Of all the provocative headlines that have appeared in newspapers in recent years, this one must take pride of place: “Do brainy women really have better sex? Yes, yes, YES!!!”
It’s sensational tabloid journalism at its worst – taking a study conducted by respectable scientists, and turning it into something newsworthy.
But Do Brainy Women Have Better Sex?
Even so it’s worth looking at this, because we know that men and women have different motivations for love, and therefore the research may well tell us something about the nature of love, and how men and women fall in love, and even, possibly, something about the way in which women try to make men fall in love with them.
Let’s have a look!
Emotional Intelligence Is Everything
The research was conducted by Prof Tim Spector at Kings College in London, and the Daily Mail, which reported on this study, presented it as a piece of evidence that suggests “brainy women have hotter sex lives, including up to twice as many orgasms”.
Some observations made by the author of the piece, who did some similar research for Psychologies Magazine, are clearly true.
For example, it’s not breaking the boundaries of known sexual science to say that the rewards of a good sex life are many and varied!
And while we obviously know that’s true, it’s leads to the main reasons why we all want a sexual relationship with a man or woman with whom we are in love: greater sensual pleasure, deeper fulfilment, a better sense of connection with our partner, and the other benefits which spinoff from being in love.
These include being able to enjoy a great sex life, an increased level of confidence, better self-esteem, a more positive attitude and greater happiness in general. You can probably think of something personal to you here (good orgasms. maybe?)
And of course we also know that good sex isn’t natural or even easy. It comes with practice, no matter how much you may say you’re in love, and with a deeper sense of connection to your partner.
Love alone won’t help you enjoy good sex life. Being in love isn’t enough: you need to practice, to get to know your partner, to understand what turns him on and how he responds sexually, and above all, you need a sense of mutual sexual generosity and compatibility.
Even if sex is great at the start of a relationship, we all know it doesn’t necessarily last. You need to work to make both love and good sex last – and hopefully get better as time goes by.
Those Brainy Women: Do They Love Better?
The interesting thing is that saying brainy women have better sex is quite misleading. The the study by Prof Tim Spector was actually investigating the connection between emotional intelligence and quality of sex rather than ordinary, every day, common or garden intelligence.
Emotional intelligence is basically about the ability somebody has to understand their own feelings, express them, and to understand what somebody else is feeling. Empathy, in other words.
Each of us knows, in all probability, that men and women are different in this respect: women tend to be champions at emotional intelligence, and men generally come second. This is probably because women spend so much time in their Lover archetype, which is all about flow, feeling, connection with others and indeed emotional literacy.
Even if you don’t know what the archetypes are, you can probably see intuitively that The Lover is a natural and inherent part of all of us – it’s the part of us which holds our inner (and outer) child, it’s the part of us which looks for connection with others, it’s the part of us which seeks to merge without boundaries.
It has its beginnings in the early bond between mother and baby, and the quality of that relationships determines the tone of how our Lover archetype operates for the rest of our lives.
We all know that some babies, regrettably, are not wanted: for them, the quality of the bond between them and the mother when they are born is not going to be good.
And there’s an inherent message which a baby picks up about him or herself from this, a message about how lovable they are.
A disrupted parent-baby bond impacts on an individual’s ability to believe themselves to be lovable, and on their ability to believe they are capable of loving others. And the earlier this wound takes place, the more profound the damage to one’s sense of self. You see, a child wants nothing more than to fall in love with his or her mother (and of course, his or her father) to the exclusion of all else.
For a baby where the bond between mother and baby is good, this child grows up believing himself or herself to be lovable and to be able to love others.
This is where the drive to love in later life comes from.
It’s the drive which makes a woman look for a man with whom she can fall in love, and it’s the drive that makes a man look for a woman with whom he can fall in love.
In the natural order of things this should be a normal part of human development, not forced: in other words, it should be something that we all naturally experience just through being alive, being social animals, and being around other people.
(I’m wondering whether or not the drive that some women have – almost a kind of neediness – to have a man fall in love with them is an aspect of damage to the primal love bond between mother and child. Could it be, I wonder, that if you are looking to find out how to make a man fall in love with you, then perhaps there’s a little bit of work to be done on repairing your own sense of how lovableyou are, or even, perhaps how loving you are?)
But we digress. Back to the research by Prof Spector.
Why would emotional intelligence – if you like to put it that way, a high emotional intelligence quotient (otherwise known as EQ) – lead to better sex?
Answer: Because emotional intelligence leads to what has been termed “sexual intelligence”. This is the ability of a person to understand others on every level, the sensual, the physical, and the emotional, and it’s essentially an indication of somebody having a high level of empathy, understanding, creativity, and self-awareness.
As you may well imagine, these are qualities which can influence the quality of sex you have. To quote the original article: according to therapist George Foster, “it is your mind, not your body, that makes you feel seductive. Sexual messages originating your mind then flow to your body, with or without another person there. Imagine and create your own sensual movie, and you will feel your sexual energy building and energising you.”
You see the point? Healthy sexual energy, and perhaps also the ability to make a guy fall in love with you, is not necessarily as much as you might think about the object of your affection, and rather more than you might think to do with loving yourself.
And if you take this a stage further, it’s entirely possible that a breakdown in relationship, or even the lack of feeling of being loved, isn’t so much about your partner as it is about you being able to create desire and confidence and a sense of loveboth for yourself and for your partner.
And this, perhaps, is a reminder that in such circumstances you perhaps should not be blaming your partner, or waiting for the perfect man to love you. Instead, you could be working on loving yourself more.
If you’re already in a relationship, perhaps this means developing the confidence to express your sexual self and make demands of your partner to show how much you want to be loved and how much you want him or her to love you. (And of course you have to love yourself first before you can love others.)
So it follows, doesn’t it, that an emotionally intelligent woman is going to be a better lover simply because she is more in touch with the essence of love: empathy, communication, self-awareness and connection. Not forgetting falling love or having a man fall in love with you, of course.
Dr David Schnarch suggests that good sex can only be achieved by those who are emotionally adult. What this means to me, is that people who have a deep understanding of themselves, and what makes them tick, and who are able to relate to others and empathic way, can both give and receive love, fall in love, and enjoy the intimacy of sexual intercourse.
On another page of the site we will look at the ways in which you can effectively increase your emotional intelligence, and thereby improve the quality of your emotional connection with men. This will make you more easily able to make a man fall in love with you without manipulation or tricks, and so in turn make yourself more attractive and desirable, and obviously therefore more likely to attract the attention of a man who wants to fall in love with you.