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.
Yeah.
Right.
How do you make a woman stop having sex?
Marry her.
Women are not that different from men.....they just hide their secrets better, incluing their sex life.
No man can ever know what a woman wants. Hell, they don’t even know themselves and wouldn’t tell you if they did.
I have no idea ... but odds are that somebody is “hittin’ it” ... and that the union might possibly be fertile. And I really wonder what it’s like for a kid to grow up with mommy looking like that.
I thought that, by "bulb," they meant some sort of bladder (like the little rubber bulb of an eye-dropper). But a light bulb does make more sense. Hope that it's not an old-style incandescent bulb. That could be painful!
Regards,
Emasculated “men”. Reminds me of Nero-—Caligula-—men who preferred boys in their beds and orgies with males and flowers and baths.
Your summary of her theory is pretty close to my theory.
My theory is, women either want a man similar to their Father if they had a good Father/Daughter relationship and/or they want a brutus beefcake type guy who treats them like a whore. The brutus beefcake syndrome happens when a woman feels like she has been chosen above all others since brutus can pick anyone. She’s willing to accept the degrading treatment because she’s obviously better than all the other women. If a woman can’t find a brutus, she settles for someone like her Father.
Nomex fireproof suit is on, ready for the responses. BTW, been in a loving monogamous marriage for 15 years and have been in a monagamous relationship with that same person for 18 years. I’m the guy that’s almost identical to her Father that she settled for after all the college flings that treated her like dirt chose others.
Of course, I’m fantastic in the bedroom so she has no reason to stray. LOL!
Flame away ladies.
The reason there are so many complaints about a decline in sexual desire in America is that the public is barraged with too much sexual material, pictorial, writings and probably discussion. Steak is great but not 24/7.
They’ll also leave you when you can’t figure out what they don’t even know.
Of course if it was Eric cheating on Isabel she’d probably slit his throat as he slept and claimed “battered woman syndrome”.
Got to mention that old joke about Wedding Cake being the best contraceptive...........
I love your thinking, and your expression. :D
In my youth I did notice that a woman was more likely to forgive you for “pushing the advantage” - but not for missing it.
I get passionate about this subject. Lately it’s really irritating me.
Yup. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.
Not REAL guys, we just share a 12 pack with them.......
My brother does this kind of thing for his wife. He’s hyper-romantic. Oh, yes, he’s a big strong muscular tough man who does a physical, blue-collar job all day, cuts down trees on his property on weekends, and then goes to the symphony on Saturday night. (His idea.) She really is the luckiest woman in the world, and she knows it and acts like it; and he thinks he’s the luckiest guy in the world. I don’t know why he thinks that. They’ve only been married for about ten years, though.
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