According to Osho, women cultivate attractiveness as a political strategy: in patriarchal societies their bodies became the only accessible source of power. They often resent male sexual demands to preserve that power, staying tantalizing yet unattainable—the 'carrot' that controls. Saying yes risks becoming an object, losing leverage. The real solution is dropping power games through understanding and restoring equal freedoms.
Like holding a cookie just out of reach, being pretty gives power in a world that limited them; saying no keeps that power so they aren’t used.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, why do women like to be attractive to men when they also resent their sexual desires?
Now that is simple logic. If she says yes, you reduce her to a mechanism; you use her. And nobody wants to be used. It is the other side of the same power politics. Power means the capacity to use the other, and when somebody uses you your power is gone, you are reduced to powerlessness. So no woman wants to be used. And you have been doing that down the ages. Love has become an ugly thing. It should be the greatest glory, but it is not -- because man has been using woman and the woman resents it, resists it, naturally. She does not want to be reduced to a commodity. That's why you will see husbands just wagging their tails around their wives and their wives in such an attitude that they are above all this nonsense -- holier-than-thou. The wives go on pretending that they are…
Beloved Osho, I thought I heard you say that if one goes deeply into sex it will eventually drop off by itself. I have thought long and hard about this, desperately trying to penetrate its hidden meaning, but all I got was a headache.
No medical researcher has come to the conclusion, but I say it from my own discoveries that I go on and on making -- I'm an incurable discoverer -- and sooner or later science will have to agree with me. The sex center exists in the head, not in the genitals -- that much science has come to know. And if the sex center exists in the head and not in the genitals, then sex deprivation can create a headache. It will not create genital ache because there is nothing... it is only an extension of a certain center in your mind. Why have people started thinking -- and doctors have started even advising their patients -- that sex is good for your mental health? And they are right: all the people who have repressed sex in the past in the name of religion, have suffered tremendously with headaches. Even…
Beloved Osho, I have noticed that the women here are becoming juicier and more active, while we men are becoming lazier and lazier. Would you comment?
I was a lecturer in the university... just by coincidence I was sitting with the vice-chancellor -- he had called me to discuss a few things about my behavior -- and at that very moment a girl student came in. She was in tears. The vice-chancellor asked her, "What is the matter?" She said, "Look at these letters! A few boys go on continuously writing me love letters. They even throw pebbles at me. They are harassing me!" Naturally the vice-chancellor said, "You just name those people, they will be punished." I said, "Wait. You don't understand psychology. Let me take the case in hand. I am teaching psychology -- you don't know anything about it." He was shocked that a lecturer should say that. But it was absolutely certain that he had no idea of psychology. He had been the chief justice of a high court. I said, "It…
For one who would purify his chitta, who would attain his own nature—why is bodily adornment, why is the association with woman or with man, and delicious and nutritive food like poison? Why? Let us consider the reasons rightly. We adorn the body only because our interest is in someone else. No one adorns the body for oneself; it is always for the other. One in whom we are assured—then we cease to adorn for them. Hence other men’s wives appear more beautiful; one’s own wife not so much. For wives become assured of their husbands. Now daily adornment is no longer needed. What has been won—what is the need to win again and again? The husband sees their real face. He tires of it. The neighbors see their made-up face, prepared for going out; thus the neighbors seem to take rasa in them.
Beloved Osho, how is it that going into something consciously has such a power to reveal all the threads which make up the tangle?
Such is the unconsciousness of man. The wife died in the morning and he is worried about what he is going to do in the night -- tonight! And you are talking about time: that some day wounds will be healed. What about tonight? I have heard an ancient story, Arabic, that a man's father died and all the old people of the neighborhood came and said, "Don't be worried, son. If you have lost your father, we are here. Don't think for a single moment that you are fatherless. We are all your fathers. You can come always to us in any difficulty, any problem." He was very much consoled, seeing the concern of his neighborhood people. He had never thought that they would be so considerate. And then his mother died and all the old women came and said, "Don't be worried. We are still alive. You can…