Myth: ALL men, and any truly sexual woman loves intercourse more than anything, is always ready to go, and wants to get right down to it as soon, and often, as possible. This belief infests the fantasy life of erotic culture--read the vast majority of erotic fiction and you’ll see evidence of this, often in the form of “...she was dripping wet instantly...” and other such lies. The truth is that it takes time for a woman’s body to become fully aroused and there’s no shortcut around simple biology. Fiction tends to de-emphasize the arousal phase of sex both to appeal to a primarily male audience (the same reason you see so much attention to physical descriptions, right down to a list of measurements, for the females in such stories) and to meet the conventions of the genre. Tales which are likely to be read as fantasy fodder for private masturbation tend to cut right to the chase because they’re all about the orgasm--not the characters’, the reader’s. Their primary purpose, when you think about it, is to help you cum faster when you’re alone, not better and more often when you’re with a partner.
The stereotype of the submissive cock-hungry bisexual nympho living in those stories is a tissue-thin (if you’ll pardon the double entendre) fantasy, meant to arouse your mind as a shortcut to orgasm. Mind you, I’m not criticizing the stories; I’m a fan of them. When it’s done well, female readers get to fantasize about a world of sexual promiscuity and adventure without social consequences and men get to immerse themselves in a world where every woman, no matter how off-limits in the real world, is an eagerly available sex partner. But what’s hot on the page, the detailed depiction of fantasy sex that really get your mental gears turning and the blood flowing isn’t necessarily what would make the best sexual encounter in real life. After all, if real sex were like the stories, men would also be expected to get it up five times in an hour. Since that’s also a biological impossibility, perhaps we should try to keep the difference between fantasy and reality in mind when thinking about our partners.
Reality: for most women, including those who love sex, foreplay is often, if not usually, the most important part of sex; and most men don't get nearly the pleasure they're capable of experiencing, either. The perpetually turned-on and ready-to-go woman doesn’t exist anywhere in the world, and any woman who claims to be one is either psycho-biologically aberrant (clinical nymphomania, for instance) or lying in order to be seen as more sexually attractive. Sure, it’s a shop-worn truism that women care about foreplay more than men do; we’ve all heard it before, and probably made a sexist joke or two about “getting to the good part” and complained to our friends or muttered under our breath after experiencing the “Wham-Bam-Thank You, Ma’am” style of sexual encounter. That doesn’t mean that men are bad in bed, don’t care about pleasuring women, or even that men are easier to please sexually than are women. In fact, most men aren’t getting one tenth of the pleasure from sex that they could, but few know it.
