Treading on Dangerous Ground

I just finished reading "Bonk" by Mary Roach (here), so I feel I'm up on the latest in sex research. When I ran across an article reviewing research on women's sexual desire, I thought it would be fun to see all the themes run through again.

There was a fair overlap. But there was new material. So the article was a pleasant addition to what I had recently learned.

As for style, I prefer the Roach-style romp through the literature because it educates without taking itself too seriously. But for those who are more fastidious and want their science delivered without innuendo, the article entitled "What Do Women Want?" by Daniel Bergner in the NY Times Magazine covers interesting ground in sex research.

It looks the work of a number of researchers, but most deeply at three sex researchers: Meredith Chivers at Queen's University, Lisa Diamond at the University of Utah, and Marta Meana at the University of Nevada. Here are some interesting bits from the article.

The key result of Chivers' work:

Males who identified themselves as straight swelled while gazing at heterosexual or lesbian sex and while watching the masturbating and exercising women. They were mostly unmoved when the screen displayed only men. Gay males were aroused in the opposite categorical pattern. Any expectation that the animal sex would speak to something primitive within the men seemed to be mistaken; neither straights nor gays were stirred by the bonobos. And for the male participants, the subjective ratings on the keypad matched the readings of the plethysmograph. The men’s minds and genitals were in agreement.

All was different with the women. No matter what their self-proclaimed sexual orientation, they showed, on the whole, strong and swift genital arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women and women with men. They responded objectively much more to the exercising woman than to the strolling man, and their blood flow rose quickly — and markedly, though to a lesser degree than during all the human scenes except the footage of the ambling, strapping man — as they watched the apes. And with the women, especially the straight women, mind and genitals seemed scarcely to belong to the same person. The readings from the plethysmograph and the keypad weren’t in much accord. During shots of lesbian coupling, heterosexual women reported less excitement than their vaginas indicated; watching gay men, they reported a great deal less; and viewing heterosexual intercourse, they reported much more. Among the lesbian volunteers, the two readings converged when women appeared on the screen. But when the films featured only men, the lesbians reported less engagement than the plethysmograph recorded. Whether straight or gay, the women claimed almost no arousal whatsoever while staring at the bonobos.

The key claim of Diamond is for a sexual "fluidity" of sexual desire in women that isn't found in males:

...Diamond argues that for her participants, and quite possibly for women on the whole, desire is malleable, that it cannot be captured by asking women to categorize their attractions at any single point, that to do so is to apply a male paradigm of more fixed sexual orientation. Among the women in her group who called themselves lesbian, to take one bit of the evidence she assembles to back her ideas, just one-third reported attraction solely to women as her research unfolded. And with the other two-thirds, the explanation for their periodic attraction to men was not a cultural pressure to conform but rather a genuine desire.

The key results of Meana:

Yet while Meana minimized the role of relationships in stoking desire, she didn’t dispense with the sexual relevance, for women, of being cared for and protected. “What women want is a real dilemma,” she said. Earlier, she showed me, as a joke, a photograph of two control panels, one representing the workings of male desire, the second, female, the first with only a simple on-off switch, the second with countless knobs. “Women want to be thrown up against a wall but not truly endangered. Women want a caveman and caring. If I had to pick an actor who embodies all the qualities, all the contradictions, it would be Denzel Washington. He communicates that kind of power and that he is a good man.”

Fascinating stuff. The bottom line: men are simple while women are quite complex (separate mind/genital systems, fluidity of desire, being desired is the orgasm).