I sat down to read this article by Daniel Berger in the NY Times Magazine full well expecting that I’d have to write a long debunking under the category “Science For Choads”.  But it wasn’t as bad as I expected it to be, because at least the researchers interviewed admit there might be this thing called social conditioning. The researchers Berger interviews can’t quite break out of the paradigm of looking at female sexuality in terms of male sexuality, in that it needs to be explained away or fixed where it differs from what men feel (or what men want female sexuality to be), but they’re trying to get there. 

But this article is shot through with major problems all the same.  The main thing is that Berger shies away from cultural explanations, as do his researchers, even though the research could easily point to cultural reasons more than biological ones for women’s differences.  No one asks the most relevant question, which is, “If women were raised in a less oppressive environment, and given the same sexual cues and permissions as men, would it change their sexual responses significantly?”  Part of the reason that the question isn’t being asked is that Berger and his subjects know that being a feminist is somehow anti-sex, and therefore they go out of their way to denounce it.  The word is only brought up in order to falsely imply that feminists are anti-sex, even if we’re still tediously morally superior.

She pronounced, as well, “I consider myself a feminist.” Then she added, “But political correctness isn’t sexy at all.” For women, “being desired is the orgasm,” Meana said somewhat metaphorically — it is, in her vision, at once the thing craved and the spark of craving.

Unfortunately, if she didn’t strain herself to avoid feminist explanations for women’s so-called narcissism, she would have a better chance of stumbling on the truth.  She has all these theories about why women like to look at the female form, tend to see “sex” in women’s bodies more than men’s (just like straight men do), and respond so strongly to being desired.  Many of them have the strong whiff of bullshit, like this:

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