27th
Week 10 Women want Bonobos?
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This week we read “What do women want?” an article by Daniel Bergner. The article is about Meredith Chivers and her research. Chivers is a psychology professor and creator of the “bonobo pornography.” An interesting part of her research is that using plethysmographs for the men and plastic probes for women she found that men respond in “category specific” ways. The subjective ratings on the keypad matched the reading of the plethysmograph, this meaning that men’s minds and genitals were in agreement. However, the results for women were different. Chivers explains that women’s results were all over the place, “No matter what their self-proclaimed sexual orientation, they showed, on the whole, strong and swift genital arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women and women with men.”(2) This reminds me of the discussion we had in-class why is it that women do not experience an orgasm until later life as opposed to men? I find it very interesting that according to Chives research women’s blood flow rises more quickly than men and women get aroused faster, but yet women are not having orgasms. Chives states,”women reported less excitement than their vaginas indicated,” in other words out bodies do not seem to agree with our minds. This makes alot of sense when you look at rape cases and how even the victims report to have had an orgasm on the incident, one has to question how that is possible? This is an example of how we are still trying to understand the workings of women’s arousal and desire.
Another interesting point/theme is made in the article when Chivers states, “The horrible reality of psychological research is that you can’t pull apart the cultural from the biological.” In other words there is no way to know if something is purely nature or nurture. For example in-class we discussed how the subject of women and masturbation is not talked about whereas men and masturbation is a normal thing. A classmate made an interesting point that maybe the reason why women have a hard time reaching that level of excitement or orgasm is because we have been stigmatized as “nice girls do not touch themselves” and as a result women do not explore and find out what we like. Society sees it as pervasive. This is a perfect example of how you cannot pull apart the cultural from the biological.
