5 Things Men (Really) Think About Sex

by Jayden Harlow

1967 may have been the summer of love, but 2008 will go down as the summer of sex. Women flocked to the theaters to see if Carrie would really walk down the aisle with Mr. Big in Sex and The City: The Movie, and they are tuning in on Thursday nights for a peak at the lives of ’70s-era swingers in Swingtown.

At the same time, we males increasingly find ourselves confronted by some pretty powerful notions about our sex drives and how we respond to the 21st century woman (or, more accurately, Hollywood’s portrayal of the 21st century woman). While Swingtown and SATC may be titillating, or even liberating for women, the reality is that these kinds of programs tend to feed into longstanding myths about men and our expectations of the women in our lives. To combat this problem, here are five common myths about men, along with the reality behind them.

MYTH #1: Men are intimidated when a woman has had a lot of sexual partners.

REALITY: Honestly, we men try to spend as little time as possible thinking about how many people you’ve been to bed with and what you did sexually before meeting us. We’re glad you have the mechanics down, but, beyond that, ignorance is bliss. It isn’t the experience that freaks us out; it’s the talking about it that’s the real problem. When you tell us you learned this amazing technique from a Kundalini teacher in Prague, we’re then stuck with the mental image of you steaming up a yoga studio with another man. Not cool! So tell us you found that move in a Kama Sutra book and have always wanted to try it out. Yeah, we’ll know you’re probably fibbing, but we’ll be much happier without that yoga teacher in our heads.

MYTH #2: “Slutty” is an out-of-date concept. Men expect women to be as sexually forward as we are.