Bergner, and the leading sex researchers he interviews, argue that women’s sexuality is not the rational, civilized and balancing force it’s so often made out to be — that it is base, animalistic and ravenous, everything we’ve told ourselves about male sexuality. As one researcher tells Bergner of all the restrictions put on female sexuality: “Those barriers are a testament to the power of the drive itself. It’s a pretty incredible testament. Because the drive must be so strong to override all of that.”
“Women’s desire — its inherent range and innate power — is an underestimated and constrained force, even in our times, when all can seem so sexually inundated, so far beyond restriction,” he writes. “Despite the notions our culture continues to imbue, this force is not, for the most part, sparked or sustained by emotional intimacy and safety.” In fact, he argues, “one of our most comforting assumptions, soothing perhaps above all to men but clung to by both sexes, that female eros is much better made for monogamy than the male libido, is scarcely more than a fairy tale.”
The implications are huge. As Bergner puts it: “What nascent truths will come into view, floating forward if these faiths continue to be cut apart?”
This book — how do I put this without sounding hyperbolic? This book should be read by every woman on earth. It should be handed out to pubescent girls right alongside “Our Bodies, Our Selves” and be required course reading for Human Sexuality 101. It is a must-read for any person with even a remote erotic interest in the female gender. It deserves to be listed on bridal registries — gay and straight. It could single-spine-edly replace at least a quarter of the sexual self-help section and the world would be better for it. It is a revelation, a story of redemption. I laughed, I almost cried — with joy. I was turned on, even. You want a female Viagra? This book is as close as we have to it.
I spoke to Bergner by phone about everything from monkey porn to rape fantasies.
"You point out some remarkable ways that scientists have ignored evidence suggesting that women — and female animals — are far from passive when it comes to sex and are in fact often initiators. Do you have a favorite example of this?"
I really do. Deidrah, a rhesus monkey, a member of the species that we sent into space in the ’60s as our doubles, to see how well we would survive, is one of my favorite characters in the book. I went down and spent a while at a primatology center with a scientist who was trying to take the blinders off the way we see the sexuality of our closest ancestors. And what I learned was that for decades, despite evidence to the contrary, scientists had painted primate sex as male dominated. Males are the initiators; females the sort of almost indifferent receivers.
But standing next to this scientist Kim Wallen, it was clear that that was not at all true — almost comically so. We spent a day following Deidrah, a relatively tranquil, low-key female monkey, who was nevertheless relentlessly stalking — sexually stalking — her object of desire. If there’s any objectification going on in the monkey kingdom, it’s the females objectifying the males, chasing them, and sort of all but forcing them. It wasn’t just Deidrah, of course — it was all the female monkeys that we were following, and it was just alarming how we could be so sure of this other reality, and blind to the truth that was just staring us right in the face. So that was one example of our blindness to female sexuality and, ultimately I think, our fear of it.
Quickly, back to women for a second, a quick example, if we can get a little graphic for a sec, about understanding the size and reach of the clitoris. We’ve been doing dissections of bodies for centuries, pretty effectively, but it wasn’t until very recently that there was any acknowledgment of extensions right underneath the surface of the skin — very rich in nerves, very primed for pleasure, reachable there through the vaginal walls — that rival the size of the penis; probably are greater than the size of the penis. One of the scientists, who was really influential in calling attention to the size, put it this way: the reason we’ve ignored this is because we’ve managed to convince ourselves that one gender is all about reproduction and the other is all about sex. That is, women are all about reproduction and men are all about sex. Again, a complete distortion.
"Some of the evidence suggesting that female sexuality is stronger than is typically suggested is based on plethysmograph (a tool used to measure vaginal blood-flow and lubrication) studies showing that women become physically aroused to a much wider array of visual stimuli than men (even as they subjectively report a much smaller range of arousal). But what of the hypothesis presented by researcher Meredith Chivers, that vaginal lubrication might not be a reliable measure of female desire, that it is a separate system, an evolutionary adaptation, meant to protect females from sexual violence and bodily harm? If this proved to be true, what would it mean for all these plethysmograph studies?"
Now you’re at the most complicated part of this whole field, I think. So, let me pause and try to be coherent. OK, so, if that were true — underline if –that were true, that is, if there really are two separate sexual systems, one represented by these physical responses and the other represented by the very subjective sense of desiring, then would be less relevant to understanding desire. But, I think that both Meredith and I have started to wrestle with a simpler interpretation: that the physical responses, registered in the plethysmography, really might well be a measure of being turned on, being in a state of desire. So, with the range of things that she’s exposed women to in the lab — that would be straight women watching two women together, two men together, men and women, and of course, famously, two monkeys having sex — both straight and gay women have consistently responded very powerfully and immediately, physically, to all these kinds of images. And I think, in Meredith’s mind, that really does represent something about desire.
On the subject of rape and sexual assault, and the fact that, also in the lab, women are responding generally to scenarios of sexual assault. Here’s where we get into a really tricky space, so I hope you have space for this when we’re talking about desire. No one, no one, no one — not Meredith, not Marta Meana, and not me — is in any way retracting “no means no.” That’s number one. [Ed. Note: he goes on for several more paragraphs like this, clearly fearing for his life at the hands of sexually enraged Feminists, for daring to assert the obvious, natural conclusions of his empirical findings] Number two is, there are different levels of desire and of fantasy, and you know, fantasy and sexual assault in one form or another are pretty common, but does that mean that any of us want to go out and be sexually assaulted? No, it doesn’t. The realm of arousal and the realm of fantasy can tell us something about ourselves psychologically without indicating that we really want to experience that thing, far from it.
"Since we’re on the topic of rape fantasies, can we talk about why they are so common among women?"
I mean here, again, I want to be careful because, number one, I’m a man. You know I’ve listened a lot at this point and asked a lot of relentless questions, but my answer is going to be inherently a fallible one.[Ed.: yet more prostration and bootlicking before the liberal sacred cows, unquestionably to spare his family from the inevitable media persecution and loss of livelihood/life]
The force of culture puts some level of shame on women’s sexuality and a fantasy of sexual assault is a fantasy that allows for sex that is completely free of blame. So that’s one reason. Another, which Meana brings up, and which I think is very compelling, is this idea that the feeling of being desired is a very powerful one, a very electrical one. And I think at least at the fantasy level, that sense of being wanted, and being wanted beyond the man’s self-control is also really powerful.
"That brings up another theory, which is that there’s something “narcissistic” about women’s desire. Can you explain the thinking behind that idea?"
Yes, it’s important to underline here that I don’t think Marta Meana, who first introduced that to the conversation, meant narcissistic in a condemnatory or critical way at all, just in a descriptive way that a really powerful engine for female desires is being desired, is being wanted. It’s both — it is a powerful feeling, I think, to have that level of desire coming at you, and an electrifying one.
"Is this narcissistic desire innate or is it a cultural byproduct?"
I think that was one of the things I wrestled with most in the book, and I can still visibly remember wrestling with it as I was turning in final chapters. I kept thinking back to Deidrah, our monkey, and thinking, OK, that is not a sexuality that seems to depend on being desired. She has a desire; she is going out and getting what she desires. I can’t describe to you how clear that drama was as we watched it. If you’re talking about innate patterns of sexuality, how do you get from that to us? One of the answers is that the force of culture has, to some degree, inverted things. And, you know, maybe that’s the only wise answer, if you want to talk about innate factors.
Culturally, I think there’s all kinds of other ways to look at it. We’ve very strongly eroticized women’s bodies and, of course, women are going to feel that as well as men. And then all the other forces that have, not only allowed, but encouraged men to be the aggressors in all kinds of ways, and constructed femininity around the very opposite kind of characteristics are going to play into this. Then there’s Freud — and no one likes to talk about Freud, he is problematic, but he’s also awfully wise in some ways. He and his protégé Melanie Klein, who eventually sort of split off from Freud in some ways, write about the intensity of an incest relationship with the mother’s breasts, and how much power that breast has, how much erotic power that begins to set up in our psyches. We don’t want to think about the culture; we’re very squeamish thinking about childhood sexuality. But of course to talk about the psychological loops and things, I think we better think about that, and so both Freud, but even more so Melanie Klein, emphasized the influence of the breast on the way our sexuality forms, and so it makes sense to me that, not only men, but women, would still be feeling that erotic influence as adults, both directly, as an attraction to other female bodies but also in wanting to have that power that the mother’s breasts once had. So, being desired with that intensity, puts women back in that sort of omnipotent place that their mothers once had for them as infants.
"You write that one of your researchers views monogamy as a “cultural cage” that distorts women’s libido. Is monogamy more suited for men than women?"
Certainly, women are no better suited for monogamy than men are. That, I think, is clear. It seems possible, if you look at some of the data, that women are even less well-suited for monogamy than men. It’s important to distinguish between the sexual level of desire, and what we choose in our relationships for all kinds of reasons. But on a sexual level, women are even less suited to monogamy.
now watch as the trolls come out of the woodwork to femmesplain to us that Science is a lie, and how we should all give ourselves over to Liberal Ideology and the death of Reason or face the consequences
Now let us consider the whole of the differentiations of the mental character between man and woman in the light of a further generalisation which is sufficiently obvious in itself and which has been formulated with special clearness by the late Otto Weininger in his remarkable book, Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character). I refer to the observations contained in Section II., Chaps. 2 and 3. The point has been, of course, previously noted, and the present writer, among others, has on various occasions called special attention to it. But its formulation and elaboration by Weininger is the most complete I know. The truth in question consists in the fact, undeniable to all those not rendered impervious to facts by preconceived dogma, that, as I have elsewhere put it, while man has a sex, woman is a sex. Let us hear Weininger on this point.
“Woman is only sexual, man is also sexual. Alike in time and space this difference may be traced in man, parts of his body susceptible to sexual excitement are small in number and strictly localised. In woman sexuality is diffused over the whole body, every contact on whatever part excites her sexually.”
Weininger points out that while the sexual element in man, owing to the physiological character of the sexual organs, may be at times more violent than that in woman, yet that it is spasmodic and occurs in crises separated by intervals of quiescence. In woman, on the other hand, while less spasmodic, it is continuous. The sexual instinct with man being, as he styles it, “an appendix” and no more, he can raise himself mentally entirely outside of it.
“He is conscious of it as of something which he possesses but which is not inseparate from the rest of his nature. He can view it objectively. With woman this is not the case; the sex element is part of her whole nature. Hence, it is not as with man, clearly recognisable in local manifestations, but subtly affects the whole life of the organism. For this reason the man is conscious of the sexual element within him as such, whereas the woman is unconscious of it as such. It is not for nothing that in common parlance woman is spoken of as ‘the sex.’ In this sexual differentiation of the whole life-nature of woman from man, deducible as it is from physiological and anatomical distinctions, lies the ground of those differentiations of function which culminate in the fact that while mankind in its intellectual moral and technical development is represented in the main by Man, Woman has continued to find her chief function in the direct procreation of the race.”
Cheers.
Cheers.
slumlord posted:can't wait to have a bunch of plebes scoff at this like it was self-evident to them all along
i cant wait for hordes of model quality babes to start queuing outside my basement once they realise its not weird to want the D
COINTELBRO posted:Rape is not "natural", it is stigmatized in all cultures and the optimal conditions for successful reproduction are where both parties are consenting. Also in the animal kingdom females try to avoid rape and some have even evolved distinct mutations for that purpose.
Cheers.
even if the ivory tower boys show rape is "natural" what difference does it make? naturality is a terrible blueprint for anything
COINTELBRO posted:Rape is not "natural", it is stigmatized in all cultures
how does this square with the idea that the modern liberal first world, the most feminist place in human history, is nonetheless a "rape culture???" *kevin garnett's frostbitten corpse completes its trip from the red bull orbital balloon and dunks at over 200 miles an hour on the net you didn't realize was right over your head*
later tonight we look at how science/society is still trying to wrap it's head around the magnitude of what darwin established 150 years ago.
11 is sports with hank
it's like the whole argument rests on the undermining of the argument.
codywilson posted:falwed
is that another word for palestine
Yet he had been considered, until the war, one of the most promising of French writers: Proust praised him extravagantly, as did Larbaud, Giraudoux and Cocteau. Céline said that in the year 2000, the only other contemporary writer who would be read – apart from Céline, of course – would be Morand. Well, you can't really choose all the company you keep, but your choice can be revealing.
Hecate and Her Dogs is about a sick love affair. A bored, meticulous foreign exchange trader attached to a bank operating in Tangier decides, clinically, to take a mistress, and picks on Clotilde, whose husband has been posted to Vladivostock, and who advises him to "take life as it comes".
They begin an affair, but it turns disturbing. At first – the narration here is highly elliptical, to the point of obscurity – it seems that, after a great deal of sex together, she has discovered the joys of masturbation. It then emerges, as he listens to what she says while masturbating (this book was first published in 1954, by the way), that she has been doing something horribly depraved, involving children.
It is exactly because we are not provided with the details that the book is so unnerving. In effect, it is anti-pornography. Yet it is about a woman who, if her crimes were made public, would, we are led to believe, be vilified and damned as much as any contemporary abuser we can think of.
Or would she? We are given, as I said, no details; and much of what is said (if we are to take the narrator at his word, and there is no firm reason beyond convention that we should do so) exists only as a soundtrack to her own masturbation. It could all be fantasy. What we think might have happened might not have happened; we are entering, perhaps, a hall of mirrors, albeit one in which we do not even know whether we should doubt the evidence of our own eyes. In this, it could be offered as an interesting companion to Howard Jacobson's The Act of Love (recommended here a few weeks ago).
But tie it into the author's life – consider it as an act of expiation – and it begins to look rather different: more evasion than expiation, although its almost complete evasion of anything obviously, or even ostensibly, political should alert us to something. I got it in the end: it's about collaboration. Seen through this filter, the book yields up something as interesting as its psycho-sexual nightmares. The narrator begins to go along, in a half-hearted manner, with Clotilde's perversions; that is, chapter and verse of his confession is vague and half-hearted: "In the end, I lost all sense of restraint." But the prose, always unbending and restrained, gives little away. And there are always clues. Why, for instance, does Morand put his narrator, at one point, in New York in 1942, a locus which for the author would surely have been verboten? The dialogue with Clotilde's husband goes thus: "I'm paying my debts." "Gambling debts?" "Debts from the Big Game." "What do you mean?" "Wicked deeds . . . stains on body and soul."
I would not go to the firing squad saying that this book is about Morand's wartime guilt. (He did, by the way, make it to the Académie Française in 1968.) It is as creepy when considered purely as being about sex as about anything else. But this is why it's worth buying even this very short book for £10. It sticks with you.
COINTELBRO posted:Rape is not "natural", it is stigmatized in all cultures and the optimal conditions for successful reproduction are where both parties are consenting. Also in the animal kingdom females try to avoid rape and some have even evolved distinct mutations for that purpose.
Cheers.
please don't troll
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elemennop posted:i won't say polygamy (polyamory or whatever) is a mental illness, but it is probably a symptom of mental deficiency
I encounter poly ppl a lot and while I don't have a problem with it as a concept it doesn't help that most the ones I meet are also annoying pagans or white kids with dreadlocks or anime cosplayers or rich weirdos who simply never want to commit to anything in their life
i suppose there's a theoretical situation where i could see polyamory working, but i have yet to meet anyone involved or advocating it that wasn't a complete buffoon and/or manipulative degenerate. and maybe i lack sufficient imagination, but romantic relationships seem hard enough to manage with one other person, i cannot even imagine having such a longterm relationship with multiple people. ultimately, i think you're lying to yourself if you think you can balance it, there's a reason you don't see poly-amorous pensioners.