By Ayoola Olajide
Physiologically and psychologically, a man is different from a woman in sexual response. It does not take a man more than a few minutes to be ready while a woman needs more patient attention and prolonged arousal to be ready. Psychologically, a man can have sex with almost any woman while many women want to be emotionally involved with their men to be able to have intimate relations.
Now, society is comparatively lenient with men in terms of sexual morality and marriage. While for women, society sanctions sexual relations only within the marital bed, for men, pre-marital and extramarital sex is condoned.
Family and social pressures for a man to marry are not as rigid as for a woman. A married or unmarried playboy is secretly admired while his female counterpart receives social ridicule and disapproval.
Economically, the man is at a disadvantage when he marries since he has to support a spouse who usually brings little or nothing and who may even have more expensive spending habits than the man.
Women are probably not to blame for being economic liabilities – it is the consequence in a society that expects little of women.
It is easy to understand that a woman might bow to socio-economic pressures and let herself be given in marriage. But against the background of less repressive family and social attitudes as well as economic advantage, it is not so easy to understand why a man would compromise and marry.
Why men exchange pleasure for displeasure and freedom for confinement is not all that difficult to comprehend when one looks through to the real reason for male marriage: sex.
Yes, women have cause to be suspicious, hostile and anxious about starting a relationship with men: men are often only interested in sex.
Only the most ascetic of men will marry exclusively for the sake of procreation. A large majority of men are interested first and last in sex and only in-between is the desire for offspring and for companionship.
The moment a man sees a woman he desires, what comes into his mind is not love, friendship, companionship, marriage or even children; it is how to get her laid.
Fortunately or unfortunately, women are psychologically conditioned to be alert on this; so women employ all kinds of deviousness meant to culminate in marriage.
It is usually male insistent demand for sex and the devious ways they in turn employ that make many women to break down and have premarital sex, sex being a positive reinforcement for men and a negative reinforcement for women both being socially and physiologically prescribed.
A man will do almost anything for sex, and for this reason psychosexual offenses are committed mostly by men and not by women. Males are almost exclusively rapists, pedophiliacs, sadists, voyeurs and exhibitionists.
A woman wants love and marriage; a man wants sex, so they make a strange compromise and come together. Both may look upon the offspring of their marriage as the fusion of their love, but really, children are the offspring of sexual passion -“Behold, I was conceived in iniquity and in sin my mother conceived me,” the psalmist says. Indeed, children are the curious outcome of sex, and not the other way.
It is another thing entirely explaining why a man with an unlimited opportunity for sexual fulfillment in marriage continues to seek extramarital affairs.
•Culled from; Quality Weekly Magazine, January 3, 1991, Vol. 7.
