Men's and women's sexual experience differs (IStock Photo 5058065, Georgiana Palmer)

Between bed sheets across the nation, Americans make use of billions of dollars worth of condoms and oral contraceptives, and still bear more than 4 million children.

There’s a lot of sex going on in this country.

But even with millions getting in on the act, not everybody’s got the same take on the experience. 1 in 2.33 (43%) of U.S. men think about sex at least once a day and when they get it, they like it -- 1 in 1.2 U.S. men (or 83%) report enjoying that hair-mussing, headboard-banging activity a great deal. Yet a much smaller proportion of women feel the same. Only 1 in 7.69 (or just 13%) of U.S. women think about sex on a daily basis, and only 1 in 1.69(60%) really enjoys herself when she gets it. In fact, the odds a woman in the U.S. doesn’t enjoy sex at all are 1 in 14.29 (7%) compared to only 1 in 50 (2%) men who reports the same.

It’s not just that they’re using different equipment for the job. When men receive sexual stimulation, they focus on the physical, sexual experience, and their brains process the experience into an awareness of enjoyable arousal. Women’s brains, on the other hand, rely less on the straightforward genital response and instead appear to incorporate a much wider spectrum of emotional and environmental cues. The resulting subjective experience doesn’t always add up to pleasurable, sexual arousal. In fact, if the circumstances aren’t right, a woman may experience much less subjective arousal than her body’s response otherwise indicates, or she may even feel highly unenjoyable feelings of guilt, shame or fear instead.

According to a series of PET scan studies, these differences could come down to the very ways that that men’s and women’s brains experience sex. For example, during sexual stimulation, men show more activity in areas of the brain associated with sensory integration, vision and visual imagery (something the visually-based multibillion-dollar pornography industry has benefited from for years). Women’s brains on the other hand, light up in very different areas—ones associated as much with selective attention and memory as with sensory integration.

But once the orgasm hits, these differences in activation pattern disappear—and so do the differences in experience. Both men and women show similar changes in brain areas that correspond to the cardiovascular system and to sites associated with pleasure, satiation, urge suppression and release—fitting nicely with how both genders typically describe an orgasm: satisfying, fulfilling, pleasurable. Of course, that’s assuming nobody’s faking—as 1 in 2.08 (48%) women, and even 1 in 9.09 (11%) men, have already done.