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.

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

Comments

[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....