I don't understand why someone like Simon who is supposedly a male feminist doesn't already know and understand this part.
Edit: He’s also conveniently forgetting that an unplanned pregnancy is harder on a woman, and that women are more susceptible to STIs.
As somebody who runs a sex-positive publication where nearly all the writers are women, I have to say that Simon and guys like him are very, very wrong about women and sex. Under the right conditions (see above) most women love sex. In fact, for most of history (until around the Victorian era) women were viewed as the much more carnal gender. But, aside from the fact that women who own their sexuality are still harshly judged, women get bored with the same ole, same ole routine boring sex and it tends to kill their libido. It's well documented that if a woman lives with a man by about a year in, it's quite common that she's going to be less interested in sex, not because she no longer cares about it, but because she's bored, and tired of handling the domestic load.
“Even if you are having sex frequently, even if she orgasms regularly, this doesn’t necessarily mean that she’s actually satisfied. As science writer Natalie Angier has characterized it, women are subject to “the multiple sheaths of compromise and constraint” that cloak and contort their sexuality. Patriarchal narratives that espouse what is appropriate for women, and decree how they naturally are in order to fit that mold keep many, many women from accessing or even understanding their own sexuality.”
Your point about a lot of men's sexual need actually being about validation and the fact that it's the only socially acceptable way for men to have touch is spot on. Looking at the surface of a dynamic and deciding what's going on underneath without actually investigating it isn't a very intelligent way to try to understand something.
Tell Simon to read Untrue by Wednesday Martin if he wants to actually learn about women's sexuality, and not just propagate some silly cultural narrative.
“There’s quite a bit of research that suggests that if women are not concerned for their safety in some way and feel likely that they will have a pleasurable experience, they are just as open to casual sex as men are. A 2017 study showed that among women aged twenty-five to twenty-nine, group sex and threesome experience equaled that of men the same age and women were nearly twice as likely to have gone to a dungeon, BDSM, swingers’, or sex party, which pretty handily challenges the long-held assumption that men are the naturally more sexually adventurous ones or that women primarily want an emotional connection.”
