What do women want (in bed)?

 Lagos - Dorothy Black looks at new work being done in
female sexuality and comes back with the answer: it’s a lot
wilder than you’ve ever imagined.
Can you imagine a world where a woman’s sexuality was
deemed predatory, aggressive and voracious? Where she
hunted for mates who could satisfy her physically, instead
of coyly waiting for romantic gestures from a chivalrous
gentleman? Where she favoured sex with many different
men instead of being locked down and physically
committed to one?
However that makes you feel, you should know that
studies into female sexuality are starting to paint this
picture.
Turns out, the story that’s been packaged and sold to us
about our bodies, desires and sex drive – as fact – might
have been a more than just a little bit influenced by that
creepy old man in the corner called patriarchy.
This is nothing new to subcultures that still venerate and
nurture female sexual energy as a force to be reckoned
with. My first experience of this was with Shakti Malan, a
now world-renowned tantrika who runs workshops
showing women how to tap into their desire and ‘drop into’
their own bodies.
If you’re wondering what other bodies we’ve collectively
dropped into, just open any women’s glossy and take a
look at what your sexual power is being sold to you as:
demure, made-up, withholding, brittle with frailty and in
stasis, waiting to satisfy The One. Your desire is
constructed in perfume ads and bounced about in music
videos as a means to a man’s end.
So, do you know what your desire looks and feels like
without all of this? Well move back to that first paragraph
and you’ll have an idea about where new – unbiased,
women-focused – research thinks we’re at.
In What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of
Female Desire, author Daniel Bergner (yes, the irony is not
lost on me) delves into work being done in the field of
women’s sexuality and, in particular, the area of lust – what
turns us on and how we get turned on.
In effect, What Do Women Want challenges the tired
tropes that have been constructed around women’s
sexuality, not only by gender-biased social mores, but by
the largely male-dominated science fraternity.
Some top eye-ballers include what monogamy actually
does to women’s libidos (kill it), the narcissism inherent in
being turned on by being desired (the sexiness of being
‘objectified’), that the female of the species is a sexual
aggressor (not a passive bystander) and how much more
visual we are than men.
This last one is illustrated by, what is for me, one of the
most telling studies that prove just how ‘out of’ of our
bodies we tend to be – how disconnected we as women
are from what we find desirable to what we think we
should find desirable.
Berger kicks his book off with a study conducted by Dr
Meredith Chivers, a leading scientist in the field of female
sexuality. In one experiment Chivers gets a group of men
and women – straight, bi and lesbian – to watch a variety of
porn, from hetero stuff to lesbian and gay porn and even
clips of bonobos (a type of chimp) having sex.
The women were fitted with a plethysmograph, a little
plastic probe that’s inserted into the vagina and measures
genital blood flow and gives an objective indication of the
body’s response to sexual images. But the women were
also given a keyboard to rate how aroused they believe
they felt.
While the men were largely turned on by their particular
preferences (straights got turned on my straight porn,
gays were turned on my gay porn) and their physical and
cognitive responses matched, women had a far greater
range. Even if they didn’t admit to it.
Apart from the image of a single, handsome man walking
along a beach (sorry Men's Health), the women responded
with arousal to just about all the sexually explicit material
they watched – even the clip of the bonobos shagging up a
storm.
Writing in a paper for the New York Times about this
process, Berger says of Chivers’ findings: ‘No matter what
their self-proclaimed sexual orientation, [the women]
showed, on the whole, strong and swift genital arousal
when the screen offered men with men, women with
women and women with men.’
But the problem? ‘With the women, especially the straight
women, mind and genitals seemed scarcely to belong to
the same person.’ In other words, while the
plethysmograph recorded deep arousal, the women made
their keyboard marks according to what they deemed
appropriate.
Women haven’t been conditioned to be ‘allowed’ to desire.
Anthropologist Helen Fischer, who has done extensive
research into the human sexual make-up is quoted in What
Do Women Want: ‘Being a human who is sexual, who is
allowed to be sexual, is a freedom accorded by society
much more readily to males than to females.’
Why this is the case is not a matter of biology as we’ve
been led to believe. In fact, if you look at the female sexual
physiology it is practically made for pleasure. Remember
that column about the full extent of the clit and it’s internal
expanse?
In a Q&A Berger conducted for Salon, he says: ‘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.’
There’s a lot to take in and I suggest reading through the
Salon Q&A with Berger as a handy overview of the work
currently being done.
But I’ll leave you with this from the piece, since it so deftly
sums up where the new picture of our sexual power is
headed: ‘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,’ Berger 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.’
Rather, ‘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 question, I guess I’m asking you to ask yourself, is this:
How do you really feel about your sexuality, your desire
and your attractions? And how much of that is you owning
your space or buying into society’s fairy tale?