Conference Agenda

A number of factors crucial for experiencing high sexual satisfaction have already been identified, people's mindset being one of them. The goal of this research was to investigate further how women’s mental attitude towards sex refers to their sexual satisfaction. Two different theoretical approaches were applied for this aim: a) the well-established cognitive model and the notion of self-schemas; b) the phenomenological dialogical self theory and the concept of I-positions. It was hypothesized that: 1) sexual I-positions predict sexual satisfaction stronger than sexual self-schemas; 2) there are concrete sexual I-positions, such as “I-as-guilty” or “I-as-wild” which explain sexual satisfaction the most. The study was conducted online on a group of 228 heterosexual Turkish women with at least 1-year lasting relationship. They completed The New Sexual Satisfaction Scale, Sexual I-Position Profiles and Women’s Sexual Self-Schema Scale. Analyses showed that I-positions predict sexual satisfaction much better than self-schemas. Sexual I-positions explained 48.8% of the variance. It was observed that positive I-positions explain sexual satisfaction much better than negative ones. The following I-positions were the most important for sexual satisfaction, “I-as-his-lover”, “I-as-wild”, “I-as-sexy”, “I-as-not interested”, “I-as-princess” and “I-as-blessed”. Results for sexual schemas showed that only romantic-passionate schema is significant for sexual satisfaction when analyzed together with I-positions. Obtained findings suggest that the phenomenological concept of sexual I-positions provides a more robust explanation for women’s sexual satisfaction than traditional, stable cognitive sexual self-schemas.