Men's desire is a straight line, women's desire is a wave form

Sally Law in the latest issue of The New Yorker has a fascinating interview with Cindy Meston and David Buss, psychology professors at the University of Texas at Austin, about their book, "Why Women Have Sex." Here's the paragraph that jumped out at me:

[W]hereas men’s sexual orgasm tends to be fairly predictable and reliable in the sense of its occurrence, women’s sexual orgasm is highly variable. It's variable from woman to woman, and variable within the same woman from partner to partner, circumstance to circumstance, etc. Sexual attraction provides another example. Men’s sexual attraction tends to be based heavily on visual cues. Women’s sexual attraction tends to be far more nuanced. It’s affected by olfactory cues (how a man smells), personality of the partner (such as sense of humor and confidence), social status (how he is regarded in the eyes of his peers), other women's judgments of how attractive he is, and many other factors, in addition to the visual cues. The qualities women find to be sexually attractive in a man also vary across the ovulatory cycle, such as a shift toward finding more masculine features (faces, bodies, and voices) attractive at ovulation.

To put this simply, men's desire appears to be a straight line -- fixed, constant, predictable, cliched even (and often involves light blue eye shadow). But women's desire seems more like a wave form -- nuanced, varied, shifting over time. So why are men and women so rarely on the same page? Because the straight line of men's desire and the wave form of women's desire only intersect occasionally.

Now that may be putting too fine a point on it. But I think it is helpful to understand that men and women are not mirror images of each other, but rather seem to think about and experience desire in very different ways.













And of course Dr.'s Meston and Buss focused their research on heterosexual desire. It would be fascinating to replicate their research but focus it instead on homosexual relationships and those in which gender is more variable.

[Note: it's tough to write about this topic without slipping into using sex and gender synonymously. But as I pointed out in a previous post, sex is not the same thing as gender.

Also because I occasionally write on sex and gender (and use explicit language), it's interesting to see the keywords in the google searches that sometimes bring people to my site. Many many people who end up at my post, bleeding heart liberal, were not exactly looking for an exegesis on subconscious framing in political speech. But for the few dudes out there who were looking to get off, ended up here by accident, and maybe learned a little something new in the process, I guess that's to the good too.]

Sex is not the same thing as gender

This is a really simple concept but so many people don't understand it that it leads to a lot of confusion. Needless to say conservatives don't understand the difference between sex and gender but I find that even some good progressives are unclear on the distinction, so let me just try to break it down for a minute:

Sex is biological. In humans, each cell normally contains 23 pairs of chromosomes, for a total of 46. Twenty-two of these pairs, called autosomes, look the same in both males and females. The 23rd pair, the sex chromosomes, differ between males and females. Females have two copies of the X chromosome, while males have one X and one Y chromosome. (More here.)

Making matters more confusing, occasionally some people are born with two X chromosomes and at least one Y chromosome (more info here) or one X chromosome and two Y chromosomes (more info here). So even biologically determined sex, male and female, is not black and white, either/or.

Gender is socially constructed. Masculinity and femininity are socially constructed and socially defined. Both male (XY) and female (XX) can express masculinity or femininity as they so choose.

You can have an opposite sex marriage (a man and a woman -- as Carrie Prejean would prefer things apparently) that is still also a same gender marriage (both male or both female in how they choose to express themselves socially). So too you can have a same-sex marriage (two men or two women) that is still also an opposite gender marriage (one same sex partner expresses the traditionally opposite gender).

Because gender is socially constructed -- no one person is ever entirely one or the other, masculine or feminine. We are all a blend of both masculinity and femininity and that blend can change as we so choose. Indeed it is increasingly clear that a balance of masculinity and femininity is essential to the health of any organism.

As I understand it, the California Supreme Court is NOT deciding same-gender marriage. They are ruling on same-sex marriage (whether two people who both have XX or who both have XY chromosomes can marry each other). Same-gender marriage (because gender is socially constructed) is already legal in all 50 states.

The problem: and the understandable source of much confusion is that the words male and female can refer to either sex or gender. The words were developed during an ancient time in which people (wrongly it turns out) assumed that biologically determined sex and socially determined gender, were the same thing. Now we know that they are not. But the words male and female persist -- and are used interchangeably in conversation sometimes to connote sex and other times to connote gender usually without the speaker ever specifying which meaning is intended.

That's the reason that conservatives always get it wrong on same sex marriage. They incorrectly think that gender is biologically determined -- so any male (XY) who expresses (social) female traits is viewed as acting "against nature" -- against their "biological programming." Conservative love so called "natural law" -- unfortunately, they don't actually understand nature very well and so they usually get both nature and human nature wrong.

Update #1. Tuesday, May 26, 2009 is Stonewall Tuesday here in California as the State Supreme Court hands down their decision regarding Prop 8. I just want to remind everyone that no matter what they decide this thing is going to end up going before the voters again. If the State Supreme Court does the right thing and strikes down Prop 8 -- we're gonna have to put together a campaign to protect our justices from a recall effort. And if they do the wrong thing and uphold the heinous Prop 8 -- then we're gonna have to go to the ballot box to try to overturn their decision. So yeah, let's get ready to burn the mutherfucker down and make this place ungovernable if they uphold Prop 8 on Tuesday. But remember that we're still gonna have to win it at the ballot box sooner or later (probably in November 2010).

Essential reads

Both from Salon.com (you might have to watch a short ad) but they are rocking it today.

Ya gotta read Glenn Greenwald's piece, "Vital Unresolved Anthrax Questions and ABC News." It is the definitive piece on what the new revelations today in the anthrax attacks say about this administration and ABC News' complicity in leading us into an unjust war. Key paragraphs:

If the now-deceased Ivins really was the culprit behind the attacks, then that means that the anthrax came from a U.S. Government lab, sent by a top U.S. Army scientist at Ft. Detrick. Without resort to any speculation or inferences at all, it is hard to overstate the significance of that fact. From the beginning, there was a clear intent on the part of the anthrax attacker to create a link between the anthrax attacks and both Islamic radicals and the 9/11 attacks....

Much more important than the general attempt to link the anthrax to Islamic terrorists, there was a specific intent -- indispensably aided by ABC News -- to link the anthrax attacks to Iraq and Saddam Hussein. In my view, and I've written about this several times and in great detail to no avail, the role played by ABC News in this episode is the single greatest, unresolved media scandal of this decade. News of Ivins' suicide, which means (presumably) that the anthrax attacks originated from Ft. Detrick, adds critical new facts and heightens how scandalous ABC News' conduct continues to be in this matter.

I have a lot more to say about this development but it'll have to wait for another post.

Also of interest, "In Defense of Casual Sex" -- finally a thoughtful discussion about so-called "hook up culture" and how people just need to chill out about it. The piece doesn't really hit its stride until the second page and then, just like that, the McCarthyesque sexual panic of the older generation is dispelled in three simple sentences:

For all the anxiety about "hookup culture" the truth is that for many people older than 20, "hookup culture" will sound remarkably like, well, "college." Indeed, students shifted from dating to what was essentially hooking up during a wild time -- perhaps you've heard of it -- called the '70s. But, as the median age of marriage continues to climb, young women are spending a lot more time romantically vetting -- and being vetted.

Also brilliant in the piece:

I also discovered that a lot of young men are scared shitless -- of women, themselves and their future; that, contrary to our cultural imaginings, they are just as desperate to figure things out as young women. I found that a lot of the pains in the relationships of us 20-somethings can be blamed on cultural prescriptions for masculinity. Yes, there is the stud-slut double standard -- but there's also an expectation that men, unlike women, will not seek safe harbor in a relationship. No, they are supposed to bravely sail their ships beyond the singing sirens and silted waters of their quarter life until they miraculously hit land in the Real Adult World.

Finally, I've added the Jed Report to my blog roll -- dude is completely rocking it.