The XX Factor: What women really think.

The World's Biggest Boob Job

In other news of the peculiar and amazing, via the Drudge Report: NBC just posted a story about a woman who went to Brazil to get a breast enlargement. Not just any breast enlargement: She wanted to set a world record for breast implants. (This was her ninth surgery, they say.) Interestingly, it turns out Texas, where she had traveled for surgery, has a law limiting the size of breast implants. Libertarians among us: Care to get outraged? I tend to be all for women's right to do whatever we want. But I confess (guiltily) that I found it hard to respond with equanimity to the photograph of Sheyla Hershey. What I couldn't answer: whether that lack of equanimity was the same as what I'd feel in response to any other extreme elective surgery, such as people who amputate their limbs. Because this surgery seems to me to have more in common with the extremity of fetishism than with the  desire for sexual allure.

Susan Sontag on Female Desire

I read Susan Sontag's peculiar, amazing journals this weekend. (In the midst of lists of books she needs to read, from Brave New World to Oscar Wilde's De Profundis are resolutions to wash her hair at least "once every ten days.") But one passage from 1962 leapt out at me in connection to the discussion of female desire we had the other week:

Female sexuality: two types, the responder + the initiator. All sex is both active (having the dynamo inside oneself) + passive (surrendering).

Fear of what people will think—not the natural temperament—makes most women dependent on being desired before they can desire.

Sontag—at least in 1962—seems to agree with today's so-called "postfeminist" scientists that being desired is important to female sexuality. But here she believes it has to do with cultural, rather than biological, reasons.

“Rule by Republican Hissy Fit”?

I’m a bit disappointed by President Obama’s rude expurgation of contraceptive planning from the “economic recovery package”—as we’re being asked to call the stimulus bill that’s working its way through Congress. Perhaps I’m just not down with all the euphemism on tap this week: Why not just call “Republican skepticism” here on the Hill what it is—an attempt to derail the future expansion of health coverage, couched in a puritanical queasiness with contraception. Lisa Lerer reports Minority leader John Boehner asking: “How can you spend millions of dollars on contraceptives? How does that stimulate the economy?” Well, John—hot button-ness aside—birth control is a commodity bought and sold like any other.

I agree with EJ that in many cases (I felt this way about Rick Warren) progressives should attempt to see the forest, not the offending tree. But here, it’s not just a bunch of women begging for their crazy pills! The Democratic White House’s concession of rhetorical and political ground—about whether contraception (a better than average return on public investment) and other Medicaid assistance counts as “stimulus” or not—could have outsized effects on the future of the universal health coverage debate. Over at the Washington Independent, Lindsay Beyerstein makes roughly this point. Harold Pollack and Nicholas Beaudrot at TAP make it explicit: We’re now, the latter writes, subject to “rule by Republican hissy fit.”

Who knows whether it’s the public climate that requires lifting of the odious global gag rule to be done under cover of media darkness, or the lightweight status afforded to “women’s health” in general—but birth control represents an arm of the pharmaceutical industry that nets drugmakers over $5 billion annually—perhaps even in a recession. I imagine the investors of $5 billion in any other American industry could, presumably, expect some back-scratching, be it through money kicked into the search for a better product, or strenuous lobbying to ensure access to said product is available to American women—especially those planning families, and seeking “economic recovery” from the new Congress.

Chimps, Toys, and Sex?

OK, Will, I am fuzzing up your thesis about sex difference because I wonder about how grounded parts of it are, and like I said, I find exaggerations of sex difference slightly maddening. So a few thoughts in response to yours (and from here on out I am channeling Slate columnist Amanda Schaffer, who knows much more than I do about all of this).

I agree with your claim about aggression, to the extent that boys on average tend to score higher on specific measures for aggression that's physical and verbal. I'm not sure the relevance of the study you cite though; I'd offer this one instead.

About responsiveness and social editing, I'm not exactly sure what you mean. Responsiveness to anger, pain, or what? And does social editing mean changing the way you present yourself based on cues from people around you, and is the idea that women do more of it? I Googled to not much avail. I see that the second study you cite sort of relates to some idea of responsiveness (though the findings show only a partial sex difference). But the third study is about money and kid toy preferences, which doesn't seem to relate to responsiveness or social editing (am I missing something). And what's the fourth one supposed to signify? The authors say that the finding that the male chimps played more "is practice for later dominance behavior." But why--couldn't it just as easily be about females' greater industriousness or something? And in any case, aren't we far afield from whether men are more likely to be desirous and women more likely to want to be desired, itself a speculation based on preliminary research?

Feel free to ignore me--I know you have your own blog to manage!

ADDENDUM: On bloggingheads.tv, Ann Althouse and I discuss how women's sexuality may differ from men's and what this new sex research means for feminism.

 

A Little Nature Here, A Little Nurture There

Slate's William Saletan returns for a second guest post on female sexuality:

Hey, no fair with the complications, Emily! I had a nice, simple thesis that men and women were different, and you had to go fuzz it up with all your nuance and stuff. But, heck, I’m a gentleman. You took my bait; I’ll take yours.

I can’t rehash all the research on sex patterns in aggression, responsiveness, and social editing in this space or without putting everyone to sleep. Plus, why trust my spin? Here are abstracts and write-ups from a few recent studies, which can be interpreted in various ways. A little nature here, a little nurture there. Have at it.

1. Do angry men get noticed?
(Current Biology, 2006)

Angry male faces were detected significantly more rapidly by male than female observers. … Our findings are consistent with the notion of a perceptual system in both males and females that has evolved to rapidly detect aggression in males.

In humans, evolution has resulted in marked differentiation between males and females, including differences in the structural and functional organization of the brain. These differences are reflected in patterns of cognitive and behavioural abilities. For example, females tend to perform better than males at fine motor and perceptual discrimination tasks, whereas males are better at route-finding tasks. Males are also physically larger and more aggressive than females, and so more likely to pose a physical threat. Such physical differences between the sexes may in turn have shaped the cognitive processes involved in detecting threatening behaviour in others. Early detection of an angry facial expression, for example, might reduce the likelihood of an injurious or potentially fatal confrontation. … Recent evidence suggests that females are better than males at recognizing non-threatening facial expressions such as happiness or sadness.

2. Empathic neural responses are modulated by the perceived fairness of others
(Nature, 2006)

We engaged male and female volunteers in an economic game, in which two confederates played fairly or unfairly, and then measured brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging while these same volunteers observed the confederates receiving pain. Both sexes exhibited empathy-related activation in pain-related brain areas … towards fair players. However, these empathy-related responses were significantly reduced in males when observing an unfair person receiving pain. This effect was accompanied by increased activation in reward-related areas, correlated with an expressed desire for revenge.

3. Sex differences in rhesus monkey toy preferences parallel those of children
(Hormones and Behavior, 2008)

Male monkeys, like boys, showed consistent and strong preferences for wheeled toys, while female monkeys, like girls, showed greater variability in preferences. … The similarities to human findings demonstrate that such preferences can develop without explicit gendered socialization. We offer the hypothesis that toy preferences reflect hormonally influenced behavioral and cognitive biases which are sculpted by social processes into the sex differences seen in monkeys and humans.

(More on the study here: The animals were offered two categories of toys— ones with wheels such as wagons and other vehicles, and various dolls and cuddly toys.)

4. Sex differences in the development of termite-fishing skills in the wild chimpanzees
(Animal Behavior, 2005)

[T]he techniques of female offspring closely resembled those of their mothers whereas the techniques of male offspring did not, suggesting that the process by which termite fishing is learned differs for male and female chimpanzees.

(More on the study here: By the first day, adult females were getting at the mustard and a young female watched carefully and began to pick up the skills, she said. Two young males did not fare as well—one simply sat next to his mother and tried to steal some mustard from her, Dr. Lonsdorf said. The behavior of both sexes may seem familiar to many parents, she said, adding, "The sex differences we found in the chimps mimic some of the findings from the human child development literature." She pointed out, however, that at least in the case of chimps, each is doing something important, since the males' play is practice for later dominance behavior.)

Taking Will's Bait

Will, we invite you to join the party and you show up and ask hard questions. Ok, I'll bite. You ask whether the women-as-reactive pattern extends "to other realms of life," since "it certainly resonates with broad sex-differential patterns of aggression, responsiveness, and social editing." So tell us more about the research you're referencing. I'm often driven mildly crazy by the exaggeration of findings about brain-based sex difference. It's just sexier to say that women are different from men than to say they're mostly similar. (See this great series by Amanda Schaffer for a take down about sex-based differences on language and types of intelligence.) On the other hand, when the research is solid, it's of course worth grappling with. My recollection is that you're right about aggression, but remind us why, and fill us in on the other fronts you raised.
 

Who Knows What Women Want?

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. 

Women's Sexuality: A Guest Post

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.

Heteroflexible

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.

Women's Problems

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.

What Do We Want To Know About What We Want?

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."

The Sexual Fluidity of Women

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?