January 29, 2009
What do these enigmatic women want?
Greg Downey over at the blog neuroanthropology:
In particular, Bergner gives us thumbnail portraits of women engaged in sex research: Meredith Chivers of Queens University (Kingston, Ontario), Lisa Diamond of the University of Utah, and Marta Meana from UNLV, although there’s also commentary from Julia Heiman, the Director of the Kinsey Institute, and others. As with so much of contemporary science writing, we get researchers as characters, with quirky personal descriptions and accounts of meeting the author, each one standing in for a particular perspective in current scientific debates.
Chivers is portrayed as arguing that women are existentially divided ‘between two truly separate, if inscrutably overlapping, systems, the physiological and the subjective,’ Diamond is made to stand in for the ‘female desire may be dictated… by intimacy, by emotional connection,’ and Meana stands in for the argument that women are narcissists desiring to submit. Whether or not these are accurate portrayals—and they might be—the model is prevalent in science writing: get characters to represent lines of thinking, even though many of us are not so clearly signed on with a single theoretical team. Here, we know the score: Diamond arguing women want intimacy, Meana that they want a real man to take them, and Chivers that women want it all, even if they don’t realize it and contradict themselves...
One can imagine an article with the title, ‘What do diners want?’, which bemoaned the fickleness and impenetrable complexity of culinary preferences: Sometimes they want steak, and sometimes just a salad. Sometimes they put extra salt on the meal, and sometimes they ask for ketchup. One orders fish, another chicken, another ham and eggs. One day a guy ordered tuna fish salad on rye, and the next, the same guy ordered a tandoori chicken wrap, hold the onions! My God, man, they’re insane! Who can ever come up with a unified theory of food preferences?! Food preferences are a giant forest, too complex for comprehension. What do diners want?!
You get my drift. The line of questioning is rhetorically time-tested (can we say clichéd even?) but objectively and empirically nonsensical.
[Image by Ryan McGinley/Team Gallery from New York Times. H/t: Linta Varghese]
Posted by Robin Varghese at 02:33 PM | Permalink
Comments
The more I learn about what women want, I fond myself less and less interested in the question. Chivers left the question open whether they might just as well be satisfied with chimpanzees.
Posted by: Chimps | Jan 29, 2009 6:51:42 PM
I thought the Times article itself was significantly more interesting than Downey's commentary on it.
Posted by: D | Jan 30, 2009 7:33:30 AM
To expand a bit,
With whom do women mate? With whom do women have sex? With whom do women say they would have sex? What causes women’s bodies’ automatic arousal responses (and under what conditions)? What type of guys do women like in soft porn stories? What type of guys do women like in photographs?
With men, the corresponding questions are less disjoint, a fact in itself of considerable interest, but which also makes a corresponding "what do men want" article seem less compelling.
I came across new ideas in the article (in particular the idea that physiological arousal in women might serve protective functions and so needn't track psychological arousal). The blog post, not so much! It'd be one thing if Downey's methodological scruples (as opposed to his ideological qualms about this particular one) actually moved him to deplore "trite" articles, but in end he reveals himself as motivated by views at least as trite as anything in this article:
What do women want? Lots. Just like men. And, just like men, as soon as they get what they want, women are liable to want something else.
Umm, no. If it were as simple as that, female Viagra would be making as much news and money as male Viagra.
Posted by: D | Jan 30, 2009 7:56:14 AM
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