Posted February 3, Reviewed by Michelle Quirk. Few aspects of life are as infested with mythology and taboos as sex. I'm not talking here about all the sexual inhibitions we carry in our culture. In fact, many of these inhibitions tend to occur spontaneously as we grow up, even without the help of a restrictive moral or religious education.
What I am primarily referring to is pretty much the opposite: the belief, pushed by films and other media, that sex, to be good enough and fulfilling, needs to be very frequent, powerful, varied, surprising, orgasmic, and athletic. This is a myth.
I'm not going to deny that sex, like all else in life, can be good or bad, and that there are technical factors that will influence this. But most consensual sexual encounters can be at least reasonably pleasurable, and the factors involved in the experience will be closely related to the meaning of the encounter or lack of it, as it may be , rather than to the technical abilities of the participants.
For example, a Chinese study, published some time ago, found that a p artner's wealth predicted self-reported orgasm in a sample of women. The authors saw this as evidence that female orgasm has an evolutionary function, by increasing the probability of conception with a more "desirable" male. In this case, at least, the technical sexual abilities of the participants had nothing to do with the outcome.
In another study involving 99 women, the level of satisfaction in their relationship was found to be a predictor of treatment response during cognitive behavioral sex therapy. The better the relationship was at baseline, the more the participants were able to benefit from cognitive behavioral sex therapy.
