What is Female Desire?

[ellenkushner]

Trust me, you don't want to miss this article from the NYTimes Magazine on scientific research on women's desire. Headline quotes: No matter what their self-proclaimed sexual orientation, women in the study, unlike men, showed strong and swift genital arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women and women with men. . . .[ADD:] for women on average, desire often emerges so compellingly from emotional closeness that innate orientations can be overridden. " Women’s desire is not relational, it’s narcissistic — it is dominated by the yearnings of “self-love,” by the wish to be the object of erotic admiration and sexual need. . . . . In comparison with men, women’s erotic fantasies center less on giving pleasure and more on getting it.

I'm not saying they're accurate, but it gives you an idea of the range of the piece. Read it for details.

* * *

Also, thanks to all who responded to the previous post on LitMags - I'm really enjoying the comments, and learning a lot!

Comments

[jdulac.livejournal.com]

Good to know it's all been figured out like that.

Guess they've never met a stone butch.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Naw, these are just a few quotes I thought were interesting. It's a pretty wide-ranging article - though not, I suspect, as wide-ranging as it could be given time.

[jdulac.livejournal.com]

We lost power during the storm last night so I never got to post this... I see many others have made valuable comments so I'll forego some of it :). But a key point to me is that one's subjective frame affects the world of the possible even in "scientific" results.

The stories and categories we make for gender, sexuality, desire are very powerful. People edit their life experience to fit into one of the axiomatic stories, even if the story is "alternative." If you are not one of the standard "types" you and your experience do not exist. Do you remember when the gay community did not believe bisexuality really existed? those suckers were "confused" about their "true" identity. Remember the age of political correctness when a lesbian could not REALLY be butch or femme? it was a sign of internalized hetero oppression that needed correction. You must have men friends who fondly remember the older gay man that mentored them in the scene when they were young but would not talk about it openly because our modern frames are all about "abuse" and "recruiting" and those NAMBLA weirdos. We tend to have a fixed set of lenses to look through, and they color the picture and define the universe of the possible -- what is not "possible" is thrust into the shadows. Not possible but yet... it exists.

What if we wrote: Bottoms' desire is not relational, it’s narcissistic — it is dominated by the yearnings of “self-love,” by the wish to be the object of erotic admiration and sexual need.

hmm.... is there some... conflation going on here? Desire is made of so many axes. Woman/man/gay/straight/top/bottom are really such crude approximations of what is an infinite number of compass points, some as fine as a nano-hair... Life is more complex than "Nomads of Gor."

No need to get into the assumptions behind mapping between women's lubrication and desire -- others have mentioned this. Sometimes rape victims experience lubrication, but it does not mean that they "wanted it" or enjoyed it, or worse, that all women really want it.(You can see the competing frames here -- we are only comfortable with absolutes, pick only one).

And we won't even touch the third rail about power, sexuality, and desire and how they intertwine...

Have you noticed that I hate essentialism?

also, clearly, my thoughts not improved in clarity for having sat overnight... :)

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

No, I think you make very good points, here, and I'm glad you braved the storm to write them up. Did you read the actual article? The reason I'm so pleased with it is that it shows people genuinely trying to expand preconceived and narrow social notions of sexuality - *testing* them instead of theorizing, however flawed the initial tests may be. Gotta start somewhere; and once it's started, it, like the discussions you refer to, goes on.

Maybe the lines I picked to illustrate what the article's about were lousy choices. But it's sure produced interesting comments!

[vschanoes.livejournal.com]

Well, no kidding. Women are raised in a culture that equates their sexual objecthood with their worth and with sexual arousal in general and men are raised in a culture that equates their worth with their abilities. Apparently that has effects.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Yes - but isn't it nice to see someone actually saying so in print?

[vschanoes.livejournal.com]

I guess so...I'm always suspicious...

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

So did you read the article?

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

what bothers me the most about this study is that they equate lubrication with erection, because they're respectively easy to measure on various sets of genitals. but they're not the same responses, having rather different biological underpinnings.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Aha!

[rosefox]

See here for more on controversy over plethysmography. It is not, shall we say, an exact science.

EDIT: I should also note that in the study described, the machinery said one thing and the women said another thing. Why are we assuming the machinery is right and the women are wrong?

[natesmomclaire.livejournal.com]

EXCELLENT point! What really struck me about the article (and okay, I've only read the beginning) was how women's reports of arousal varied from the objective data.

[rosefox]

See, in tech support, we call that broken equipment.

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

*nods* yeah, that. if self-report doesn't correlate with some physiological measurement, i would guess that the physiological measurement, umm, doesn't correlate with the subjective feeling. i wonder if the other cast was some mass-media thing, b/c it's not the sort of thing that can readily pass peer review, though i haven't read any peer-reviewed stuff from this person myself....

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

Men's fantasies center on giving pleasure?! What skewed research yielded that conclusion. (Not to malign any sensitive new-age guys, but, you know, you're not the majority.)

At best, I'd buy that their fantasies center on receiving admiration for the supposed giving of pleasure ("Oh, you're so big!"), a far cry (ahem) from actually giving pleasure.

[auroramama]

Well, maybe I'm skewed by having my own SNAG. But I would have thought guys fantasized about giving pleasure, but effortlessly, in bed; the analogy might be fantasizing about thrilling an audience by playing guitar. It's not quite the same fantasy if the audience is thinking, "What huge technical skill he has! We expect to be feeling pleasure any time now!" Of course, to fantasize about delighting people without even trying is not the shortest route to actually doing so.

[peregrinejohn.livejournal.com]

Thus, fantasy.

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

I think we're saying the same thing. At least, I agree with what you said.

And having found the quotation in context in the article, I now see that it's not claiming that men's fantasies center on giving pleasure, but rather that women's fantasies are more about getting than giving pleasure, the identification with the receiver of pleasure. I can buy that.

[auroramama]

Heh. Possibly because receiving pleasure is more likely to be confined to fantasy for women?

[rojomojo.livejournal.com]

How the hell many men did they interview???!!!!

Most guys I know (and run from) really care about getting pleasure and having the biggest genitals. They could give a hang about pleasuring someone else.

rojo

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

I'm going to declare January 22 to be "punch an evolutionary psychologist in the face day".

[naamah-darling.livejournal.com]

Can we have a parade, with floats?

Yes

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

"Charles Darwin, he's our hero, bagging those with a IQ of zero!"

[lauriemann.livejournal.com]

You might want to read this:

What Do These Enigmatic Women Want? (http://neuroanthropology.net/2009/01/24/what-do-these-enigmati-women-want/)

I wonder about the genital arousal part of the study. Couldn't something that measures genital arousal in women, by its very nature, cause arousal in women?

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Gotta say I wondered the same thing. And the description of the men's, ah, apparatus, too, gives pause!

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

Not that I think the article means much, but there were points that the measuring device didn't register what the researcher's called arousal, so I think the devise isn't necessarily the cause.

Great discussion in the link, thanks

[auroramama]

Anyone remember who remarked about this years ago -- was it Joanna Russ? Something about how the question "What do women want" is posed, while "What do humans want" is not, because of the idea that women are some less complex (or more specialized, because marked) type of organism, like rhododendrons, and eventually we'll find an answer like, "They need lots of potassium," and all the fuss will be over.

(I wince at my prose, but I'm fairly sure about the rhododendrons.)

[voidmonster.livejournal.com]

I read that a couple days ago, and there's definitely some interesting stuff in it.

However, the main takeaway point for me was that the author of the piece had the hots for the lead researcher he spent so much time on, to the exclusion of the others.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Oooh, you're mean!

[voidmonster.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I am saying that I think he was cruising for a plethysmograph.

I don't mean it in a cruel way, and he was trying to hide it, but... Well. He ends the article by watching over her shoulder as she cleans up genital data.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

*snerk*

[woodburner.livejournal.com]

I haven't finished reading it yet, so maybe I just haven't gotten there, but this seems to be ignoring the fact that what arouses you is not necessarily what you want to have sex with. Fandom is full of folks who id as lesbians and even asexuals who get off on m/m, het, and f/f when it comes to art and fiction. Sexuality is a lot more complex than who you want to boff and who you don't.

I also have a problem with what someone up-thread mentioned - male erections and female lubrication don't correspond all that well.

[woodburner.livejournal.com]

"Otherwise, I would have to believe that women want to have sex with bonobos." - Okay, I got there, lol.

Do still have problems with the second point, though.

[julieandrews.livejournal.com]

But it's not just bonobos. It's an ape sex remix.

Bonobos don't make for sexy audio apparently.

[rosefox]

Which right there tells you a lot about the researcher's definition of sexy.

I wonder what quality and style of (human) porn she got. It certainly varies quite a bit.

[birdhousefrog.livejournal.com]

Men's fantasies center on giving pleasure? Since when? (I'm sure there are notable exceptions to that guffaw I just let out.)

[kortirion.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that link - I found it very interesting... even if only because it brings to a wider [reading] audience the fact that women in general DO have many sexual fantasies and points of arousal that have nothing to do with the proximity of a partner, male or otherwise. A still prevalent cultural assumption [in both West and East] seems to be that 'boys have sexual fantasies', while girls have 'romantic crushes' ...involving white dresses and happy ever after!

We are all sexual beings - 'get over it'... as they say.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Thanks! That's what I hoped. I'm amazed that people are commenting so fiercely on my stupid little out-of-context headlines, meant just to whet people's appetite to read the whole thing if my link wasn't enough . . . . Live and learn.

[skychild17.livejournal.com]

"...for women on average, she stresses that desire often emerges so compellingly from emotional closeness that innate orientations can be overridden. "

This explains so much about Bryn Mawr.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

...and about so many of us.

That's a good quote. I shoulda put it up top. I think I will.