It seems to me as though there have been an alarming number of studies popping up about how (particularly straight) women are miserable, sexless, manipulative bitches. Some of this might be due to the excitable terriers that staff our various media outlets, who come up with headlines like this:
“He bought dinner. I was bored. He’ll do the chores. The unromantic truth about why women sleep with men” - The Daily Mail
or
“Women drink before sex ‘because they lack the confidence to do it sober’” - Telegraph
or my personal favorite:
“Men like casual sex more than women – scientific fact” - The Independent
Scientific fact?! Well who can argue with science?
Each of the studies that precipitated these embarrassing articles has its own flaws, in addition to the questionable dissemination of the data in the popular news stream. For me to talk about each would make this the longest blog entry ever, and these are only the tip of the women’s sexuality research iceberg. If you’re interested in an intelligent critical discussion of the “women have sex because they’re bored” study, check out Dr. Petra. For more on why the casual sex argument is lazy science, check out this site. For more on the link between having a drink before sex… come ON. Is that really news? And is it really just women who do it? Give me a fucking break.
Which brings me to the reason that I’m really writing this entry, which is much more general. I guess I’m a little naive in that I thought we had put the ol’ “women just love to cuddle” argument to bed, so to speak. I thought we had moved on to realize that as humans, women have strong libidos, but that women’s sexuality is a smidge more complicated than men’s… that sometimes we need a little bit more effort and time to get going, that shame and a lack of understanding of our bodies can be to blame for low sex drives, or perhaps we have partners who don’t know or want to take the time to learn how to please us? No? This “cold fish” theory is still sticking around like some creep at the bar that just won’t take no for an answer? If this was true, why are so many sex shops like Early to Bed in business? Why is this industry growing every year? Oh right, women are only having sex so their husbands will do the laundry! Silly me for questioning Science. This isn’t science — it’s lazy science.
The terminology has changed. Instead of olde-timey vague references to inherent feminine qualities, the new arguments for why women hate sex come with the tag line “because of evolution” or “because this MRI lights up here” or “because of hormones.” And this shuts people up. Very few question the results: who was surveyed? how were they asked these questions and what were their full answers? How accurate are these fMRI experiments, really? Why is it, say, more important that 50% of women were unsatisfied in their one-night stands than that 50% of women were SATISFIED? Does anyone ask whether dissatisfaction had to do with the abilities of their partner, or maybe deeply embedded cultural guilt complexes, or or or… NO! The conclusion is that women have sex to have intimacy and babies because that’s what our ape ancestors did. Obviously.
I love evolutionary biology and neuroscience, and I think surveys can reveal useful information about our sexual behavior, but I hate when data is misused and misinterpreted to eschew more mundane explanations of compatibility, personal relationships, cultural norms, education, and communication — in order to drudge up prejudices against women (or whomever) so we can pat ourselves on the back and say we were right all along because the newspapers said so.
