Thank you and of course I agree we should not despise anyone. But I think many men (and isn't it weird and ironic that here I am lecturing about men to you!) among themselves judge us and make themselves superior as regards our looks, intelligence, and our sexual eagerness. Now by themselves they enjoy what we offer them but on some level many think OK if she "gave in" to me that easily then she must be "cheap" or is much too susceptible to men etc. This is what I have been told. And girls of my generation were taught not to go to bed with a man too soon or he would think those things about us so would not take us seriously. My mother taught me that - he would not 'respect" us so would not marry us. And even you write that we must not care about ourselves or respect ourselves. Even while you admit that we were created for sex and reproduction. Now of course (and I guess you would say in "society") we learn to be careful for various reasons. mostly because we can get pregnant and dishonor our families and so on. So that puts a greater burden on us. So we get conflicted about our feelings which point us to sex and our reputation which makes us more careful about it. But even with all that I would most of us give ourselves very easily because it is just in our DNA. And certainly if we are in rebellion it becomes just a part of doing what we want consequences included. I don't know - honestly for me it separates the men who are just using me from those who are more interested in me. Because if they can get past my "easiness" then it means the more accept me as a person with my imperfections the way certain parts of society might view me. And you are wrong that it is just about our pleasure. I would guess most of us do it for the feeling of feeling desired and feeling affirmed as women and human beings. Sometimes there is pleasure for us from the first time but most of the time takes adjustment and learning about someone and shaping ourselves to him before our pleasure even becomes a factor. Of course we cannot "love" all men we come in contact with, but I think in giving ourselves we are respecting them probably to a greater extent than many of them respect us. For most of us dorat "love" is hope. We put ourselves out there and give ourselves because we were created to but we hope something will come back for us. So when all these teenagers who write in to AB asking if such-and-such means he "loves" me - what they are thinking about is whether he thinks enough of us he will want to stay with and support us. And it breaks my heart to read so many girls asking what they can do to "make him love me" which shows very little understanding of the way things work. I felt at that age that I was already "despised" so it didn't much matter what I did so I could allow myself to be freer because I could not go anywhere but up anyway. Playing games is something beautiful girls can do - if they feel they need to. Imagine my surprise at learning the reason my beautiful friends and cousins did that was because they were unsure of themselves - in much the same way I was. They received lots more attention than I ever did. I was more sexual because allowed myself to be. My cousin, who was and is very beautiful and received lots of attention, never had an orgasm having intercourse with a man until an affair during her second marriage. She was I her 40s by then. I was enjoying guys when I was 16. So I went from no dates and no boyfriends to enjoying guys and being easy. I used sex to get over because it was the only thing that felt good to me that was not harmful to me - as were drugs and drink and smoking etc.

Man! There is a LOT there, but first - when did I ever say THIS: "And even you write that we must not care about ourselves or respect ourselves."? I never said that. You persist in conflating what I write about what science says about our evolutionary development with our social development. That's strange given that you agree with it. It is you who wrote: "But even with all that I would most of us give ourselves very easily because it is just in our DNA." It is also you who wrote in response to another question: "...And because of that richness I am able to have with them I am mostly glad, just like your girlfriend, to make myself available as well if they want to just "take advantage" because I believe I have been created for that and that can be very satisfying to me on an even more primal, I guess reproductive, level." EXACTLY! That does not require that you disrespect yourself. It is simply an honest assessment of PART of what motivates us. (Besides, do I sound like I disrespect my gf or my daughter?) As far as sex in general, our evolutionary origins tend to reinforce how we feel. You say that it takes women a while to "adjust" and you want that "feeling of being loved." Yup, all true. However, at least in part, there is an evolutionary explanation for that. Men are biologically programmed to impregnate as many females as possible. Women, however, in nature can only carry one baby at a time - normally - and so they need that sense that the male is committed to them and will protect them and their offspring. That is not evil or wrong. It is just how the human race got its' start. There is nothing there to respect or disrespect - it just is. (For that matter, it helped to civilize humanity. How well do you think the human race would have done if males had been running all over making and abandoning babies and their mothers? Society evolved in that sense to accommodate a woman's needs.) As far as "...it breaks my heart to read so many girls asking what they can do to "make him love me," " It depends how you read that. Yes, most teens are too immature to understand how complex it can truly be. By the same token, we ALL try to do things to make people - especially the opposite sex - love us. When I was falling for my gf, I made sure to buy her gifts - to this day I still buy her a rose every Wednesday to commemorate the day we met. I make sure to stay fit. I make sure to be a good father. You try to make yourself attractive to your husband. We do things that we hope will make our s/o's love us. As long as it stays within healthy bounds, that is a VERY good thing. Again, it makes us more civilized. The problem with teens is that they are too young to know the boundaries and the limits. The basic instinct is in all of us. (Oh, and by the way, have you ever seen a teen aged boy with a crush on a girl? It's not just girls who want to make someone love them.) Honestly, and I hope you are not offended, I tend to think that your personal experience and resentments - that sense that you were not pretty enough - colors your interpretation. As much as you enjoy sex, I get the sense of an irreducible confrontational attitude toward men. You enjoy them at one level, but at another you have felt victimized - and in some cases were victimized - by them. Well, been there, done that, too. Being human, we don't always treat people as we should - and speaking bluntly, I lost a baby to a woman who really didn't give a damn what I thought. Her right, I guess, but I won't pretend that she was a selfless victim. Bottom line, we are as evolution made us - but we ARE NOT JUST what evolution made us. Yup, I have certain sexual instincts. However, I am more than just my instincts. Yet, there is implicit in what you wrote - albeit somewhat inconsistently - an assumption that men are all instinct and women are more sensitive. The truth is, that we are both a bit of both.

The bottom line is that you are thinking of "submissive" as degrading. However, they are not the same thing in a sexual context. When you, to use your own words, make yourself "available" to a man, that is, in biological terms, a submissive act. The man has a biological urge and you are submitting to it. Yet, that can be as much an act of love. (Indeed, in another context in Christian teaching, the very definition of love is service to others.) Now it so happens that my gf and I enjoy that sense of being animalistic. There is a sense of real relief and real passion. I feel very much like a man. I am proving my sexual prowess, I am claiming my gf and protecting her. My gf feels very similar to what you feel. She feels like she is fulfilling a very primal desire to be impregnated, and that she is giving her body to me to be used - a term you have used - and that I am, in a sense, protecting her. For her it is very primal, too. However, losing that kind of self-control is not your cup of tea. Different strokes - pardon the pun - but it is not inherently degrading in and of itself.

By the way, if it helps, when you have sex with a man you are in a very real sense controlling him, too. First, human males do have sexual needs - though that should not be assumed to mean that they MUST be satisfied. Your prehistoric primate ancestors had only their instincts. Civilized human beings? Well those impulses are never fully erased from us - are controlled. YOU have a choice your ancestor did not. That all said, men who don't get sex tend to get depressed, have more health problems and die at an earlier age on average. Men DO need sex. That means they need YOU - and they will do a LOT to impress you and get you to have sex with them. You deny this, frankly, because somebody sold you a bill of goods that you were not pretty enough. I will never convince you differently, but contrary to what you believe, a male won't have sex even with an "easy" girl if he thinks she is not attractive. (Again, think of your brothers,) Moreover, once a guy is having sex with you, he basically loses control of his body. His erection is involuntary. When he orgasms the muscle spasms that facilitate his thrusting, his heavy breathing, his perspiring, ejaculation itself...all of that you cause and he is helpless. At a certain point, he can't control his body till he ejaculates. At that moment, you are in charge. Push him away, and he is just really frustrated and helpless. My point is that submissiveness in a sexual context is much more complex than this cost/benefit tally that you seem to have drawn up in your head,

Well you seem like you understand but then you keep getting off into that thing about how we can only carry one child at a time as though somehow that makes us inferior as being to whatever animals can carry multiple children - lots of them. I believe that we "need" (read desire) sex as well. I would dispute whether men who have more sex are healthier or happier or better off. And - silly! - I am a girl so in case you haven't noticed men are interested in being with me no matter how I look. I try to be objective (difficult) and realistic about my looks. Men liked me because I was a good companion and did not ask a lot of them. very seldom did they think of me in terms of marriage. I know what women, as well as most men, consider beautiful or pretty. Which has btw changed over the years. And please believe me I am not in that company. But if someone likes me and wants to be with me who am I to argue with him? I accept what he feels for me and enjoy that he does. Looking back I can see how in some ways I was attractive and certainly I believed when men would tell me they liked one thing or another. But I am speaking in general. As I matured and started taking my appearance more seriously I learned grooming and what clothing to wear to emphasize my positive qualities or, as we used to call them , attributes. But I guess I do like to think of myself as - and forgive me this is really kind of self-centered - as a no-frills, basic woman, in working order (so far!) and I do like the idea that if someone wants to be with me it is because they go for me as I am rather than what I am not or what I could have been. You know that old saw "I'm not much but I'm all I've got". I don't want to control anyone though I might make suggestions or hold my body a certain way if I think it will make things better. Not do I feel I'm "submitting" - instead I feel I am simply bring all I have to bear . If it works for some women to think they are "submitting" then fine for them. My mind works in different ways I guess. Though yes we are talking about the same behavior but just terming it differently. And if you imagine somehow that I don't "lose control" then guess you have never seen me with a group of men. Or even with my husband after half an hour. I believe part of our enjoyment is letting go of that control just like you say part of being a man is hanging on to it. Maybe. A lot of the rest of this is in response to other comments I have made elsewhere.

You are arguing with an earthquake. The data show that men who get less sex tend not to live as long as men who do. That is factual data. (It also shows that men who are married live longer than unmarried men.) To take your second case, the historical record was that our female primate ancestors could not carry more than one child at a time. On average, a woman who carried more than one child abandoned one of them or died at birth. By the way, death in childbirth and infant mortality was a problem as late as the early 1900's. Until modern medicine came along, the mortality rate even in the United States for births was at a level that would astonish you. Check out the CDC website. It makes fascinating reading. (One other interesting fact, a recent article on a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that the increased use of Caesareans has had an effect on our evolutionary development. In nature, women who could not deliver naturally died. Now that they are living, the genes that otherwise would have died out with them are now passing onto the gene pool. The result is a never ending cycle of increased Caesareans. The effect is real and happening right now. We can actually see it in the medical research.) Anyhow, bottom line, you insist on placing value judgments on simple facts. Women are not inferior because they could only carry one child - which by the way, with the advent of modern medicine is no longer the case. However, it did influence our evolutionary development - including our evolutionary psychology. One of these is that women approach sex differently than men. (As the saying goes, for men, there is no love until there is sex. For women, there is no sex until there is love.) These are basic tendencies. There are exceptions, of course, but as a rule, this is how human sexual psychology has developed and works.) Your persist in reading these feelings as conscious, when in fact it is mostly unconscious motivations. (Oh, and as to women, losing control, I don't recall saying that women did not. However, a male's loss of control is linked to his orgasms and his orgasms are linked to ejaculation. There is a complex process at work. By contrast, a woman will ovulate orgasm or no.) At any rate. you seem to be taking offense to historical data, which is odd. It says nothing good or bad about women in general, or any particular woman, to analyze our evolutionary development. (It is also somewhat peculiar that you seem not to be making the distinction between conscious and unconscious motivations.) As to the rest, if you believe that men are interested in you in spite of how you look, you know less about men than you seem to think. Trust me, gals who are not seen as being attractive don't attract men. (It is almost inherent in the definition.) Anyhow, there is an avalanche worth of data out there dealing with evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology and human sexual behavior. You can find tons of it on the Internet. Check it out. You may find it very compelling - and certainly less pejorative than you seem to think.