Sunday, January 25, 2009

For Debate

Corseting female sexuality

The whole article is pitched to support that old tired cliché of sexuality that 'women are complicated, men are simple' and it uses the differences in research findings to suggest women are enigmatic, complex, they don't know what they want, or are torn by competing sexual desires.


What do these enigmatic women want?;
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.

The irony is that, with such a tangle, the conclusion is foreordained: women will seem enigmatic, inconsistent, and irremediably opaque. As I’ll suggest in this, I think that the conclusion is built into the way the question is being asked. If a similar question were asked about nearly any group, in nearly any domain of complex human behaviour, and then a simple single answer were demanded, the questioner would face nearly identical frustration.

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