What Do Women Want?
We won't find out by trying to separate biology from culture.
The cover asks "What is Female Desire?" and the story title, "What do Women Want?" seems to promise that scientists are getting closer to figuring out one of life's great mysteries. Daniel Bergner, in fact, does not attempt to answer those two questions (and the small subtitles make it clear that he isn't going to try) but rather he profiles the work of several scientists who are researching women's sexual response, their subjective sense of arousal, and the ways those do or don't line up.
It is a well-written article and a very interesting read. It takes on complex questions and, within its scope, attempts to address them without oversimplifying or sensationalizing (except for the first sentence of the article, in extra large and colorful print that reads "Meredith Chivers is a creator of bonobo pornography."). I would encourage anybody to take a look. But prepare to be frustrated as well as intrigued. Some readers will be frustrated, as was Meredith Chivers (a psychology professor at Queens University, and one of the scientists whose work is the focus of the article) because the answers are not clear and meticulous research takes so long and is so difficult to do, and because, as she is quoted as saying early in the piece, "The horrible reality of psychological research is that you can't pull apart the cultural from the biological."
Click here for my frustration.
My frustration comes from the fact that researchers like Chivers insist on trying to pull apart the cultural from the biological. What is it that drives the notion that our biology is where the "truth" about us would be found if only we could clear away the confusing layers of socialization and culture? I would much prefer to see research examine the intersection of the biological and the cultural giving equal "truth value" to both. This is a theme that comes up over and over, especially in relation to the discussion of Chivers's work. (In fact if we could get past our desire for biologically essentialist answers we could see the variations in human experience that would allow us to start breaking down the false binary of male/female = boy/girl = man/woman, but that is for another blog post I think.)
It isn't that Chivers denies the importance of culture. In fact in several places her research leads to insightful observations about the interaction between culture and biology. It is just that she seems, at least in the way that the article is reported, to believe that cultural influences somehow interfere with our natural responses, and that assumption leads me to think that for her "truth = biology" rather than "truth = biology + culture". Humans do not exist outside of culture, and culture shapes our deepest drives and desires - or at least our perception and expression of them. Even if we could somehow discern a completely unsocialized physical truth about human beings' sexuality (which we could only begin to uncover by studying members of a much wider range of cultures) how would that help us understand human behavior in society if we did not also understand the ways that behavior is shaped by culture? And why should the biological seem more intrinsically "real" than the combination of biological and cultural?
Chivers is not the only sexologist whose work is discussed, and Bergner does interview people who take a less physiological approach. He talks with Marta Meana, a psychologist at University of Nevada at Las Vegas, who cautions him that in studying desire "the variability within genders may be greater than the differences between genders," something that is true about many sex-linked differences. And he talks to Lisa Diamond, whose recent book Sexual Fluidity explores the connection in women between desire and emotional intimacy, suggesting that women are attracted to and desire people less based on their gender and more based on their personalities and the emotional connections that they develop. (Yes, I am bracketing the criticism that sex and gender are not dichotomous in the first place, and that those very ideas are culturally constructed. Those of you who know my work know that I argue against essentialism in general.)
But Bergner begins and ends the article with Chivers in a way that tells us that the physiological is understood to be the essential source of truth about us as humans. And the last two paragraphs tell us that both Bergner and Chivers despair about the possibilities of ever knowing "the truth." After quoting Chivers talking about how many cultures have placed such strict limitations on women's sexuality and how those strict limitations belie the stereotype that women's sexuality must be naturally passive, Bergner remarks:
There was the implication, in her words, that she might never illuminate her subject because she could not even see it, that the data she and her colleagues collect might be deceptive, might represent only the creations of culture, and that her interpretations might be leading away from underlying truth....There was the chance that the long history of fear might have buried the nature of women's lust to deeply to unearth, to view.
It was possible to imagine, then, that a scientist blinded by staring at red lines on her computer screen, or blinded by peering at any accumulation of data -- a scientist contemplating, in darkness, the paradoxes of female desire -- would see just as well.
It is a sad ending. It is sad because it presumes that if we cannot know the physiological truth of women's desire then we might as well just wander in the darkness, perpetuating myths about it. I could not disagree more. We need more work that explicitly seeks to understand the ways that culture shapes biological processes without being weighed down by questions about its essentially physiological nature. I am put in mind, again, of Leonore Tiefer's work and the New View Campaign which does exactly this.
There is a lot more to say about the article and the findings it discusses. Fortunately we'll have an opportunity to talk to the author of the article in the near future. Daniel Bergner contacted me on Thursday to ask if I'd be interested in reviewing his new book, "The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys Into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing," which comes out on Tuesday, and I've invited him to hang out here when that review is posted and answer questions or discuss issues with readers.
female/male sexuality...??
I adhere to the given truth that females in our society have been denied both equal rights and equal pay and equal recognition as individuals and stereotyped as "mothers", etc.
Can you clarify what your proposed research is seeking to determine when you say: culture shapes biological processes without being weighed down by questions about its essentially physiological nature ?
Are you suggesting that a female's sexuality( represented how?) is being altered by culture( women won't look at pictures of naked men because culture has said that "good" females don't do that , even though females would like to look at naked males) ?
I am completely without motive other than to understand your advocacy in this subject.
walt
Actually what I said was
Actually what I said was this:
What I meant was that the work (the research) needs not to be weighed down by questions about the essentially physiological nature of biologically-observable processes like sexual response/arousal. I think that only when we understand how those biologically-observable processes are affected by societal/cultural influences can we get a full picture of the 'truth' of sexuality....because public space really matters!
Elizabeth
female/male sexuality...??
Am I correct to conclude that just because I am aroused by a picture of some sexual act between whoever, you would see that as not particularly meaningful in discovering the effects of societal/cultural influences as to how our sexuality developes?
If so, I would agree.
Not to be contentious, but how, assuming we could determine how society and culture affect our sexuality, would you put such information to use? Would it be to promote less prejudice against those people who are out of the norm of activities, to justify the role of sex workers rather that criminalize their activity,etc.?
I am a bleeding heart liberal, and I believe in compassion for all types of people....even an occasional Republican(rare). I hope this type of study would promote more tolerance of all of us, because we are ALL OUT OF SOMEBODY' s idea of what we should be!!
Putting info about sexuality to use
Walt, I think the question you ask about how information about sexuality should be put to use is a really important one. And a contentious one in many ways. A basic ethical principle of research is that research on a population should be undertaken for that population's benefit, not to harm it, right? So lets say we come to understand exactly how a person comes to desire sadomasochistic sex, or exactly how a person comes to have a foot fetish, or exactly how a person comes to be attracted to people of a given gender (not that I think we're close to such knowledge yet). Imagine the potential for that knowledge to become politicized: whose idea about how to "help" the population being studied would win out? Would we "help" by "fixing" those people? (I hope not!) Or would we help by using the findings to press for an approach to sexuality that sees all consensual sexual behavior as neutral?
The researchers in the article discussed above all seem to come at sex research from a desire to help people have happier sex lives. The article doesn't address this but I would imagine from what I read that all would support the DSM revision agenda that I mentioned when I blogged about the reclassification of kink/fetish in Sweden so that it is no longer considered indicative of mental illness.
I absolutely agree about the need for more tolerance and more acceptance. Thanks for contributing here, Walt!...because public space really matters!
Elizabeth
politics and sex
I can't imagine such knowledge (accurate or inaccurate) remaining politically neutral, when the "knowledge" that gender reassignment worked was propagated many intersexed babies were surgically altered to conform with the norm for their own good. When our society is given a tool it tends to use the tool even after the evidence is conclusive that the application of the tool was compellingly, systematically harmful.(i.e. formula being better for babies than breast milk or preventative antibiotics)
This is not to say that research is always perverted by misuse, for the most part accurate information lends power and stability to otherwise marginalized people but awareness of past errors should help hinder impetuous use of new information.
Part of what's interesting
Part of what's interesting to me is that the "end game" in female sexuality isn't easily defined at all. Even trying to look at it from the most simplistic viewpoint possible, I don't know that anyone can state that physical satisfaction for a woman creates an emotional satisfaction, or vice-versa (or that the answer is even the same from woman to woman).
I have come to agree, though, that it is probably pointless to look at female sexuality from a purely physiological standpoint. A sexual experience for a woman (and perhaps for a man, as well) can't be defined strictly by physical reaction. The research has shown that physical signs of arousal can exist without such a mental state, and that the reverse is true as well.
This is not to say that I think all research into the physiological side of sex is pointless. But as Elizabeth points out, I have to think that any hope of reaching a Grand Truth is lost unless the whole of the sexual experience and the influencing factors therein is examined in depth.
measuring stick comparisons
I understand your frustration about researchers isolating the results of physicality from the influence of culture. For me this isolation both poses challenges and makes sense from a reverse engineering viewpoint.
If there were a machine that responded to social and cultural cues and influences with changes in output and internal processes; examining the output without examining, isolating and acknowledging the input and variations in the filtering of input makes for ambiguous results.
People are not machines and the organic systems that people are have variations that differentiate both output and input on physiological, psychological and cultural levels. Hence hot for me may not elicit the same response from you no matter how much your body's model is similar to mine.
Examining the purely physical isolated genital reaction to a set of visual and auditory stimuli may give hints to researchers about tissue response. Without taking both the coexisting and complementary systems into account that include nerve and chemical signals triggered by brain responses that are culturally influenced the opportunity to create a useful compelling and significant contribution to our knowledge base remains un-impacted. However isolating minute cause and effect lends itself well to focusing future research toward or away from potential lines of inquiry.
While it's frustrating to see talented researchers seemingly run up dead end alleys while examining links in chain reactions those links group to form the chains that both bind us and support us in living as sexual beings.
To me what drives the notion that our biology is where the "truth" about us, resides in the divorce of the divine and spiritual from the physical. The very distinction drawn that love is inherently different from lust on some esoteric impossible to define barrier between mind and spirit may be where people want to divorce themselves from the drives that run their bodies. I believe there exists some distinction between mind and spirit but I also believe that it's indefinable. While culture influences many behaviors the very question of free will has many scrambling for a biological imperitive that we can blame for misdeeds while crediting spirit for all that is virtuous.
Putting info about sexuality to use
I also think that evolution plays a part in our sexuality. In African Genesis, a strong case is made for why male/female attitudes are survival evolved. Males wanting to have numerous partners(many of whom would die in childbirth) tended to succeed in genes continuing because of numerous offspring. Females who did not have many partners did not have many children and thereby increased their chances of survival, thus selecting that trait of few partners. So we arrive at males humping anything that moves, and females who were monogamous surviving where more "promiscuous" females burdened with too many offspring to care for, were less likely to survive. And these traits became "naturally selected" and form another dynamic in our discussion of our modern sexuality!
For me, personally, I think that , with the right individuals, we are all bisexual. But that is another subject. For me, I think that I could have sex with a man, though I have not, if the man matched my needs mentally. But I would not say that I would have sex with any man. And I would say the same for women.
If its not doing any harm, not from a right wing Nazi viewpoint, but a reasonable human being viewpoint , then let us embrace our many foibles and get on to the "we're destroying the planet" issues. :)
walt
the urge to biologize
Crucify me for a cliched citation, but Judith Butler makes the point somewhere, probably in Bodies that Matter, that it's always interesting to note when people *want* to invoke some sort of biological basis for sexual difference. The fact that variation within the sexes may well be greater than variation between gets shoved aside by the urge to find some fundamental physical distinction.
Or, as she says in the intro to Bodies that Matter: "In relation to sex, then, if one concedes the materiality of sex or of the body, does that very conceding operate - performatively - to materialize that sex? And further, how is it that the reiterated concession of that sex - one which need not take place in speech or writing but might be "signaled" in a much more inchoate way - constitutes the sedimentation and production of that material effect?" I.e., just by saying it, we do it.
A longer excerpt that puts that quote into context is at:
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2005/2005-November/024899.html
evolution
My reference to evolution is meant to portray one of the ways that society has imposed sexuality on women and those sexual attitudes have been "selected" through the process of natural selection. Ie., women who "wanted a lot of sex" had a lot of offspring which led to a lower chance of survival in history thereby selecting the less productive (less sexual) female. Males went the other way, mate everything that moves and your genes( and attitude ) would be selected by many offspring.
These things just happened....there was no "morality" to it, they just did it. Survival selected what worked that enabled certain behaviors to continue. On up to the present. Now women don't need men to protect them from harm and things are going to change evolution wise. But evolution moves very slowly and we are stuck with the old thinking of what women should be( but probably because they are free to be what they want). I could see a day way in the future when women would protect their males and the women would rule the world and be the aggressors in sex and politics, etc. No longer need the physicality of the male for survival, you know? Way back then in cave days, women needed men for physical protection especially during child rearing. Maybe in the future, men will be kept in cages to be ejaculated for child rearing and all the women will be lesbians!!!!!!!! OMG, did I just say that! :)
walt
logic and evolution
There seem to be some logical problems with that particular evolutionary argument. What connects the amount of sex a woman has/wants to the number of partners she has/wants? And if a woman was being monogamous with one man could she not get pregnant just as often as she could if she were having sex with multiple partners?
I'm with Dhenwood in calling for us to look at the degree of variation within categories before seeking out evolutionary arguments for the smaller mean differences between categories.
...because public space really matters!
Elizabeth
evolution
Yes, you said that.
One of the problems of drawing conclusions from historical accounts or constructs is that people don't necessarily tell the truth to themselves and often gloss over or lie outright to their children and grandchildren. To genetically survive does not preclude a woman dying in childbirth on her fourth or fifth pregnancy nor does multiple partners for women mean less genetic survival.
To start with the premise that women are or were historically less sexually interested is to color your results to be consistent with that finding. If men had partners that resulted in procreation they were female, willing or not. Women that had a higher interest in sex with men may or may not have had more pregnancies closer together given biology and social impetus to marry and have children.
Where does the genetic component of sex drive rest? Is it sex linked? Is it one component? Is it a composite of genetics, prenatal hormone levels, nutrition, sleep deprivation, trace elements and societal pressures? Any simplistic approach is likely to result in anecdotal and correlative evidence with leaps in logic that succeed in answering the question but fail in both accuracy and scientific rigor.
Why must I always rethink my position?..
I've cut and pasted it all into Word Pad and let my screen reader go to work.
Still, from the first word to hte last a single question refused to go away. I have often said I want to know what women think. Part of that answer would seem to be, 'What to women want?.
I am very interested in conversations with women about sex and sexuality. Not because of any agenda planned for a particular outcome to the conversation, because I want to know. I've spent my life in research and seeking answers that ask more questions has always been the path I followed.
On to the question: Do I want to know what women want? I think not (and thus Des Cartes dissolved.)
I've had to restate the question: What does a particular woman want?
It stikes me that there are times we slice the pie too thin. I think, in a general way, tohave some inkling of the female psyche would be beneficial. I also think tht finding some broad answer only pushes back into identities I resist. What I want varies from day to day and person to person and situation to situation. I know about labels and I know how damaging they can be.
So, my initial interest in this thread has faded. I don't want to be around anyone who thinks bitchy is strong or manipulation makes for a successful relationship. I do want my partner, even my friends, to be a bit mysterious, completely sontaneous, and entirely reliable. It seems to me, that among the women I have known who I thought of as 'honest', this is what they wanted.
It is an interesting question. I hope I never find the answer.
evolution
The theory of natural selection is TOTALLY OPPOSITE from intelligent design. I'm far left liberal. Natural selection means that what succeeds in life tends to continue. God is NOT involved. Natural selection is taking place, albeit extremely slowly....like over thousands of years, even as we speak. Flowers, animals, that happened to have some characteristic....like flowers that happened to have a bloom that bees happened to really like were pollinated and reproduced, or females that didn't burden themselves with many children to rear and survived because of it. Having many offspring in ancient days was a life threatening situation.
Please read Robert Ardrey's African Genesis if you want to know the most astute argument for what led to many of our current social attitudes. There is no judgment intended. It only explains to some degree why males and females sexual mores have formed the way they have. Many other influences come into play as well. And of course, the process is on going. Females are much more financially and emotionally independent from males now, because physical protection is less important as well as women are able to have as much financial and social power as males.
Elizabeth, I know your essay was about "what do women want?" . And you objected to people being reduced to physical response to visual stimulation as being an answer to that question, and I would agree! I also think that the answer is unknowable for women, as a group, only because who we are is inseparable from the culture and society in which we live. The answer is existential....what I want is what I want , not what another wants.
walt
Biology versus culture -- what are those researchers thinking?
"It isn't that Chivers denies the importance of culture. In fact in several places her research leads to insightful observations about the interaction between culture and biology. It is just that she seems, at least in the way that the article is reported, to believe that cultural influences somehow interfere with our natural responses, and that assumption leads me to think that for her "truth = biology" rather than "truth = biology + culture"."
Hey, Elizabeth -- good point. But I'm wondering about your caveat -- is this possibly an artifact about Bergner's reporting? I want to learn more about that.
In this day and age, the old undergrad psych 101 questions about "biology vs culture?" are rather antiquated, but they still sell papers. I wonder if she would actually see that as the centerpiece of her frustration, or if that's a quote that gets highlighted by Bergner for journalistic reasons (because journalists tend to write on the "I only took Psych 101 and only got a C in it" level.) (I think I'm wondering since so much of the coverage of his new book on kink suggests he has gone out of his way to find some of the most bizarre and atypical examples he could -- "being barbequed" kinks, for example -- while distancing himself in interviews from "those people." Makes me a bit concerned about whether sensationalizing tendencies are trumping proportionate coverage of Chivers' and others' work. I'll be eager to see your review of his book.)
Greg
We'll find out soon
...because public space really matters!
Elizabeth
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