The Sexual Fluidity of Women - Ever since Margaret Atwood—a feminist novelist in the most important sense — wrote her famous story “Rape Fantasies,” people have understood that sometimes women’s sexual fantasies are anything but politically correct. Now there’s an interesting story in the New York Times Magazine that implicitly asks: Are contemporary women doomed to experience a schism between what their bodies lust for and their minds tell them they want? (Full disclosure: Dan Bergner, the author, is an old acquaintance.) The story offers up a road map of female desire as charted by postfeminist scientists, who have been exploring female desire with gusto. Guess what? What women want in bed is far more complex and, well, polymorphously perverse than some had formerly thought. In fact, no one understands any of it yet.
Yet one interesting idea emerges from the piece: the notion that female desire is based less on intimacy (the old truism) than on the perception of being desired—a notion that, it would seem, complicates feminist notions of owning your sexuality. To take just a few bits of research from the piece: As Bergner reports, scientists have long wondered why women sometimes describe feeling arousal (even orgasm) during nonconsensual sex; some scientists now theorize that it stems from an evolutionary adaptation to early human sex. (Women whose genitals remained unlubricated were more susceptible to injury, infection, and, consequently, death.) Bergner connects this to the fact that women seem to be more responsive—on a physiological level—to a breadth of visual stimuli than men are. One recent study, conducted by psychologist Meredith Chivers, found that heterosexual women responded sexually to a wider array of videos than men did; while the men in the study mostly responded to images involving women (and the gay men mostly responded to images involving men), the straight women in the study were turned on by everything from heterosexual sex to a nude woman doing calisthenics to bonobos mating.
Interestingly, though, the women recorded their sexual response differently than did the machines that measured it: They said they had been more turned on by the images of heterosexual sex—and less turned on by the images of bonobo sex—than they actually had been. Hmm. As I understand it, this discrepancy either means that women’s minds and bodies are subconsciously at war or that the women were conscious of their less “normative” desire but felt ashamed of it. In either case, it bears thinking about.
So does the complicated notion that there's something reactive about female sexuality. (After all, we've all had the experience, I'm sure, of not desiring a man who desired us.) Be that as it may, there's something worth mulling about the (mostly female) scientists' new thinking on the matter. As Bergner puts it, scientists like Chivers believe that “female sexuality [may be] divided between two truly separate, if inscrutably overlapping, systems: the physiological and the subjective.” So I’m curious: Did any of you buy any of this? What was your reaction? ( slate.com )
Yet one interesting idea emerges from the piece: the notion that female desire is based less on intimacy (the old truism) than on the perception of being desired—a notion that, it would seem, complicates feminist notions of owning your sexuality. To take just a few bits of research from the piece: As Bergner reports, scientists have long wondered why women sometimes describe feeling arousal (even orgasm) during nonconsensual sex; some scientists now theorize that it stems from an evolutionary adaptation to early human sex. (Women whose genitals remained unlubricated were more susceptible to injury, infection, and, consequently, death.) Bergner connects this to the fact that women seem to be more responsive—on a physiological level—to a breadth of visual stimuli than men are. One recent study, conducted by psychologist Meredith Chivers, found that heterosexual women responded sexually to a wider array of videos than men did; while the men in the study mostly responded to images involving women (and the gay men mostly responded to images involving men), the straight women in the study were turned on by everything from heterosexual sex to a nude woman doing calisthenics to bonobos mating.
Interestingly, though, the women recorded their sexual response differently than did the machines that measured it: They said they had been more turned on by the images of heterosexual sex—and less turned on by the images of bonobo sex—than they actually had been. Hmm. As I understand it, this discrepancy either means that women’s minds and bodies are subconsciously at war or that the women were conscious of their less “normative” desire but felt ashamed of it. In either case, it bears thinking about.
So does the complicated notion that there's something reactive about female sexuality. (After all, we've all had the experience, I'm sure, of not desiring a man who desired us.) Be that as it may, there's something worth mulling about the (mostly female) scientists' new thinking on the matter. As Bergner puts it, scientists like Chivers believe that “female sexuality [may be] divided between two truly separate, if inscrutably overlapping, systems: the physiological and the subjective.” So I’m curious: Did any of you buy any of this? What was your reaction? ( slate.com )
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