Female Sexual Arousal & Orgasm

Orgasm. Female sexual arousal and orgasm is a complex process involving the entire woman, mind and body. The human mind receives in sexual stimuli from the body, processes it, and based on past learning and experience causes the body to respond to it. The brain may start the sexual arousal process in response to thought (sexual fantasy), visual stimuli (seeing a partner nude), audible stimulation (hearing a partner's voice), olfactory stimuli (the smell of a partner's body), and taste (the taste of a partner's body). The body may start the arousal process as the result of a woman, or her partner, touching her genitals or breasts, the feel of air flowing across her exposed skin, or her cloths stimulating her breasts or genitals. The mind and body while able to experience sexual arousal separately, cannot experience orgasm separately. Orgasm requires both the mind and body to work together. Mental thought alone may result in orgasm, but you still feel the orgasm in your body. All the sexual stimulation and arousal may originate in one or the other, but orgasm takes place in both.

At birth we respond to sexual stimulation based solely on instinct. If we feel safe and our basic material needs are met, we will most likely respond to sexual stimuli very easily. This is perhaps why the simple acts of nursing and exposing the genitals to air results in sexual arousal in infants. At birth we are very sensitive to sexual stimuli, and our minds have not learned "appropriate" sexual response yet. As a result, at birth, orgasm is probably controlled more by physical stimuli than mental thought processes. Orgasm is a simple physical reflex response at birth.

By the time puberty rolls around we have already been taught "appropriate" sexual response. We perhaps know that any sexual response is bad. We may have been so isolated from our physical sexual self's that we are not even aware of it when we are sexual aroused. This is more true of girls than boys, as boys experience a tell tale erection. We know what "good girls" and "bad girls" are. We know who a suitable mate is, even if we cannot think of them in sexual terms. Teenage girls, and adult women, may not permit themselves to be in situations that result in them feeling sexual, if they categorize those feeling as bad. They may perceive sexual arousal as "being in love." They may tune out any sexual feelings, denying they occur, or they may respond so negatively to sexual stimuli that sex itself is impossible.

Some women do not have many negative feelings toward sex and are openly sexual. They enjoy being aroused and seek out sexual stimuli freely. They do not care who or what causes them to feel aroused, they just enjoy it. Of course society views these "sexual girls" and "sexual women" negatively and labels them "sluts" and "whores." In our confused society, the girl who shuns all sexual feelings is considered more "normal" than a woman who is openly sexual. This is less true than it was twenty years ago, but still very much true.

Orgasm may be more of a mental perception than a physical experience for women, more so than it is for men, as the result of the greater sexual restrictions placed on women. A man's ability to achieve an erection and ejaculate is a symbol of his manhood, a woman's sexual arousal and sexual enjoyment may be seen as "out of control" and "wanton." This is perhaps why women are often times less orgasmic than men as one has to speculate that both are equally orgasmic at birth.