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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!

Date: 2009-01-28 11:24 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] 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.

Date: 2009-01-29 12:40 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] 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... :)

Date: 2009-01-29 03:41 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] 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!

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