Gallery Carre
Regina Lynn writes:
A recent conference brought sex researchers together for four days to talk about what we do and don’t know about female sexuality, with the general consensus being we don’t know much. Perhaps because “it wasn’t until very recently that anyone thought to test those theories by asking women,” according to Judy Peres, who covered the sixth annual meeting of the International Society for the Study of Women ’s Sexual Health for the Chicago Tribune.
The whole article is interesting, but one bit that stood out for me is the recognition that when Masters and Johnson were studying female sexuality, they mainly looked at women who were having a lot of sex and enjoying it. But now, we’re looking at what makes women dissatisfied with sex, whether desire can follow arousal instead of the other way around, what happens during orgasm and what we can do to help women want more sex more often. (I have some theories on that, myself.)
As we set scientists loose on women’s sexuality — and I think we should — we need to make sure not to forget that biology and bodies are only part of the equation. Sex tends to happen within a gigantic messy unquantifiable subjective realm known as “relating” and that is not going to submit easily to objective study.