But one thing I’m noticing is that most of the people who are commenting are older, into their adulthood, probably more confident in their ability to communicate what their boundaries are, less restricted by the peer pressure and social needs of the kids out there. Even beyond college age, we are moving into a time of sexuality when we need to be addressing these questions with high schoolers and middle schoolers.

My kids are young, my oldest is 10, but I have many friends of kids in the 7-12 grade range. And we are shocked…MORTIFIED…at the lessons that these kids are teaching each other. The fact that there are ideas if it’s anal or oral sex, you’re still a virgin…if you do it in a group with friends and it’s not one-on-one you’re safe from anything BAD happening…unsupervised parties where girls are providing numerous sexual acts for numerous sexual partners. These are 13-14 year old babies we’re talking about, using their budding maturity as a weapon and we are not teaching them to defend against it.

We need to instill in our boys from way before they should be young enough to understand, but make no mistake THEY WILL, that they are not “entitled” to encounters that result in their pleasure. Sure, it she Holy Grail of adolescence, but is our culture teaching them that it’s their right to push a young woman to the point where the unenthusiastic no is ok?

Then we butt up against the age old question of how do we teach our girls, and that’s what they are, they’re not women yet, that it’s less about whether the guy is going to respect you in the morning, but can THEY respect themselves in the morning. This may be taken the wrong way, and it’s not in the most general way that I mean it, but how do we tell them that to use their bodies and sexual privacy to ensure popularity, to make friends, to elevate their place in school society is whoring themselves. I’m not saying that makes them whores, but they are selling a part of their souls for far to cheap a price.

I worry about the years ahead, I hope that I teach my son that his sexuality is a great thing, but to be aware doesn’t mean understanding….I’m aware of nuclear power, do I understand the best uses and the full outcome if used inappropriately? I want to teach my girls the ability to communicate clearly what they want and don’t want, because I know that the pressure will be there and the opportunities will be abundant. I want them to make choices based on what they REALLY want, not what they see as the only end to this particular path and why not get it over with now.

I basically agree with enthusiastic, obvious and verbally clear, although that can be frustrating when people’s styles are more reserved. I think it best, if someone’s signals are unclear to ask. If they get annoyed with you asking for clarification then maybe they are not appropriate for you. People are individual and so a one-size fits all approach isn’t appropriate and even great communicators can make mistakes. It’s difficult being around people who expect you to read their mind. Forget that.

Some of the situations you describe are individual–the strap thing I see more as accidental, yet I suppose that could be an individual response too. Dilated pupils–hard to tell in most environments and I agree with you there. The handholding lock I would think would be a better indicator, except in very hot weather. I pay far more attention to how someone responds to me, specifically how well they listen and how attentive they seem to be when I’m speaking and how engaged they are in the conversation, yet that needs to be a two-way street. People who interrupt, dominate or don’t even respond are automatically dismissed. If someone gets too personal too soon that puts me off. I use this in general with most people, because if they cannot respond to what I’m saying or blirt and spew an inappropriate commentary, then I’m flat out not going to waste any of my precious time or energy PERIOD. Some people are good at faking interest, although I’m good at spotting them and they get cut off too. Why waste time and energy. It’s good that you have some women friends to turn too for their opinions.

“As for reading non-verbal communication when it comes to sex, again I think if intercourse is the goal, then the more aggressively inclined might choose to ignore the non-verbal signals and rationalize the outcome.”

Someone mentioned something above which I think I agree with: When it comes to sex - people getting naked with each other - things should be either enthusiastic and obvious or verbally clear. I think most of the problems with respect to verbal/non-verbal clues come up before that - initiating conversations or in sexual interactions that aren’t sex in a narrower definition: kissing, dressed making out, fooling around, etc…

There’s a book by female author Leil Lowndes with the horrible title “undercover sex signals” that I found quite helpful in learning o decipher female body language ;) But it’s still difficult for me to know whether it means something when she, say, rubs her breasts against me in a crowded place or if it was just accidental - I’m usually counting the incidents in that case… Is she telling me something if the strap of her dress drops from the shoulder and she doesn’t move it back up or is just too involved in our conversation to care? The only thing I’ve come to trust is taking her hands and see if she “locks in” or not. I’m trying to identify mirroring behaviour but I find it very hard, and in most environments its impossible to know the cause for possibly dilated pupils. In short, I find it very hard to deal with non-verbal clues that are apparently obvious to most other people, particularly my female friends. I’ve even, on occasion, asked one of them to analyse a couple of my interactions to tell me if/where I did not correctly understood non-verbal clues in their opinion. I theoretically know them and I think I’d by now even be pretty good at spotting them analytically/with respect to other people, but I don’t seem to be able to trust myself in this respect when it comes to say, knowing when the time has come to kiss or, say, becoming physical on a dancefloor.

I wait until she does (or doesn’t and the interaction is over because she seemed to expect me to make the move and I couldn’t).

There’s a difference between ability and capability–I agree. As for interpreting non-verbal (facial and body language) some people lack this ability, or do they have it and ignoring it tends to work for them. They can respond by saying that the other person used confusing signals to deflect ownership of unwanted aggressive behavior. I don’t feel comfortable making generalizations about reading and interpreting non-verbal communication. People are very good at rationalizing and denying. (I’ve met both men and women who I believe are very poor communicators.) The study is interesting. As for the math and mechanics, I did well in math and often out-performed the men in my classes in higher level math classes. I also excelled in communication. For me personally, everything changed at puberty, then sadly the focus changed towards me. I also believe there are differences between men and women, however I strongly believe that socialization and environment play a greater role and determinent to emotional makeup. I wonder about the very subtle differences that parents communicate to their infant boys and girls. I do know there’s a difference and I believe studies to back it up. I’m certain some parents are very unaware of their own emotions and how it impacts their children.

As for reading non-verbal communication when it comes to sex, again I think if intercourse is the goal, then the more aggressively inclined might choose to ignore the non-verbal signals and rationalize the outcome.

I think this is unfortunately both true to some extent: a) men (on average) don’t learn to be as good as they can be in interpreting non-verbal communication. This is somethint that can be dealt with if there was a real recognition that they need help in this area, that not everything is “naturally” given or not, and b) men (people with a male brain structure) will on average ceteris paribus never be as good as women (people with a female brain structure) are on average when it comes to interpreting non-verbal communication. There are researchers who suspect that “autism is an extreme version of the male condition ” (Simon Baron-Cohen) -

“Many of these sex differences are seen in adults, which might lead to the conclusion that all they reflect are differences in socialization and experience. But some differences are also seen extremely early in development, which may suggest that biology also plays a role. For example, girls tend to talk earlier than boys, and in the second year of life their vocabularies grow at a faster rate. One-year-old girls also make more eye contact than boys of their age.

In my work I have summarized these differences by saying that males on average have a stronger drive to systemize, and females to empathize. Systemizing involves identifying the laws that govern how a system works. Once you know the laws, you can control the system or predict its behavior. Empathizing, on the other hand, involves recognizing what another person may be feeling or thinking, and responding to those feelings with an appropriate emotion of one’s own.

…

We know that culture plays a role in the divergence of the sexes, but so does biology. For example, on the first day of life, male and female newborns pay attention to different things. On average, at 24 hours old, more male infants will look at a mechanical mobile suspended above them, whereas more female infants will look at a human face.”

Source: http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/08/08/opinion/edbaron.php?page=1

I don’t blame him for not stopping earlier (after all, being a teenager in love, I consented, clearly and vocally) but I would have been spared considerable pain had the general societal pressure been to only have sex with people who were being actually enthusiastic about it rather than to have sex with anyone who’ll let you.

i firmly believe that men are generally capable of a greater degree of perception than a number of them exhibit. is that really so out there? my point isn’t that this just poof! changes overnight, obviously. that would be absurd. my goal is that by focusing on how we treat our children from day ONE has a great deal of influence on how they grow up to conceive of sex, dating, gender roles, etc. and that if we started at the beginning, we’d have some success. clearly it has to come over time and in pieces. such is the way most social change operates.

once again, i also explicitly did not say that i think it’s a bad thing to teach women to communicate discomfort or hesitation or pain or whatever in as many ways as possible! i see no harm in urging both sexes to work on communication. but my feeling is that this isn’t all some crazy mars-venus communication barrier we’ve inherited from adam and eve, but that the degree to which women feel comfortable communicating at all and the means of communication, inside the bedroom and out, have been shaped and influenced by a society that has historically not valued female expression or opinion and has not recognized female sexuality. conversely, how men are taught to interpret various signals and what even makes it on the radar is influenced by the same culture.

it is to me both a cop-out and an insult to say that men “just don’t get it and never will, so why bother even trying?”

Men are the ones who claim that they have an immutable sex drive, not women.

But otherwise, I do agree with the rest of your response to chareth - at some point, you do have to say, “Well, this hasn’t been working for me, I need to figure out some way to take charge and change it.”

Chareth, as far as making facial expressions or freezing up, the problem with that is that so much of it can be expressions of pleasure, too. When I lost my virginity, I cried out because it hurt and thought it was weird that my boyfriend didn’t stop - he just kept going and I was really put out by that. Later, he told me he thought I was crying out in pleasure and I realized after more sexual experience that my cries of pleasure really could be cries of pain too, and vice versa. It’s really hard to tell the difference. If I had said, “Wait, that hurts,” it would have been unequivocal what I meant. When I climax, I freeze up - out of sheer joy of the feeling. When I make facial expressions, they really could go either way. You can’t fault guys for not being able to tell the difference - the line between pleasure and pain in bed can be so thin sometimes. To expect someone else to be able to accurately read all your moans and movements is just ridiculous. It’s a lot harder to mistake, “That hurts, stop,” or, “No, not yet.”

You have already said that some of the men in your experience can’t read the non-verbal clues. That wasn’t me. That was you.
So that’s the way it is.
In other words, that’s the world now.
It makes no difference if men are hardwired or if men are clueless. You experience has told us that some aren’t picking up your nonverbal clues. So what are you going to do about it in the immediate future?

Wishing won’t make it change.

I do think, if you’re going to be upset with men about this, that men might think your refusal to even countenance a declarative sentence is designed to reduce your responsibility, along with reserving your right, after some reflection, to accuse the guy of something nefarious.

Well, anyway, you do what you want. Let us know how it works out.