Posted on 06/23/2013 10:56:25 AM PDT by rickmichaels
Isabel, a New York City lawyer, has a fiancé who appears a perfect catch. Eric is sensitive, smart, kind and handsome. He’s an attentive lover, the sort of man who, on Valentine’s Day, draws her a bath surrounded by candles and arranges rose petals into a heart shape on the bed. Isabel loves Eric, even though her passion for him dwindled months after they became involved. She misses her erotically charged relationship with her ex-boyfriend who, though not marriage material, made her feel desired, his “possession.” Still, Isabel tries to rev up her low libido for sex with Eric, buying massage oil and a blindfold—which also lets her pretend she’s with someone else.
Isabel’s story may read like an outline for the next wannabe 50 Shades of Grey franchise, but it’s actually one of several personal accounts punctuating journalist Daniel Bergner’s bold new book, What Do Women Want? Adventures in the Science of Female Desire. Bergner’s account of myth-shattering research into female sexuality arrives amid a publishing landslide on the topic, joining Bella Ellwood-Clayton’s Sex Drive: In Pursuit of Sexual Desire and Katherine Angel’s Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell. Together they offer startling revelations about female desire—or rather its absence, a fevered debate of our time.
Low female libido—“hypoactive sexual desire disorder” as its been medicalized—has been the subject of hand-wringing for decades. It’s the Where’s Waldo? of scientific research, as drug companies desperately seek a “female Viagra.” There’s big money to be made: a 2005 study in the Canadian Medical Association Journal claimed between 35 and 40 per cent of women have low libido—which suggests “low” is in fact closer to “average.” Ellwood-Clayton spells out the problem in Sex Drive:“Once in a secure relationship, women’s sex drive begins to plummet,” she writes. The Canadian-born sexual anthropologist cites a German study that found that four years into a relationship, less than half of 30-year-old women wanted regular sex with their partners. After 20 years of marriage only 20 per cent of women did. Men’s libidos, on the other hand, remained pretty constant.
The issue, we’ve long thought, is that women just aren’t interested; female desire is simply weaker, and stoked by intimacy and familiarity. But scientists are now wondering whether commitment itself might be the problem. In other words, it’s not a libido deficit, it’s monogamy—an unspoken two-year itch. As Bergner puts it, the female drug we’re really seeking is “monogamy’s cure.”
Female desire is a relatively new field of research. Until the late 1970s, the male-dominated field of sexology focused on documenting male behaviour and performance. The more complex, discrete mechanisms of female lust were inconsequential. Anatomical drawings of female rats didn’t bother to include the clitoris, Bergner reports. Even today, a peep-show stigma remains attached to sexology in academe, particularly in the U.S., which is why many of the scientists he interviews are Canadian.
Psychologist Lori Brotto of the University of British Columbia cuts to the chase: “Sometimes I wonder whether [low female desire] isn’t so much about libido as it is about boredom,” she says. Ken Wallen, a psychologist and neuroendrocrinologist whose work at Emerson University outside Atlanta has revealed that female rhesus monkeys are the sexual aggressors, echoes the sentiment: “The idea that monogamy serves the natural sexuality of women may not be accurate,” he says. Bergner also cites an Australian study of women over age 40 that correlated low female desire to the length of time a woman had been with her partner, not hormonal changes. Once those women were with new partners, libido returned.
American psychologist Marta Meana routinely sees women whose white-hot lust for their partner has turned to ash. She theorizes that, within monogamy, women’s narcissistic need to feel desired is not being met: they feel their partners are trapped and that “a choice—the lust-propelled selection of her—was no longer being made.” One of the women interviewed in In What Do Woman Want?, Sophie, reveals how she compensates to summon lust for her husband: by fantasizing about being ravaged by Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter.
The “you complete me,” best-friends model held as the marital ideal and routinely joked about as a turn-off for men may actually be even more so for women, says Meana: “There has to be an ‘other’ for there to be sexiness.”
The idea that women might be ill-suited for monogamy flies in the face of entrenched thinking that women use sex to bond while men use intimacy for sex, as enshrined in the “intimacy-based sex-response cycle” pioneered by Rosemary Basson, a professor of psychiatry at UBC. It also upends the “parental investment theory,” the notion that men’s seemingly limitless reproductive capacity is why they fling seed far and wide, while women maximize limited reproductive resources by being choosy. Societies have long used the low-libido explanation to maintain order: it discourages female infidelity and has freed women’s energy to focus on home and children.
But that doesn’t jibe with the new thinking that a big part of what triggers female desire is to be desired. Some of this is conditioned: the idea that women—or “good” women—must be pursued and coaxed into sex. But women also expend a lot of energy on the hunt, Elwood-Clayton points out—much of that also focused on being desired. The stakes are even higher for women in the current hypersexualized culture, she writes: “Our desire to appear desirable exceeds desire itself.” Jim Pfaus, a Concordia University psychologist and neurobiologist, sees the double standard surrounding female sexuality rooted in fear: “We men are afraid that if we open the box, open her control, we’re opening ourselves to being cuckolded. We’re afraid of what’s inside.” A glimpse of the box’s contents was provided by Natalie Angier’s 1999 book Woman: An Intimate Geography, which describes the clitoris as the only organ designed purely for pleasure; it has 8,000 nerve fibres—twice the number in the penis. “Who needs a handgun when you’ve got a semiautomatic?” Angier writes.
At Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., psychologist Meredith Chivers is working to expose the “animal truth” of female desire. Her research, which uses a plethysmograph, a miniature bulb and light sensor placed in the vagina, suggests women’s desire is as omnivorous as men’s; they’re equally aroused by a range of pornography and are far more responsive to stories involving strangers than long-time lovers. Yet when asked to rate their arousal, women downplay it, particularly when the stimuli aren’t socially acceptable.
Chivers’s findings suggest that women buy into the zipped-up model of their own sexuality. Yet as Katherine Angel makes clear in her sexual memoir, Unmastered, female desire is a tangle of complex, often contradictory impulses fed by the mind, the heart, the images we see, things we’ve read and been told. Angel, a post-doctoral fellow at the Centre for the History of Medicine at Warwick University, writes of processing her first erotic impulses: “The words I would have put this into, had I felt the urge—the words I still put this into—are these: ‘I feel like a man.’ ” She understood, even then, that as a woman she had to tamp those impulses down.
Fittingly, Angel’s lyrical, explicit meditation on her own desire, a “ferocious and vulnerable” thing, defies traditional narrative structure. She weaves trenchant social observation throughout the book, exploring seeming contradictions like being a feminist who enjoys sexual submission. She calls porn “misogynistic, coercive, tacky,” but, like Chivers’s subjects, can be turned on by it: “I imagine sex with her—or is it me?—through his eyes. I see myself as he might. I allow myself desire for her through my desire for him.” Awareness of her capacity for pleasure feeds her desire, she writes.
Pfaus believes the new spotlight on female sexuality will make way for a revolution among women in the next generation: “We’re going to see more supposedly male-like behaviour, more women picking up men, more women getting laid and leaving, having sex without wanting to bond, more girls up in their rooms clicking on their computer and masturbating before they get started on their homework.” It’s a tableaux destined to horrify many. But, paradoxically, it could also pave the way to more aware, realistic marital expectations—and that includes new ways of scratching the two-year itch.
Oh yeah....it’s great to be someone’s “possession” until he kills you when you want to break up. Ever notice how many times that is mentioned in the news story of a woman being murdered? Women are really stupid...living in their own soap operas for some excitement in their lives.
Women generate light "down there?"
I guess you learn something new every day.
Regards,
Which illustrates the old maxim "ignore what women say, watch what they do".
“If guys would just realize that sex starts hours before “doing it” and that women don’t want to just “hit it” and they hate it if the men expect them to act like porn stars, things would get better.”
Better for who? ;-)
I feel sorry for any guy who does.
Agreed. I know it’s old fashioned, but the rebbe says that if you don’t wait, you will never be close. If you wait you will be joined together soul to soul like it is supposed to be. So, think about that before you whip your wienie out.
I’ll go out on a limb and guess that the “lignt sensor” is detecting the light from the “miniature bulb” ... and that the setup is probably measuring blood-flow into the lady’s lady-parts.
Indeed. There's a world of difference between "We're married ... don't even THINK about cheating me" and "You're my livestock".
And that, dear readers, is the reason I attempt to bed every woman I see. I'm merely trying to make the world a slightly happier place.
Y'see.
There is an overall poor correlation (r = 0.26) between women's self-reported levels of desire and their VPG readings[8] suggesting that vaginal blood flow is not a reliable indicator of female sexual arousal and a better method is needed. Men using the penile plethysmograph have a far greater correlation between reported arousal and blood flow.
See the Wikipedia article on vaginal photoplethysmography. Not the greatest source, I know, but better than the OP's source.
I'm trying to reform, and the judge says I can get an Expungement if I stay out of trouble for eight more years.
It strikes me that there’s way-too-easy a correlation being suggested between couples’ meeting, becoming intimate, conceiving, having a baby and getting that baby through the first 6-12 months of life.
When the child will be ready to be claimed by the state and put into state-mandated care. While the parents go about their merry way in meeting, becoming intimate with, conceiving children with ... other partners.
There are damn good reasons why the monogamous parents/family unit developed as the foundation of society. Yes, it involves some degree of discipline to overcome various primal instincts (discipline that too often enough breaks down for too many people). But that’s why humans are supposed to be blessed with the gift of reason, right?
Here's the story behind the photo. And yes, they both waited.
Yes.
Yes they do.
In fact, when I hit it with some women, there's this strobe-light effect that might make people think they are in an old-school disco.
Was that “before” or “after” Laz hit it?
I guess metrosexuals do.
A store that sells new husbands has opened in New York City , where a woman may go to choose a husband. Among the instructions at the entrance is a description of how the store operates:
You may visit this store ONLY ONCE!
There are six floors and the value of the products increase as the shopper ascends the flights.
The shopper may choose any item from a particular floor, or may choose to go up to the next floor,
but you cannot go back down except to exit the building!
So, a woman goes to the Husband Store to find a husband.
On the first floor the sign on the door reads:
Floor 1 - These men Have Jobs
She is intrigued, but continues to the second floor, where the sign reads:
Floor 2 - These men Have Jobs and Love Kids.
‘That’s nice,’ she thinks, ‘but I want more.’
So she continues upward. The third floor sign reads:
Floor 3 - These men Have Jobs, Love Kids, and are Extremely Good Looking.
‘Wow,’ she thinks, but feels compelled to keep going.
She goes to the fourth floor and the sign reads:
Floor 4 - These men Have Jobs, Love Kids, are Drop-dead Good Looking and Help With Housework.
‘Oh, mercy me!’ she exclaims, ‘I can hardly stand it!’
Still, she goes to the fifth floor and the sign reads:
Floor 5 - These men Have Jobs, Love Kids, are Drop-dead Gorgeous, Help with Housework, and Have a Strong Romantic Streak.
She is so tempted to stay, but she goes to the sixth floor, where the sign reads:
Floor 6 - You are visitor 31,456,012 to this floor. There are no men on this floor. This floor exists solely as proof that women are impossible to please. Thank you for shopping at the Husband Store.
.
I didn’t need to read the article to come to the conclusion, if they don’t want it:
THEY’RE DOING IT WRONG!
Nuff said...
Here is what the theory boils down to, as far as I can tell: women want to be raped by men who are overcome by their lust.
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