Academic

Female Researchers Seek to Decode Female Desire

By Caitlin Borgmann

In this week’s New York Times Magazine, Daniel Berger writes about research into women’s desire and arousal, in What Do Women Want?. Here is an interesting passage regarding the current focus on biological difference and sexual desire:

To account partly for the recent flourishing of research like Chivers?s, Heiman pointed to the arrival of Viagra in the late ?90s. Though aimed at men, the drug, which transformed the treatment of impotence, has dispersed a kind of collateral electric current into the area of women?s sexuality, not only generating an effort ? mostly futile so far ? to find drugs that can foster female desire as reliably as Viagra and its chemical relatives have facilitated erections, but also helping, indirectly, to inspire the search for a full understanding of women?s lust. This search may reflect, as well, a cultural and scientific trend, a stress on the deterministic role of biology, on nature?s dominance over nurture ? and, because of this, on innate differences between the sexes, particularly in the primal domain of sex. ?Masters and Johnson saw men and women as extremely similar,? Heiman said. ?Now it?s research on differences that gets funded, that gets published, that the public is interested in.? She wondered aloud whether the trend will eventually run its course and reverse itself, but these days it may be among the factors that infuse sexology?s interest in the giant forest.

-Caitlin Borgmann (cross-posted at Reproductive Rights Prof Blog)

Full post as published by Feminist Law Professors on January 25, 2009 (boomark / email).