A new book, What Do Women Want: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire, apparently makes the shocking revelation that women are actually carnal, wild beasts who have been socially re-conditioned when it comes to sex. In a generally creepy interview over at Salon, the author talks a lot about monkeys and rape fantasies.
Yawn/What the? That’s how I feel.
Yawn because I feel like ever since I came of age all anyone has been telling young women is that we are oppressed and repressed but deep down have the sex drive of apes. I saw it at Tufts, where the Women’s Center tried to “liberate” college girls by hosting a Sex Fair on Valentine’s Day, passing out vagina cookies, sex toys, and other things not to be discussed in polite company. The school sponsored an annual event where students would get completely drunk and run around the quad naked. I watched a female friend get physically attacked by a man at this event one year, and Tufts had a sexual assault problem. Oh and hey, women of Yale, how did sexual reductionism work out for you?
What the? because either the countless evenings I have spent with women drinking wine and watching The Notebook were a farce, the nonstop conversations with friends opining about wanting more intimacy, more sensitivity, more meaning to physicality are some sort of Truman Show set-up, and the outpouring of data about how reducing sex to pure physical contact is causing psychological harm in young women and girls are jerry-rigged—or this author is being overly-reductionist to appear controversial in order to sell books.
Women, in general, may have a sex drive not all that different from men. But people aren’t carbon copies of each other, and sexuality is profoundly personal and differs from person to person. How people feel in the bedroom is not really my business or my interest. But it’s common sense that reducing sex to animal kingdom terms means women lose. We are the physically weaker sex that must deal with the ramifications of sexual intercourse. We are the ones with the uterus, while we are being reductionist. Gender deconstruction and reduction of sexuality to its baser qualities reduces people to their unenlightened differences like physical strength. It disempowers women and empowers men to treat women like objects and encourages humans to treat other like animals. (The author says he doesn’t want to retract that “no means no.” Tell that to the women at Yale who had men yelling at them, “no means yes.”)
In fact, I would argue that efforts to neutralize gender difference with regard to sexuality have actually undermined female sexual pleasure. It’s no secret that hormonal contraception, whose sole purpose is to sever the sexual act from reproduction and supposedly level the sexual playing field, decreases female libido and the way a woman experiences sex. A recent New York Times article discussed new efforts to correct this with a drug (the aforementioned author also discusses “female Viagra”). So their solution to a problem caused largely by women on pills is…give women more pills!
And while there is nothing wrong with pointing out that women have robust sex drives per se, it is problematic to do so without looking at the bigger picture. The bigger picture accounts for real gender differences, biological and emotional. And while there is nothing wrong with pointing out that there are certain similarities between human desires and behaviors and those of the animals, there is something majorly wrong with getting excited about reducing the human sexual encounter to its animalistic elements. A celebration of carnal, animalistic, and base sexuality gives us porn, rape, and human trafficking, all of which severely undermine girls and women around the world.
But honestly, the author lost me at monkeys. I won’t pretend to have the answer to what exactly it is that women really want. But I can tell you one thing. We don’t want to be compared to monkeys.
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