Turn On

In a way that doesn’t seem to be true for men

Erotic self-focus sounds like it’s referring to masturbation, but it’s actually something entirely different. The term describes deriving arousal from yourself, oftentimes even more so than your partner, and it seems to be an important part of female sexuality in a way that it isn’t for men.

When sex researcher Marta Meana asked women, “Would you want to sleep with you?” Hell yes, many women basically said, in a way that suggested to Meana that in some sense they already had. Men, on the other hand, mostly didn’t even know what she was talking about, says Wednesday Martin, author of Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Know About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong And How The New Science Can Set Us Free.

What women want and need before and during sex is to see themselves as sexy and desired. This means not only feeling desirable to their partners but also that women need to feel sexy to themselves as well. This is, of course, a double-edged sword. Women who feel unattractive to themselves are going to have a tougher time feeling attractive to anyone else.

But this is not necessarily related to self-objectification, where women become so used to seeing themselves through the lens of how other people might see and judge them based on societal norms that they don’t have any authentic sense of themselves. When self-objectification is taking place, women begin to consider less how they feel and think and spend more time fixated on how they appear to others. This is not what’s taking place with erotic self-focus.

Marta Meana was quick to point out, it’s the independent aspect of female sexuality that she wants to underscore. Women in her studies “are not always looking into their partners’ eyes and experiencing whole person transcendence. Sometimes, they’re just really focused on a hot body part.” Or the hotness of themselves. “Women’s arousal may depend on their erotic relationships with themselves to a greater extent than is the case among men,” Meana summarized.

To test the hypothesis that women find themselves being sexy to be erotic, Meana asked both male and female study participants the hypothetical question: Imagine you’re having sex in front of a large mirror. How much time do you spend looking at your partner’s body and how much time looking at your own? The women, it turned out, would be looking at themselves a lot more than the men would.

This is neither narcissism nor self-objectification. It’s simply that to a large extent heterosexual women are their own erotic targets. Their arousal emanates to some significant degree from their own erotic relationship with themselves. This seems to be supported by the aphorism that women dress for themselves first, for other women next, and for men third.

Meana has identified the organizing principle of female sexuality as the desire to be desired. But women don’t just want to be gawked at or pawed — they want to be truly desired for all that they are. Perhaps this is one of the reasons that women find their own sexiness such a turn on — because they see themselves in a more whole way then they are sometimes perceived by men.

They aren’t just looking at the curve of their own hip or the swell of their nipple but at the way that those erotic elements are a feature of all that they are. A sex goddess is more than just a hot body, more than just a two-dimensional figure. She is a vessel for love, creation, and expansion. She is full of Shakti, the primal generative energy of the Universe.

That elemental, passionate sex goddess that lives inside every woman is something that has been controlled and suppressed for the past 10,000 years by a patriarchal social system. During that time, women’s sexuality was co-opted for the pleasure and procreative use of men. Up until the 18th century, medical literature did not even recognize that a woman’s pelvic muscles moved during birth because women were considered to be mere vessels for incubation and birth was simply the fetus fighting to get free.

The clitoris is the only organ of the human body whose sole purpose is pleasure, and yet it has consistently been erased from medical study and textbooks and treated as both immoral and pathological. “One of the most well-documented “discoveries” occurred during the late 16th century, when doctors began recognizing the clitoris as a normal part of female anatomy rather than a pathologized one associated with hermaphrodites or lesbians.”

Is it any wonder then that women connect with their inherent sensuality and erotic potential as a part of their own arousal. After thousands of years of female sexuality being revered for its life-giving properties and connection to the primary deity, this was curtailed with the onset of a patriarchal system.

For thousands of years these sexual customs had been accepted as natural among the people of the Near and Middle East. Inherent within the very practice of the sexual customs was the lack of concern for the paternity of children — and it is only with a certain knowledge of paternity that a patrilineal system can be maintained.

These ancient sexual customs were denounced as wicked and depraved and it was for this reason that the Levite priests devised the concept of sexual “morality”: premarital virginity for women, marital fidelity for women, in other words total control over the knowledge of paternity.

When God Was A Woman, Merlin Stone, page 160

I see erotic self-focus for women as a way to reclaim a part of their birthright that was erased by a patriarchal social system threatened by female sensuality and sexual freedom. Reconnecting with the sex goddess within not only empowers and arouses the woman who is beholding herself in that way, but it benefits her partner as well. I hope that additional research and a better understanding of erotic self-focus and other elements of female desire will continue to help more women connect to the things that turn them on — themselves included.