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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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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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