Today, Tuesday, June 18th, The Erotic Literary Salon, FREE raffle for Logan Belle’s “Miss Chatterley.” Come early for a good seat, doors open 6:30.
What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire by Daniel Bergner
The following articles/reviews have been written describing what people feel is the new stance on women’s sexual desire, according to Daniel Bergner. Actually, it is reverting back to a time when people felt women’s desires were greater than man’s. Shall post later this week, history of women’s sexual desires. Perhaps it changes based on the historical context and ethnicity of the women.
Excerpts and links to entire articles.
NY Times Review:
I’ll Have What She’s Having
‘What Do Women Want?’ by Daniel Bergner
By ELAINE BLAIR
Galen of Pergamum, the great physician and medical researcher of antiquity, was one of many learned men of his time who believed that women had to have an orgasm during sexual intercourse for conception to occur. For 1,500 years this was the scientific consensus. How could we have continued to believe in the necessity of female orgasm when there must have been all kinds of evidence to the contrary? No one is sure, according to Daniel Bergner. When it comes to the study of female sexuality, scientists have tended to see what they expect, or want, to see, and there are fewer established facts than you would think. “Despite all the powers of contemporary science,” Bergner writes, “the seemingly straightforward anatomical question, is there a G spot? remains unanswered.”
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Slate Review:
Women Want Sex
But men don’t want them to know it.
By Amanda Hess
Playboy is poised at an interesting moment in the cultural representation of human sexuality, where it’s en vogue to embrace the sexual desires of women—as long as they fit in neatly with the desires of men. As a producer for the now-bankrupt softcore porn franchise Girls Gone Wildtold Ariel Levy in 2004, Joe Francis’ cameras were merely capturing a new permutation of female sexuality, one where women willingly “flash for the brand.” Playboy, too, as Hugh Hefner told Levy, is being “embraced by young women in a curious way in a postfeminist world.” As the CEO said at the chateau, “at our parties, more girls want their pictures taken next to the Playmates in bunny costumes than men do. Now, you explain that to me.”
I had some theories. They crystallized that weekend, when I read Daniel Bergner’s What Do Women Want? a fascinating survey of the emerging science on female desire, published today. In the book, Bergner, an occasional Slate contributor, lays out a diverse body of research that threatens to disrupt all the modern stereotypes of female sexuality: That women are not visual creatures; that their sex drive is lower than men’s; that they’re aroused by love, not sex; and that they’re naturally fitted to be sexual objects, not agents.
If society didn’t realize all of that before, Bergner writes, it’s because the men who run it didn’t want to. “Women’s desire—its inherent range and innate power—is an underestimated and constrained force,” he concludes. In the Middle Ages, it was constrained by the idea that “lust-drunk witches … left men ‘smooth,’ devoid of their genitals.” In the last century, it was constrained by Freud’s theory that women have “a weaker sexual instinct” than men. Now, it’s constrained by modern evolutionary psychology that says that “women are rigged by their genes to seek the comfort of relationships.” Across culture, Bergner writes, “with scientific or God-given confidence, girls and women are told how they should feel.” Mostly, they should feel comfortable sexualizing themselves, but not men.
The sexologists Bergner profiles in his book are all working to peel back those cultural messages of how women should feel to find out what actually arouses them.
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