A friend passed on the link to this article in the New York Times Magazine, maybe you've already read it:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/magazine/25desire-t.html
While it's great to have the fact that no one knows anything about women's sexuality acknowledged in a national magazine, there were a few aspects of this article that bugged the shit out of me. The reporter's reflexive need to give a fuckability report on the women doing the research, for instance:
While the subjects watched on a computer screen, Chivers, who favors high boots and fashionable rectangular glasses...
What the hell? He goes into detail on another researcher's hair. Who gives a shit? Why oh why is it that in order to talk about women's sexuality, the conversation must somehow be made sexy to men?
The data from Chivers' study relating to the naked man irritated me as well, because it can be interpreted to support the notion that women don't like looking at hot men. But the man in the video was shown walking around with a flaccid cock, which as the article delves into later, is the antithesis of hot. No wonder the women responded to him less than they did to the apes. I wish Chivers had included pictures of attractive men that did not include their penises. I would love to know how the women in the study would have responded to that.
This quote, from Julia Heiman, director of the Kinsey Institute, is troubling:
“Masters and Johnson saw men and women as extremely similar,” Heiman
said. “Now it’s research on differences that gets funded, that gets
published, that the public is interested in.”
Well, you generally find what you look for, don't you? What I want to know is who is making these funding decisions, and just what agenda do they have? While I'm all for examining female desire, the overall project of magnifying every difference between women and men seems to me to support treating us differently, legally, and that's not good.
On the other hand, women's sexuality is different from men's, whether that difference stems from innate biological differences or is due to the societal context in which we live or the interplay between the two. The whole piece about women being turned on by being desired was very interesting. If this is true, then the impossible standard of beauty to which we are held is in effect a massive, population-wide, daily dose of saltpeter for women. No wonder we have a reputation for not being interested in sex. The whole culture is constantly telling us we're unattractive.
There's a lot more. It's an eight page article. I'm still digesting the implications that some of the research has for the concept of consent in women. Those findings are troubling, and in the wrong hands, could lead to some very irresponsible conclusions. But the article is well worth reading.
...Hewlett-Packard's new service, MagCloud, makes the notion accessible:
