Why women truly loved Prince - and why he truly loved us back.

In his 1986 Grammy Award-winning song Kiss, Prince sang: “Women not girls rule my world”.

As tributes light up the internet for the late performer and songwriter — a man who the New York Times has described as being “bursting with music” — many people have taken to social media to share why Prince was so important to women.

He might have won seven Grammys, some said, but he also dedicated much of his career to celebrating women’s sexuality, and generously nurturing and championing other female artists.

“I haven’t seen anyone write about how [Prince] always surrounded himself with female musicians,”tweeted Vox.com writer David Roberts.

“Under appreciated fact about Prince: He championed women musicians throughout his career,” Selene Yeager tweeted.

“I think it needs to be said that Prince was an excellent supporter of women in rock. Look at his bands,”added Jessica Faust.

Prince ‘really respected women as artists’

Senior music writer for Fairfax Media Bernard Zuel said Prince’s support of the women around him was so significant because it was rare.

“Prince was someone who really respected women as artists, songwriters and performers — something that was certainly not a given in the 70s and 80s when he started, and still isn’t even an assumed truth now,” Mr Zuel told ABC News.

“He was a massive fan of Joni Mitchell and I suspect that must have had a massive role in how he saw women as equals and as contemporaries, and as people with whom he could work and who might bring something special to him.

“Once you recognise the quality in someone as great as Joni Mitchell, you have to see that goes beyond your sex.”

Over the years Prince nurtured and supported numerous female artists, many of whom played alongside him in his bands and went on to have successful solo careers of their own.

One of Prince’s proteges, singer, drummer and percussionist Sheila E, served as Prince’s drummer and musical director throughout the 80s, and was also a successful solo artist (and at one point his fiancee).

“I think we influenced each other,” Sheila E told TIME in 2014. “I influenced him the same way he influenced me … We mentored each other, if you want to look at it that way. That’s the good thing about Prince: you can see how he was influenced by the people around him.”

Prince wrote many award-winning songs for other women

Prince also wrote countless award-winning songs — often under a pseudonym — for other female artists including Stevie Nicks, Sinead O’Connor, The Bangles and Chaka Khan.

“He was a big factor in a lot of careers,” said Mr Zuel. “There were other people nurturing women and supporting women but it wasn’t common for someone of his prominence and talent to have such a broad interest in and support of other artists.

“[Prince] stood out for that generosity, he stood out for his willingness to share what he was doing with them.”

However Mr Zuel said it was important to understand that Prince was no saint.

“He was also able to see himself as above some of these people and chuck them out of the band if they didn’t fit with where he was going,” Mr Zeul said.

“So we’re not talking a complete, all-encompassing, all-forgiving man … he had a more complex, more nuanced relationship with women than just good or bad or supportive or destructive.”

Prince’s songs show women ‘with the same sexual urges as men’

Prince has also been celebrated for the way he embraced women’s sexuality in his music.

“He was a very strongly sexual person in his songs and women were both players and partners in that,” said Mr Zuel.

In his book I Would Die 4 U: Why Prince Became an Icon, Toure described Prince’s 1983 hit Little Red Corvette as a “masterfully written pornish sex story song”.

The song details Prince’s experience with a woman more experienced than himself: “It’s as though Prince is a sexual athlete whose competition is women who are more sexual,” Toure wrote.

Writing at BuzzFeed Nichole Perkins said: “It’s easy to think that Prince only sees women as objects made for sexual pleasure, but looking further, his songs show women with the same sexual urges as men.”

Perkins continued: “Prince helped me achieve an honest and good sex life. For that, I’ll always be grateful.”

And in his 1984 song Darling Nikki Prince again sang of women’s sexual pleasure:

“I knew a girl named Nikki / I guess you could say she was a sex fiend / I met her in a hotel lobby / Masturbating with a magazine.”

Apparently Tipper Gore, wife of then-senator Al Gore, had bought Prince’s album Purple Rain for her 11-year-old daughter, but after hearing its explicit lyrics — Darling Nikki included — tried to return it.

Ms Gore later helped form the Parents’ Music Resource Centre, which led to the introduction of warning labels on record covers.

‘You’re the reason god made a girl’

Of course, when it came to women Prince wasn’t just about sex — in 1994’s ‘The Most Beautiful Girl in the World’, he sang of physical beauty, certainly, but also love.

“Cuz baby, this kind of beauty has got no reason to ever be shy / ‘Cuz honey, this kind of beauty is the kind that comes from inside.”

And the music video is a celebration of women’s accomplishments. In it, a diverse group of women watch footage on a screen of some of their biggest achievements, from giving birth and winning a gold medal to making other people laugh.

Prince sings: “It’s plain to see, you’re the reason that god made a girl.”

This post originally appeared on ABC News.

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