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Susannah is furious about the misogynist premise of yesterday's NY Times on female desire. 5:12pm - Comment - Show Comments (3)Hide Comments (3)

Stephanie Gilmore at 5:17pm January 26
no doubt!!

Jessica Smith at 5:55pm January 26 via Facebook Mobile
Hm... You'll have to explain this to me. I thought the article was fairly accurate (in "parts" @ least).

Erica Dale Southward at 10:36pm January 26
I am still reading through it but I was heartened to see that at the VERY least they acknowledged that it is impossible to tease out a learned from a "biological" response.

response:

yes, i think being able to separate learned responses is important... but i thought that they didn't do enough with that, at least on first reading. my biggest issue was that our sexual desires are inextricable from our social conditioning... i WANT to be desired in part because of that scene between Christian Slater and Samatha Mathis in Pump Up the Volume! therefore boobies might turn me on because they remind me of that scene, not because of some evolutionary thing or other... or maybe both... or maybe because i am bisexual/queer... but whatever, there are many other layers to it that have a lot to do with our social dynamics.

more importantly, our ability to articulate desire in language is totally enmeshed in the language we are taught is ok for us. in our generation at least, it was way less acceptable for women to be conscious and/or verbal about intense sexual desire than it was for men (may not be true for those ten years or so younger, i'm not sure). if we don't look at that, then the terms of the study just reproduce the idea that women's desire is aberrant because it is different from men's. the research questions should be (in my humble opinion): HOW is women's desire triggered? what is the relationship between physical sensation and conscious acknowledgment? in what ways are the research questions modeled on assumptions about men's desire? what are the results if we adopt similar strategies for evaluating men's desire as those we use to evaluate women? i think that would be FASCINATING.

plus, were any of these women sexually abused? because it's textbook that one of the first and most lasting responses is dissociation/the inability to acknowledge and own physical desire.

this may be an issue of writeup rather than of how the study was conducted... and i am teaching a class on women in pop culture since 1990 so i am all fired up about hegemony and ideology right now... but i mostly just am full of DESIRE about what kinds of studies i would like to see and am devastated (yes, devastated! :)) to once again see an article that reproduces the "chicks are crazy" paradigm, even if it does credit women with pansexuality, which is a step forward.

... and now back to thinking about the economy, which is, let's face it, more important.