Rankin “One Dress” at Brick Lane showThe Kinsey Institute, led by Julia Heiman, is conducting an international study on sexuality in heterosexual couples who have been married more than 20 years, with the male partner between 40 and 70 years old.

Interviewed in the Washington Post, Heiman said that she is most surprised at the differences in responses from men and women, as they examine relationship satisfaction in Brazil, Japan, Germany, Spain and the US.

Each country has 200 couples participating, and the female responses are a big surprise. Then again, perhaps not, when you consider how much we learn about female sexuality when focus groups and interviews aren’t the sole source of information.

In what sounds like a total reversal of expected gender behavior, Heiman found that among men a number of factors could predict relationship satisfaction, including health, sexual functioning and intimacies like kissing and cuddling.

In women, only sexual functioning — level of desire, frequency of arousal and orgasm — seemed to predict relationship satisfaction. Heiman says the result “was really different from what we expected.” via AOC

We thought women were the ones who only wanted to cuddle. Hmmmm, perhaps we have a major breakdown in our global culture’s understanding of female sexuality for real.

Older Japanese Women Warm Up to Idea of Divorce

It will be interesting to read the survey of Japanese couples in the Kinsey Study on relationship satisfaction.  If Japanese women are as sexually demanding after 20 years of marriage as their American women counterparts — and women in Spain, Germany and Brazil — their embrace of divorce makes a lot of sense.