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The Surprising Science Behind Why Women Moan During Sex
Why do so many women make noise during sex?
I remember being young and feeling out of place as I navigated the world of sex. I fumbled around like a child who’d just been handed a violin and asked to play Mozart.
I think we all were. Puberty is a tough part of life. There’s a lot going on with our bodies and minds and we don’t quite know what to make of it. If it felt like you were a child living in an adult’s body, that’s because you were. I know it felt that way for me.
My young mind was opening up to a world of sexy, scary, and intimidating things as I navigated my way from boyhood to manhood. And one thing that always confused me was the way women moaned during sex.
It was the 90s and the sounds of sex were everywhere. And it was especially important that our culture, like other cultures, focused on the sounds that women make during sex.
Women moaned during sex in movies, they moaned during sex in pornos, their moans were described by friends and romance novels alike. I couldn’t tell if everyone was exaggerating how awesome sex was or if it was really just that awesome and I was missing out by being a child.
It felt like the kind of fraudulent exaggeration we see all over our culture in the way that lipstick is an embellishment of red, blood-filled, and perky lips; or the way that foundation is an exaggeration of smooth, blemish-free skin that nobody really has.
Sexual vocalizations seemed like the Instagram influencers of the sex world.
Culture and Sexual Vocalizations
If I asked you to close your eyes and imagine couples having sex, which party do you automatically assume is going to be the loudest?
I’ll let you answer that question.
Of course, the truth is a bit more nuanced than that. Some men are very vocal (and many women love this, by the way). Some women aren’t vocal at all. But on a whole, in every culture, whether you’re on the far eastern reaches of Asia, up north in Finland, or even down south in the rainforests of the Amazon, all over the globe, women are the louder sex when it comes to sex.
