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Like many others here, I read Daniel Bergner's "What Do Women Want?" with interest. While I tend to shy away from reports from the frontlines written by those who do their research talking to the scientists and not the monkeys, I was intrigued by the essay's truthtelling: "All was different with the women." (Is not one among us going to confess to being turned on by bonobo porn?) The piece reminded me of a parallel story I've seen played out on the adult movie sets that I've visited, where you can never believe your eyes, especially when it comes to women.
Over the years, porn has taken a beating at the hands of those who deem it misogynist garbage. In fact, I'd argue, pornography is obsessed primarily with female desire. That the product its industry produces is less socially acceptable than the polysyllabic studies of Bergner's "postfeminist" desire hunters in lab coats doesn't make it any less revealing of how complicated it gets for all of us when it comes to sex, and how little any of us know about our own desires.
Porn stars toil daily in the shadowy world of desire. In Porn Valley, the sex acts are real, but is the desire manufactured? As Susan Faludi so vividly illuminated in her 1996 New Yorker essay, "The Money Shot," there is no greater pressure on a porn set than the burden placed upon the male performer and his erection, or "wood," in the parlance of the business. The woodsman must prove his desire to convince the audience that this is the "real" deal, that this scene of sexual desire is no masquerade. Hence, the "money" shot. Without it, all is lost.
For porn starlets, the act is trickier. On the one hand, the female performers have it easier. Sometimes they're turned on. Sometimes they're not. They don't have to physically "deliver" on desire in the same way their male counterparts do. Yet, for the vast majority of the male viewing audience, porn "fails" without at least the pantomime of female sexual pleasure. Without it, no scopophilia. If porn is to be believed, most men are as preoccupied with female desire as we are unaware of what it is we really want.
I wonder why the term "postfeminist" is used in the context of Bergner's essay? Understanding female desire seems more like a universal quest. Either way, I suspect it may be an impossible one.
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Ah, Nina, Sam, Bonnie—real estate porn is very dangerous. I try not to look.
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Well, XXers, let it never be said that we women don't get results. On the heels of last week's hideous and inopportune MLK-day revelation—that the hands of Barack Obama's ubiquitous cardboard cutout were, gasp, white—I realized that "Barack's" left paw is also like, totally single. (FLOTUS Michelle can't be too happy about that)
For better or worse, Barack's "Look—I can talk to the Muslims!" coloring and his "rock"-solid marital status became two of the more compelling characterological arguments for his election. In speech after speech over the course of the campaign, the hypnotic glint of the real Obama's thick wedding band told me that it was all going to be OK (and that "my taxes ... will not ... go up"). And for many former racial cynics, his "golden" hue helped seal the deal. Making it all the more terrible that the cutout could have been so obviously white, and so clearly unfaithful, for so long.
So I obsessively traced the cutout back to its makers in Utah. A series of interrogations and a great deal of hold muzak later, I obtained change I could believe in: The cutout company is now advertising two black, presumably wifed Baracks, "coming soon" to its inventory. Good.
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Nina, and Dana, your discussion underlines my theory that perfect real estate is more seductive and harder to attain than a perfect partner.
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Dana, I had a similar response to Nina's post about that amazing living situation for Roselyn Leibowitz and Catherine Redmond, the two friends profiled in Sunday's New York Times. Given all the moaning and fantasizing we all did recently about how to achieve financial contentment without trading in our less than lucrative professions, I can't imagine how these two artists could pull off $3 million in renovations. Do I smell a sugar daddy lurking behind that newly installed kitchen counter?
The whole thing was especially depressing to me after going this weekend to look at apartments with my own platonic, best friend roommate. Our tiny tiny apartment has become a little too tiny tiny for us, but even a place with one extra notch of breathing room (while staying within our price range) is so horribly far from what Leibowitz and Redmond get to call home. Ninety yards of book shelves?? We'd be happy just to have our beds not be pushed up against opposite sides of the same wall.
Um, that said...anyone know of some spacious yet affordable-for-journalists-without-sugar-daddies apartment in Brooklyn? Let me know! We are wonderfully responsible tenants!
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Nina, so funny you posted on that Times Homes & Garden piece about the two older women sharing connected lofts -- I had the link all clipped and ready to send to my best friend in Texas, proposing an arrangement just like this if we ever find ourselves widowed, divorced or otherwise single. (For the moment, I'm very fond of both my roommates, one of whom, as you put it, I gave birth to myself.) But then I got to thinking about the implications of one woman paying for the entire ($3 million dollar!) loft and all the renovations, and never did send my friend the link. Whether or not the two parties are romantically involved -- and I did love the fact that these two women were just buddies -- the power imbalance there just felt too creepy.
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I've lived by myself for the past year or so. And while I love having my own space (so much so that a swinging Friday night for me sometimes involves sewing new throw pillows) I often miss the social nature of roommate life—sometimes you just want someone to sit next to you while you watch The Real World. If you assume that singleton living is just a stop on the way toward romantic cohabitation, then fine; the loneliness can be dealt with as a character-building exercise. But if you don't want to shack up with a partner—or reproduce, essentially birthing your own roommates—and you don't want to live alone, what are your options?
If you have the money—and a good architect—you can do what the two women profiled in Sunday's New York Times Home and Garden section did: design a loft that consists of two connected but separate apartments. The gorgeous space (see the slideshow here) provides the women—who are 54 and 65—both "companionship [and] a great deal of privacy." The arrangement is less than official—one woman paid for the loft and the renovations, and there's no written or legal agreement between them—but to me it's a heartening step toward recognizing the very real, very concrete role friendships can play in our adult lives. Hell, if I could have a two-fer apartment with my best friend (complete with 90 YARDS of bookshelves!) I might never move in with my boyfriend, either.
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Responding to Sam's question about whether President Obama's campaign served his daughters up as "accessories for his Family Man ensemble," pampering and showing off our delightful children are among the great rewards of parenting. Although normally, the gifts and attention we direct to our children are on a more personal scale, bringing them into the spotlight on special occasions (announcing Dad's candidacy, Malia's birthday, Dad's election victory and swearing in), or making special treats available (the Jonas Brothers!), are a natural extension of the first couple's well-deserved pride in their charming and adorable daughters. That said, too much attention can be toxic. When they make up a guest list for the next White House sleepover, the children may feel serious politicking from among their new 2nd second- and fifth-grade classmates. The Obamas now need to definitively address the tsunami of attention the 7- and 10-year-old little girls are attracting. While there is still no sashaandmalia.com domain, there are already a number of high-traffic blogs and Web sites devoted to fans of the first daughters. Michelle's statement that the controversial "Marvelous Malia" and "Sweet Sasha" dolls are "inappropriate" is not enough. Although I love the new president's policy of transparency, he and Michelle need to draw a curtain across coverage of these minor children to protect their images and names from being commoditized in the marketplace.
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It's funny, Samantha, because when I read Barbara and Jenna Bush's letter to Sasha and Malia, I scoffed at the latter part of the sentence, "Our dad, like yours, is a man of great integrity and love; a man who always put us first." Really? The president of the United States always put his children first? I have no ability to assess the parenting skills of Bush or Obama, but I think that being president necessarily entails putting the country before your children. I don't know how to answer Samantha's question of whether it's a worthwhile trade for the parents or the children, and I can only thank the people who are willing to give up so much to serve the United States, but the assertion that the president always puts his (or, someday, her) children first strikes me as impossible. I think the president gives up that ability when he takes the oath of office.
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Fellow XX Factor contributors and readers, we're not the only ones intrigued by Daniel Bergner's article in the New York Times Magazine on female sexuality. Slate's own William Saletan has written about it as his "Human Nature" blog.
Will writes:
May I join the conversation? I was struck in Bergner's article by the same idea Meghan flagged: that perhaps "there's something reactive about female sexuality." (I have another take on the idea here.)
To me, what's really provocative about this theory is that its logic doesn't seem confined to sexuality. Bergner quotes Meredith Chivers as speculating:
[O]ne possibility is that instead of it being a go-out-there-and-get-it kind of sexuality, it's more of a reactive process. If you have this dyad, and one part is pumped full of testosterone, is more interested in risk taking, is probably more aggressive, you've got a very strong motivational force. It wouldn't make sense to have another similar force. You need something complementary.
If the dyad theory is correct, why wouldn't it extend to other realms of life, with one sex initiating and the other reacting? It certainly resonates with broad sex-differential patterns of aggression, responsiveness, and social editing.
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Ann, your reading of Bergner's article seemed spot on for me, particularly the part about women not wanting to find clear-cut answers in order to keep the door open for sexual possibility. The part of "What Do Women Want?" that stood out to me most was the discussion of sexologist Lisa Diamond's research:
Diamond doesn’t claim that women are without innate sexual orientations. But she sees
significance in the fact that many of her subjects agreed with the
statement “I’m the kind of person who becomes physically attracted to
the person rather than their gender.” For her participants, for the well-known women she lists at the start of her book [Ann Heche, Julie Cypher] and for women on average, she stresses that desire often emerges so compellingly from emotional closeness that innate orientations can be overridden.
While I believed they were being honest, I never understood my bisexual female friends who would say similar things to Diamond's statement -- that they were attracted to the person, not the gender (or maybe, as Meghan mentioned, they were attracted to the person's desire, not their gender). Anyone who's attended a liberal arts college in the past 20 odd years knows at least one women who earns the not-so-kind epithet "LUG," or lesbian until graduation, and those women are not taken especially seriously.
Research like Diamond and Chivers' is valuable, not just for getting women to understand themselves, but to potentially foster more understanding of non-normative orientations. To answer your question Meghan, no, like Nina, I don't believe that women are divided between the divergent systems of sexuality, the physiological and the subjective. It seems from the research being done, we're fairly far from coming up with any definitive commentary about women's sexuality. I think we're probably not even asking the right questions yet.
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The saga continues with the Sasha and Malia dolls that Bonnie thought were inevitable and Nina thought would be more fun if they wore miniskirts and traveled in space. First a Ty spokeswoman claimed that the company avoids naming their dolls for "any particular living individual" and chalked up the release of Sweet Sasha and Marvelous Malia to serendipity ("Sasha and Malia are beautiful names" that "worked very well with the dolls we were making," she said). Now it looks like Marjorie's call for the elder Obamas to stand up for the girls' privacy has been answered; the first lady said through her press secretary that she feels "it is inappropriate to use young, private citizens for marketing purposes."
I'm all for protecting the girls' privacy as much as possible. But are they really private citizens? When Barack Obama brought his daughters on stage with him at campaign events, making them adorable little accessories for his Family Man ensemble, wasn't he making the choice to thrust them into the public eye? And when he writes open letters to them on their first day of school (which, as Emily pointed out, came off as fairly hollow and staged), doesn't he sacrifice some of the moral high ground in this debate over his daughters' privacy, some of his right to outrage when that privacy is breached?
It's tough, I'd imagine, to be the child of a celebrity. In the case of Suri Cruise or Shiloh Jolie Pitt, though, there was no choice; their parents were celebrities from a fairly young age, so any kids they had would necessarily grow up in the spotlight. With politicians, it feels a little different. Barack Obama didn't have to run for president. And no doubt when he decided to do so, one of the issues he talked through was whether it would be fair to Sasha and Malia (and for that matter, Michelle) to put them through that. Running for public office requires a pretty hefty ego—enough faith in yourself to think that your ability to make things better with a position of power override whatever damages you'll inflict on those around you, both from rampant attention from the media and splintered attention from yourself.
Do any of you moms hold it against him that he chose to go for it anyway, even though it would almost certainly make a "normal" childhood impossible for his daughters? Or is a selfless style of parenting just as damaging as one that could be labeled selfish? Being hounded by paparazzi and commodified by toy companies is bad, yes, but for all that, Sasha and Malia get to grow up with a front-row seat to the ultimate role models: a man and woman who put it all on the line because they thought they could make a difference in the world and were determined to take that as far as they could. Perhaps it's a good trade.
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Meghan, thanks for starting a discussion about this Sunday's twisty and complicated NYT Magazine story on female desire. One quick response: You wrote about Meredith Chivers' experiment in which participants were shown a variety of sexual (and semi-sexual) images:
Interestingly, though, the women recorded their sexual response differently than did the machines that measured it: they said they had been more turned on by the images of heterosexual sex—and less turned on by the images of bonobo sex—than they actually had been. Hmm. As I understand it, this discrepancy either means that women's minds and bodies are subconsciously at war, or that the women were conscious of their less "normative" desire but felt ashamed of it. In either case, it bears thinking about.
I agree that the split between bodily reactions and psychological reactions Chivers found was fascinating. (Though I wonder how cleanly those divisions can actually be made.) But the way you describe that discrepancy makes it inherently a problem—either our minds and bodies are "at war" or we're "ashamed" of getting turned on by horny bonobos. Is it possible that the women simply had complicated reactions that, in the immediate testing situation, they weren't fully prepared to untangle or report accurately? Not that I like perpetuating the idea that women are this deep, dark forest of mystic mysteries, while men, in turn, are straightforward and easy to comprehend. (Ann, I'm a fan of your Freudian reading of the article.) But I'm not sure Chivers' data necessarily paints a picture of a womanly torment.
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Meghan, not to evade your questions, but I found myself focusing on the subtexts of Daniel Bergner's article: He is particularly fascinated by the difficulty of doing scientific research on female sexuality and by the jarring multiplicity of theories and by the tenacity of the postfeminist sexologists like Meredith Chivers in the face of the morass—more fascinated, almost, than he is by their findings about female sexuality itself. From the start, the emphasis is not just on how their data don't add up in any expected way, but also on the ways their thinking about their data doesn't add up predictably or neatly, either.
I don't mean at all to suggest that Bergner (a distant acquaintance) disparages the endeavor. But his article prompted me to wonder—in the rather ungrounded, speculative spirit the field seems to encourage—whether Freud's famous question invites a sort of Freudian reading: Maybe the last thing men really want to know is what, exactly, women want. As for women, what do they want to know? Well, to apply some crude evolutionary logic, it might seem advantageous if they were eager to probe the mysteries of their own desire not in order to come up with clear-cut answers, but to keep the door open to an array of possibilities. Could be a promising recipe, at any rate, for achieving the goal that brought Chivers to the field in the first place: "I wanted everybody to have great sex."
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Ever since Margaret Atwood—a feminist novelist in the most important sense—wrote her famous story “Rape Fantasies,” people have understood that sometimes women’s sexual fantasies are anything but politically correct. Now there’s an interesting story in the New York Times Magazine that implicitly asks: Are contemporary women doomed to experience a schism between what their bodies lust for and their minds tell them they want? (Full disclosure: Dan Bergner, the author, is an old acquaintance.) The story offers up a road map of female desire as charted by postfeminist scientists, who have been exploring female desire with gusto. Guess what? What women want in bed is far more complex and, well, polymorphously perverse than some had formerly thought. In fact, no one understands any of it yet.
Yet one interesting idea emerges from the piece: the notion that female desire is based less on intimacy (the old truism) than on the perception of being desired—a notion that, it would seem, complicates feminist notions of owning your sexuality. To take just a few bits of research from the piece: As Bergner reports, scientists have long wondered why women sometimes describe feeling arousal (even orgasm) during nonconsensual sex; some scientists now theorize that it stems from an evolutionary adaptation to early human sex. (Women whose genitals remained unlubricated were more susceptible to injury, infection, and, consequently, death.) Bergner connects this to the fact that women seem to be more responsive—on a physiological level—to a breadth of visual stimuli than men are. One recent study, conducted by psychologist Meredith Chivers, found that heterosexual women responded sexually to a wider array of videos than men did; while the men in the study mostly responded to images involving women (and the gay men mostly responded to images involving men), the straight women in the study were turned on by everything from heterosexual sex to a nude woman doing calisthenics to bonobos mating.
Interestingly, though, the women recorded their sexual response differently than did the machines that measured it: They said they had been more turned on by the images of heterosexual sex—and less turned on by the images of bonobo sex—than they actually had been. Hmm. As I understand it, this discrepancy either means that women’s minds and bodies are subconsciously at war or that the women were conscious of their less “normative” desire but felt ashamed of it. In either case, it bears thinking about.
So does the complicated notion that there's something reactive about female sexuality. (After all, we've all had the experience, I'm sure, of not desiring a man who desired us.) Be that as it may, there's something worth mulling about the (mostly female) scientists' new thinking on the matter. As Bergner puts it, scientists like Chivers believe that “female sexuality [may be] divided between two truly separate, if inscrutably overlapping, systems: the physiological and the subjective.” So I’m curious: Did any of you buy any of this? What was your reaction?