didn’t we all grow up needing to be secretive? is it because of the adage of how ‘everyone thinks women are hot’ so like even straight women would get turned on more by their own moaning?
like as a guy i don’t even…have the impulse to involve my voice in it at all
I always thought it was purely social conditioning, but I’ve got a theory that just popped in my head. I wonder if women need to be more vocal to communicate “Yes that’s good, keep doing that”? Like frankly my partner is often in charge of pace, depth, and even calling for position changes. I’m letting him know with my noises how good something is for me, If you should keep doing it, or if I get quiet he knows to try something different. I don’t mind him being quiet at all, until I’m on top and then I’m like I literally cannot tell if this is good for you. I have to ask out loud “is that good?” And then change something, “is that good?” After a blow-job I have to ask him, what parts did you like more than the other parts? Obviously I can tell he’s into it overall, but It’s really hard to know if a rhythm or amount of pressure is better than another if moaning doesn’t increase when you try something. Like he can absolutely tell when he hits a good spot when fingering me because my moans make it very obvious. I will straight say, “yes,” “please,” “right there,” “don’t move.” All kinds of stuff. It’s not just about making it hotter for the other person, it’s about communicating how good something is for you so they don’t have to do as much guessing
I’ve also always thought it may have to do with social conditioning, but possibly on a non-sexual level. My thought is that guys are (generally) conditioned to be more quiet about intimate things, or things that are good, and more loud in “aggressive” situations. This fits well with the factual observation that men are less likely to talk about personal problems with a friend, and more likely to push the boundaries (be vocal) in an interview. In my head, it’s an extension of the “strong, silent” stereotype, which is often regarded as positive. Women, on the other hand, are (typically) socially conditioned to be more vocal about feelings in general. I wouldn’t be surprised if these conditionings bleed over into how vocal people are during sex.
With that said: I’m a guy, and my gf likes it when I make noises. Once I got used to it, I also learned to enjoy grunting. Grunting is highly recommended.
Trans woman here, and I can say from first hand experience that hormones change sexual response and desire. I’m guessing (and only guessing) that that is at least a part of the reason.
I know my own experience changed and i vocalise more, but even I can’t tell you why.
You know I’ve never really thought about it until now, but besides the hormones helping your body match who you are, do the hormones change anything mentally? I assume no personality changes, but I’ve wondered if things like senses, pain, temperature tolerance etc. change.
Edit: that’s wild y’all. thanks for the answers.
Oh goddess does the temperature tolerance change. Turns out the fat distribution matters a lot for that!
Also yeah there’s a line in the first altered carbon book about how for men, skin is armor, and for women, a sensory organ, and it’s a little exaggerated, but it’s pointing at a real thing.Re personality: that’s harder to judge, because you have so much going on. It’s a major change in your life, you’re altering how you and the world interact with each other, so it would be hard to avoid your personality going through a rock to mud transition and shifting, but I think there’s definitely some shift towards social responsibility, yeah. Obviously there isn’t an exact measurement, but I think it’s pretty common.
I’ve never heard about women’s skin being generally more sensitive, that’s really interesting! I always thought the difference in temperature tolerance had to do with women having a thicker sub-skin fat layer (might not be the correct English term for “underhudsfett”). Have you noticed any other physiological changes that you think can be attributed to the transition?
Sorry if I’m a bit direct, I just think the biology of the human body is fascinating, and I’ve never really before thought of the insight that we can get from people that have experienced “both sides” of the spectrum, so to speak.
Pelvic tilt is a pretty obvious one, part of why women have shapelier asses and also reduces height a little bit. Emotions definitely feel more accessible, although I have heard that trans guys also get some of that sometimes so that might have more to do with dissociating less, but I also get some urge to cry at stuff like… Last night I was watching a movie with my girlfriend and characters were talking about people they’d lost, and it was an effort not to cry.
You can ask me literally anything you actually want to know about without losing points with me. Just be sure you want to know. There’s a pretty good chance I’ll answer and if you didn’t want to know you might have regrets.
Cool! I didn’t know about the pelvic tilt either, and it’s interesting to hear that both mtf and ftm transitioners (is that the right term?) have similar experiences regarding emotional accessibility. And thanks for opening for questions, I’m going to fire off a couple right away:
Have you experienced any change in sleep patterns?
Any significant change in appetite? If yes, how? Both regarding amounts, and what kind of food you “crave”?
I’m assuming you don’t menstruate, but do you have any kind of hormonal “cycle” that would be similar? If so, how is it?
PS. It’s veery late in my time zone, so I have to sleep now, but I appreciate any answers I get, and I’m looking forward to reading them :)
Different transfem here, but I can say that I’ve had a big change in sleep patterns. I’m a much lighter sleeper now and wake up a lot easier and earlier than I used to. It was a fast and persistent change
My sense of smell is much better now, and that was also a very fast change. I enjoy food more as a result, and have a wider palette. No special cravings, though.
You asked earlier about mental changes - for me that was profound. I’m much calmer and happier now, and feel emotions ‘flowing’ and processing better than before. I used to struggle with anxiety and anger, but now I’m generally more balanced and when I do feel difficult emotion it’s easier to make sense of it and move forward. Before I would often have a sense of what I call emotional “heat” where I knew I was having a strong emotional reaction and felt a drive to act on it, but I would struggle to understand of articulate exactly what I was feeling. Now, in similar conditions I don’t feel such a big impulsive motivation and it’s easier to think through and express the nuance of my emotional experience. This was the change I wanted the very most from HRT and it’s been wonderful to experience.
Of course, everyone is unique and has different receptors, responses, etc. I started from having exceptionally high T levels, and now have typical cis female T and E levels.
Thanks for sharing! I wouldn’t have guessed that sense of smell could be so heavily impacted! Nice to hear that your emotions are doing better as well :)
There’s no common language name for the fat layer under the skin in English. The medical term is most often used which is subcutaneous fat.
Edit: Using “cutaneous” for skin is borrowing straight from Latin which is a little odd. Not because of the Latin, lots of medical and scientific terminology is Latin origin, but because almost every other time we talk about the skin we use the Greek term “dermis”.
Y’all need more combined words! Why can’t we just call it “underskinsfat” or “subskinsfat” and be rid of the problem? I much miss the option in the English language of just plugging together whatever words I need in order to create a word that gets the point across. I hope the devs will add that in a future update.
Without that option you can’t get words like “ashstuck” to describe the specific situation where someone is stuck somewhere because flights are cancelled due to ash in the atmosphere, typically from a volcanic eruption.
The only difference I was aware of with skin is that the collagen fibres are arranged in a different pattern and women’s has less elasticity because of it.
I just want to say that I was on the fence about Lemmy but reading this very interesting thread about changes to the human body being explained by reference to sci-fi confirmed for me that this is a cool place that I will enjoy visiting. Thank you.
Glad I could help! Enjoy your time here!
Skin sensitivity, smell, taste, posture, temperature tolerance, it can all change!
Wow that was very interesting to know
Cis, but I’ve heard that MtF typically your vision becomes more sensitive to color differences, and FtM it becomes more sensitive to shapes and outlines.
Ftm here, I’ve never heard of this before. If anybody has further information, I’d be very interested
I know for MtF the temperature tolerance goes down because of physical changes. I’m sure the hormones change things mentally, whether you’re aware of it or not. They’re a big change.
So personality changes in the same way antidepressants have them. But yeah the rest absolutely. I became more scent over vision, increased pain tolerance relative to mental state (but happy has way less physical pain tolerance than dead inside so it’s not necessarily an increase), and everything is too damn cold
deleted by creator
Trans man, I would say I vocalize more now that I’m T but that might just have to do with my life circumstances significantly improving at the same time, so I tend use my voice more often in general.
Dude, got a tip for you. Make some noise. She’ll love it.
She likes it when I do the Bob Ross voice
Any noise I make would be forced, and that’s just awkward for everybody.
Because of this : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_copulatory_vocalizations
Thank you for posting this. I knew a woman’s orgasm had a purpose in insemination but vocalizations indicating the best time for male ejaculation makes sense.
And about a billion times more sense than some of the nonsense posted in this thread.
Removed by mod
A lot of that bs has been disproven. Orgasm plays next to no reproductive function (beyond, ya know, incentivising us to wanna bone)
Recent studies have shown that just as likely women have other reasons to use their voice during sex. For example to boost their partners self-esteem, etc.
Please don’t just save in your head “women moan to indicate best time for ejaculation”.
Fair enough! I was looking at that Wikipedia entry and that’s where I got that but I’m open to other non-cavewoman-gangbang answers.
Personally I’m loud every second I’m having fun and I can’t say I know of any scientific weapon for it. But it’d be nice for that to be more optional than it is!
Get a load of all the people calling bullshit on my comment lmao.
Dude you extrapolated some crazy stuff about cave woman orgies that are in no way supported by this link.
Except there is clearly a potential link that deserves further study to come to a conclusion? There’s more credibility backing this being a possible origin than there is to the argument “stupid horny male scientists like thinking about caveman gangbangs. Social construct, guys.”
I’d like to hear an actual counter theory that isn’t hiding behind identity politics or an emotional response. I’ve already stated that this hypothesis isn’t concrete fact, but you’re being willfully ignorant if you don’t believe there’s any merit to it.
Bro your hypothesis is “I feel like it” and your evidence is “You can’t prove it’s not true” and that’s just not how science works.
What we have is evidence (see your damn link to wikipedia) in non-human primates and the “I’m making a sound now to indicate that you should ejaculated for maximum likelihood of impregnation” is pretty solid stuff. There’s talk of encouraging fights for better mate selection. What there isn’t is talk of “I am doing a sex, please join the train being run on me” no matter how much you feel like it’s a valid theory.
Audibly encouraging fights among males literally ties into the theory. The hypothesis is that female moaning attracts nearby males, the males want to procreate, but only one male’s genetics are going to actually form a child, and it is in the species’ best interests for that child to contain the DNA of the most-likely-to-survive and procreate. It doesn’t matter whether the guys all form an orderly queue to some daily gangbang (which was absolutely NOT the case), or start fighting amongst themselves to be the only one with a chance (which includes the possibility that another had ejaculated inside her prior to this) - the purpose of her vocalizing was to encourage males in the area to compete, especially if she’s already in the middle of the act. There’s enough merit here to suggest further study into the area, especially given that neither of our theories are proven.
You seem to be fixated on an argument I’ve not made, and I may not have worded it clearly enough. I’m not suggesting that primitive human females started moaning in an attempt to initiate a gangbang because cave-dwelling women were insatiable whores or whatever. I’m suggesting that those vocalizations were a method to incite breeding competition between males in the area, and that this aids natural selection.
I’m not reading your thesis on cave woman gang bangs. Hopefully someone else will engage you on this topic further.
Eta; And lemme just say, the idea that “more evidence should be gathered” demands that you need to specify exactly how you want to gather said evidence. Which requires treating human women as animals to be studied. It’s absolutely ridiculous at best and psycho at worst.
On the other hand, recent studies have indicated that most copulatory vocalizations in women do not accompany their own orgasm, but rather their partner’s ejaculation. The study showed that the man typically finds the woman’s vocalization arousing and highly exciting, and that the woman herself is aware of this.
Vocalizations can be used intentionally by women in order to boost the self-esteem of their partner and to cause quicker ejaculation.
Ha, name a woman that hasn’t done this to hurry along bad sex.
Try it sometime, my wife loves it and I grew to not be shy about it. There is something about letting out moans and noises that makes sex so much better.
I started screaming. It’s basically a heavy metal concert in our room now.
Hell yeah, brother. Helps you get into that primal mode.
I’m just here for the wont
I are more wont for the same reason.
You guys are all over thinking this. A lot. I’m pretty sure it’s because basically all porn has a very loud female role and a near silent male role. There’s been lots of studies on how porn affects people’s actual sex lives. Vocalization is a part of that. Girls watch it in formative years, learn “This must be what my partner will find hot,” just like tons of other emulated behavior from other media. Boys do the same.
my gf loves it when i make noise
Same reason dogs don’t bark when they chase the mail truck.
As a trans woman, I noticed it started happening fully unintentionally after HRT. It’s anecdotal, but makes me feel like there’s definitely a chemical component because it actually surprised me.
I wonder how much of that is placebo effect.
My honest guess is all of it
It kinda came outta nowhere for me, I wasn’t expecting it. But idk, could be ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Before I transitioned I was pretty much silent. Hormones affected that some, but I have to say I got way more vocal post-op. First time I got it in the vagina I was quite loud.
I think some of it is just what genitals people are rocking.
I don’t know how I know the answer to this, and I’ll try to keep it brief and simplify something more complex than I can go into given I’m typing on my phone, but here goes:
This goes wayyyyyyy back into our past as human beings. Women largely vocalize more than men during sex as a way to signal to other males in the area that sex is happening and that they should join in. It’s encouragement for the male, but it goes deeper (heh) than that - the human penis is quite large as far as body to dick ratio for animals goes, and there are two reasons for that; the head is designed to ‘scoop’ competing males’ semen out with each thrust in preparation for replacing it with the dick-haver’s own, while the longer shaft allows deeper penetration in order to scoop as much as possible.
So basically, when a woman moans loudly, it’s signifying she’s ready to go, and that the strongest male in a group will be the one to eventually impregnate her. It’s literally a survival of the fittest mechanism.
Now obviously that isn’t the reason for it these days, as we’re all aware that our intelligence as a species makes sex a vastly more complex thing than it is for other animals at this point in our evolutionary path, but that’s what researchers believe is the origin of sexy female noises.
EDIT: This is a legitimate hypothesis. Not everything is some modern social construct with no link to any evolutionary advantages and survival of the fittest. I’m sorry if this challenges your narrow worldview.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_copulatory_vocalizationsI hate this hypothesis and I highly doubt any women were involved with developing it.
… which makes no difference either way because science can be done without including any person of any particular gender.
Gender does give some unique insights to things though. When only one sex are the only ones looking at something, particularly something that has an effect in a psychology or physiology based thing it’s way easier to overlook a detail of something that they have never experienced. When science was the domain of almost exclusively men there were a lot of easily provable false things in regards to women and archeological finds that were just taken as gospel because nobody thought to prioritize or consider different perspectives. When you study a sex like they are an animal with no internal perspective, unique cultural expectations or values you make a lot of mistakes.
Like they never bothered mapping the internal structure of the clit until 1998. The internal structure is actually a lot bigger than you’d think.
Science generally has a way to test a hypothesis. Like a lot of things that start with “humans do x because when we were cavemen…”, this has no way to test it.
Do you think they were busy moaning or?
I’d like to unscrew my eyeballs, put them in a hard bristle boot brush to remove the outer layer and then put them back in my sockets so I can be free of this comment. We moan because it feels good. If you want to try and go further perhaps because we haven’t been conditioned as much to suppress emotion. As to the shape of the head….if anything the shape would serve as a plug for the current male’s own sperm to prevent it from coming out. C’mom
I didn’t just make this up, it’s a legitimate hypothesis. Someone else posted a wiki link to it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_copulatory_vocalizations)
Not everything is some patriarchal social conditioning conspiracy, dude.
I never doubted it’s someone’s hypothesis, that doesn’t make it any less absurd
See moaning and panting and the softly whispered “fuuuuucky yes” more as a means of expressing arousal and excitement. My SO is fairly vocal (involuntarily, I love it), but I had to learn it first. It really feels good tho’, I suppose it depends on what your partner wants/likes?
I grunt and moan to signify my effort and enjoyment.
Porn has done it for dozens of years at this point, and it has just become not only an expectation, but just a thing that gets picked up.
The reason men don’t moan during sex is the same reason why Gordon Freeman doesn’t talk, basically.
