Why Women Have Sex: Sexual Deception, Punishment, And Abuse

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Why Women Have Sex: Sexual Deception, Punishment, and Abuse Jed Diamond, Ph.D. has been a marriage and family counselor for the last 44 years. He is the author of 8 books, including Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places, Male Menopause, and The Irritable Male Syndrome. He offers counseling to men, women, and couples in his office in California or by phone with people throughout the U.S. and around the world. To contact Dr. Diamond, send an e-mail to [email protected] or visit him at www.MenAlive.com Let’s face it, sex is an endlessly interesting topic. One of the benefits of being a licensed marriage and family counselor and sex therapist is that I get to learn about the latest research on human sexuality. Since I’m a writer I get to share with all of you what I am learning. I’ve been discussing the work of two of my colleagues David Buss and Cindy Meston. They recently published a book called Why Women Have Sex which describes their research findings. I’ve shared some of that information in previous articles. In Why Women Have Sex: Booty Calls, Sugar Daddies, and Friends-With-Benefits I described some of the subtle ways in which women trade sex for financial or other benefits. In 237 Reasons Why Women Have Sex I describe the range of reasons from the mundane (it reduces headaches) to the sublime (As an expression of love, affection, and commitment). 10 Most Important Reasons Women Have Sex, Including the Best Reason, #10 looks at the top ten reasons women want to have sex. Whether you’re a woman who wants to enjoy sex more fully or a partner who wants to learn how to better satisfy the woman in your life, you’ll learn valuable insights here. Dr. Buss answers many of the questions that people have about his research in Why Women Have Sex: 7 Surprising Questions Answered. What I’d like to share with you now has to do with the “dark side” of human sexuality. We all want to believe that sex and love go together and people come together (no pun intended) for the best of reasons and with positive and caring motives. Yet we know that this isn’t always the case. As a psychotherapist I talk to men and women all the time who knowingly deceive each other and go out of their way to hurt or punish a partner. I’ve known people who have HIV Aids and knowingly have sex with unsuspecting strangers. They are weapons of mass destruction and become sexual killing machines. I’ve also known people will continue to have unprotected sex even though they know they are endangering their own lives. They are so selfdestructive they are creating a Russian roulette kind of sexual suicide. I’ve also known people who use sex as a more subtle weapon. I had a client who came to me because his girlfriend was suing him for child support payments.

Generally I tell guys who have fathered children to support them and their mother. But when I heard the full story and checked out the facts I realized I there was a woman who was using sex as a way of extorting money from my client. My client is a well known writer and a successful men’s health advocate. His girlfriend, who he had been seeing for a number of years, told him that she didn’t want to have children and was on “the pill.” My client wanted to have children and was hoping she would change her mind. After being together for 4 years she suddenly split up with him. Two months later she told him she was pregnant and was asking for a sizeable child support payment. Needless to say, my client was shocked. “She told me she didn’t want children,” he told me. “She said she was on the pill. How could this happen?” Since he was a father to be, though, he was joyful to be having a child and was hoping they might get back together. The woman didn’t want to have anything to do with him and refused to consider even letting him see his child. But she wanted payment. Later he learned from a mutual friend that she had set the whole thing up. She had purposely gotten pregnant with the intention of getting a lot of money out of him and keeping him away from the child. It took him many years of court battles and thousands of dollars payment to allow him to share parental rights. He was always willing to pay support, even after he was deceived, if she would allow him to see his son. According to Buss and Meston, these experiences are not that unusual. We often think of men as being deceptive towards women, but it’s clear that women can be just as dishonest and destructive as men can be. As Buss and Meston say in their book, “A deeper, evolutionary understanding of why sexual deception and other dark sides of mating are so prevalent comes from sexual conflict theory. Whenever the evolutionary interests of a man and a woman differ, there is the potential for sexual conflict.” In the case I cited above, the woman wanted to get money from the man and devised a plan to do so. The man wanted to have a relationship with his son and he was willing to “pay for the deception” in order to have his son in his life. Luckily this situation had a happy ending. Eventually my client was able to get custody of the child and became the full-time parent. The deceptive Mom, who was not very responsible in other areas of her life, was able to visit when she was able. So the moral of the story is that whenever we put men, women, and sex together there is certain to be interesting and often unexpected consequences.

I look forward to your comments. To contact me, send an e-mail to [email protected] or visit him at www.MenAlive.com