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What Do Women Want?

Started by jimmy olsen, August 10, 2009, 01:02:53 PM

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jimmy olsen

An interesting, though very long article by the New York Times on women's sexuality focusing on the disconnect between the body and the mind. I posted most of the first page but there's a lot more at the link.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/magazine/25desire-t.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1&em

QuoteWhat Do Women Want?

By DANIEL BERGNER
Published: January 22, 2009

Meredith Chivers is a creator of bonobo pornography. She is a 36-year-old psychology professor at Queen's University in the small city of Kingston, Ontario, a highly regarded scientist and a member of the editorial board of the world's leading journal of sexual research, Archives of Sexual Behavior. The bonobo film was part of a series of related experiments she has carried out over the past several years. She found footage of bonobos, a species of ape, as they mated, and then, because the accompanying sounds were dull — "bonobos don't seem to make much noise in sex," she told me, "though the females give a kind of pleasure grin and make chirpy sounds" — she dubbed in some animated chimpanzee hooting and screeching. She showed the short movie to men and women, straight and gay. To the same subjects, she also showed clips of heterosexual sex, male and female homosexual sex, a man masturbating, a woman masturbating, a chiseled man walking naked on a beach and a well-toned woman doing calisthenics in the nude.

While the subjects watched on a computer screen, Chivers, who favors high boots and fashionable rectangular glasses, measured their arousal in two ways, objectively and subjectively. The participants sat in a brown leatherette La-Z-Boy chair in her small lab at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health, a prestigious psychiatric teaching hospital affiliated with the University of Toronto, where Chivers was a postdoctoral fellow and where I first talked with her about her research a few years ago. The genitals of the volunteers were connected to plethysmographs — for the men, an apparatus that fits over the penis and gauges its swelling; for the women, a little plastic probe that sits in the vagina and, by bouncing light off the vaginal walls, measures genital blood flow. An engorgement of blood spurs a lubricating process called vaginal transudation: the seeping of moisture through the walls. The participants were also given a keypad so that they could rate how aroused they felt.

The men, on average, responded genitally in what Chivers terms "category specific" ways. Males who identified themselves as straight swelled while gazing at heterosexual or lesbian sex and while watching the masturbating and exercising women. They were mostly unmoved when the screen displayed only men. Gay males were aroused in the opposite categorical pattern. Any expectation that the animal sex would speak to something primitive within the men seemed to be mistaken; neither straights nor gays were stirred by the bonobos. And for the male participants, the subjective ratings on the keypad matched the readings of the plethysmograph. The men's minds and genitals were in agreement.

All was different with the women. No matter what their self-proclaimed sexual orientation, they showed, on the whole, strong and swift genital arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women and women with men. They responded objectively much more to the exercising woman than to the strolling man, and their blood flow rose quickly — and markedly, though to a lesser degree than during all the human scenes except the footage of the ambling, strapping man — as they watched the apes. And with the women, especially the straight women, mind and genitals seemed scarcely to belong to the same person. The readings from the plethysmograph and the keypad weren't in much accord. During shots of lesbian coupling, heterosexual women reported less excitement than their vaginas indicated; watching gay men, they reported a great deal less; and viewing heterosexual intercourse, they reported much more. Among the lesbian volunteers, the two readings converged when women appeared on the screen. But when the films featured only men, the lesbians reported less engagement than the plethysmograph recorded. Whether straight or gay, the women claimed almost no arousal whatsoever while staring at the bonobos.


"I feel like a pioneer at the edge of a giant forest," Chivers said, describing her ambition to understand the workings of women's arousal and desire. "There's a path leading in, but it isn't much." She sees herself, she explained, as part of an emerging "critical mass" of female sexologists starting to make their way into those woods. These researchers and clinicians are consumed by the sexual problem Sigmund Freud posed to one of his female disciples almost a century ago: "The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is, What does a woman want?"....
It is far better for the truth to tear my flesh to pieces, then for my soul to wander through darkness in eternal damnation.

Jet: So what kind of woman is she? What's Julia like?
Faye: Ordinary. The kind of beautiful, dangerous ordinary that you just can't leave alone.
Jet: I see.
Faye: Like an angel from the underworld. Or a devil from Paradise.
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1 Karma Chameleon point

The Brain

QuoteWhether straight or gay, the women claimed almost no arousal whatsoever while staring at the bonobos.

:huh:
Women want me. Men want to be with me.

MadImmortalMan

The Brain: Not a participant in this study.
"Stability is destabilizing." --Hyman Minsky

"Complacency can be a self-denying prophecy."
"We have nothing to fear but lack of fear itself." --Larry Summers

garbon

"I've never been quite sure what the point of a eunuch is, if truth be told. It seems to me they're only men with the useful bits cut off."
I drank because I wanted to drown my sorrows, but now the damned things have learned to swim.

DisturbedPervert

Quoteheterosexual women reported less excitement than their vaginas indicated

Story of my life

jimmy olsen

Quote from: garbon on August 10, 2009, 01:10:48 PM
So what do they want?

There's disagreement between the proponents of increased emotional intimacy and the proponents of the narcissism of desire.
It is far better for the truth to tear my flesh to pieces, then for my soul to wander through darkness in eternal damnation.

Jet: So what kind of woman is she? What's Julia like?
Faye: Ordinary. The kind of beautiful, dangerous ordinary that you just can't leave alone.
Jet: I see.
Faye: Like an angel from the underworld. Or a devil from Paradise.
--------------------------------------------
1 Karma Chameleon point

Grey Fox

Colonel Caliga is Awesome.

Martinus

I don't think this study proves that women "do not know what they want". It just proves that their thought processes can occur independently and simultaneously to their sexual arousal, whereas it really does seem that men think with their dicks. :D

HVC

Being lazy is bad; unless you still get what you want, then it's called "patience".
Hubris must be punished. Severely.

Berkut

Quote from: Martinus on August 10, 2009, 01:23:37 PM
I don't think this study proves that women "do not know what they want". It just proves that their thought processes can occur independently and simultaneously to their sexual arousal, whereas it really does seem that men think with their dicks. :D

I don't think the article at any point claimed that women "do not know what they want".
"If you think this has a happy ending, then you haven't been paying attention."

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Malthus

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane—Marcus Aurelius

jimmy olsen

Quote from: Martinus on August 10, 2009, 01:23:37 PM
I don't think this study proves that women "do not know what they want". It just proves that their thought processes can occur independently and simultaneously to their sexual arousal, whereas it really does seem that men think with their dicks. :D
But that can be problematic for women who'd like to be having more sex, but don't because their mind isn't into it. It's why there isn't the equivalent of Viagra out on the market for women, physical arousal isn't the problem.
It is far better for the truth to tear my flesh to pieces, then for my soul to wander through darkness in eternal damnation.

Jet: So what kind of woman is she? What's Julia like?
Faye: Ordinary. The kind of beautiful, dangerous ordinary that you just can't leave alone.
Jet: I see.
Faye: Like an angel from the underworld. Or a devil from Paradise.
--------------------------------------------
1 Karma Chameleon point

Berkut

I don't think the study "proves" anything - and the article makes it rather clear that the recent investigation into the issue has raised a lot more questions than it has answered. The article itself was very informative, IMO.
"If you think this has a happy ending, then you haven't been paying attention."

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Eddie Teach

I thought it'd been established that women want a more sensitive version of Mel Gibson?
To sleep, perchance to dream. But in that sleep of death, what dreams may come?

Berkut

Turns out that is Denzel Washington.
"If you think this has a happy ending, then you haven't been paying attention."

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0 rows returned