Pundits Know Next to Nothing About Women's Sexual Selves

Rankin “One Dress” at Brick Lane showThe Kinsey Institute, led by Julia Heiman, is conducting an international study on sexuality in heterosexual couples who have been married more than 20 years, with the male partner between 40 and 70 years old.

Interviewed in the Washington Post, Heiman said that she is most surprised at the differences in responses from men and women, as they examine relationship satisfaction in Brazil, Japan, Germany, Spain and the US.

Each country has 200 couples participating, and the female responses are a big surprise. Then again, perhaps not, when you consider how much we learn about female sexuality when focus groups and interviews aren’t the sole source of information.

In what sounds like a total reversal of expected gender behavior, Heiman found that among men a number of factors could predict relationship satisfaction, including health, sexual functioning and intimacies like kissing and cuddling.

In women, only sexual functioning — level of desire, frequency of arousal and orgasm — seemed to predict relationship satisfaction. Heiman says the result “was really different from what we expected.” via AOC

We thought women were the ones who only wanted to cuddle. Hmmmm, perhaps we have a major breakdown in our global culture’s understanding of female sexuality for real.

Older Japanese Women Warm Up to Idea of Divorce

It will be interesting to read the survey of Japanese couples in the Kinsey Study on relationship satisfaction.  If Japanese women are as sexually demanding after 20 years of marriage as their American women counterparts — and women in Spain, Germany and Brazil — their embrace of divorce makes a lot of sense.

In the US, it’s women who institute divorce after 50. One-fourth of new divorces in 2008 took place in people married at least 20 years. American pundits say that the trend speaks to the me-centric values of the boomer generation, except that older Japanese women are getting divorces in record numbers as well.

A 2009 survey of 1,500 men and 4,900 women in Japan, reported by the Global Times, found that when asked about the benefits of divorce, most Japanese men said “I cannot think of any,” while a large percentage of the women chose “liberating myself from husband and family,” or “having more free time.” (Note: we don’t believe that “sexual release” was a reason listed in the Japanese research.)

Among the study participants with a history of divorce, 30 percent of men aged from 30 to 59 “proposed divorces,” while the percentage for men age 60 and above was less than 50 percent.

Comparatively, 70 percent of women aged from 30 to 59 proposed divorces, and the percentage for women age 60 and above is 83 percent. Interesting set of facts, right?

As a woman, I find Japanese culture amazingly mysogynistic towards females and am not all surprised to discover self-sacrificing, long-suffering Japanese women every bit as receptive as their self-indulgent female counterparts in America to “go it alone” after 50.

Perhaps it’s time to tweak culture’s understanding of how women over 50 feel about divorce. We read (rarely) that it’s not the end of the world for women, who continue to deliver big surprises to researchers, as the investigation into what women really believe sexually is taken over by science.

Men More Likely Than Women To First Look at Face in Erotic Films

Women would never admit that they look first at genitalia in erotic films, because females just don’t admit to such behavior. Brain scans and technological observation of eye movements are shooting major holes in what we think we know about female sexuality.

It’s believed that birth control drugs could have some impact on women’s brain and eye patterns, when watching explicit erotica.

“Women using hormonal contraceptives looked more at the genitals, while women who were not using hormonal contraceptives paid more attention to contextual elements of the photographs,” said lead author Heather Rupp, Ph.D., a fellow at The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction at Indiana University, who conducted the study in partnership with Kim Wallen, Ph.D., a Dobbs Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Neuroendocrinology at Emory University and the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. via Sensuality News

We’re not about to dismiss the research findings as totally driven by hormones. Our recently updated story on women’s Internet search behavior — when key words are ‘sexy’ — delivers an unprecedented understanding that when the subject is erotica, women lie like crazy.

I suggest that we proceed with caution on any topics involving American women and sex.  Getting inside our minds requires clever strategy, and often even we won’t listen to our desires, preferring to speak out of both sides of our mouths.

Women’s very survival has depended — at times — on the art of deception, and we continue the practice in 2010.

Bourgeois, puritanical, seemingly uptight women have created some of the greatest historical scandals in the history of the world. Restrained corsets often spawn creative minds. via AOC

The Internet gives women a degree of anonymity that confessionals don’t.

I remember confessing my young-girl sin of stealing the peony flowers, and even my beloved grandmother asked me what the heck I had done. With instructions to say the Hail Mary prayer 100 times for my transgression, I had my whole family waiting impatatiently for me to finish my penance.

After 30 minutes, the entire town was lingering at the church, not believing that my sins had anything to do with snipping a few flowers — unless a flower of another kind was the subject of my confession.

100 prayers for masturbation made way more sense in my small town. Assuming they now knew the truth about my immorality, it was generally agreed that Father Ben should have thrown the book at me, and making me say the whole rosary 100 times, instead of a Hall Mary.

The truth is, I really did only steal peonies and left the church with my defiant young-girl head held high. Nevertheless, I learned quickly, like most women, to keep my mouth shut on sexual matters.

The Truth About Women and Pornography

Behind women’s protestations that we HATE pornography, our digital footprint tells an entirely different story.  I won’t give you the stats for teen sex searches, because you will faint; someone will call the popemobile; and I’ll get shut down for corrupting morals.

The scientific truth is that in 2006 women executed:

•  50% of the 75 million searches for the word sex

•  64% of the 30 million searches for adult dating

•  56% of the 14 million searches for teen sex 

•  64% of the 13 million searches for adult sex

•  50% of the 12 million searches for sex chat

•  59% of the 8.5 million searches for cyber sex

Sexual Ambiguity Is Best

My personal takeaway from all our new learnings on female sexuality is that when the subject is true scientific research and not self-reported women’s comments about their behavior, we don’t know much at all. The same can be said to an extent about men, but researchers have established far greater consistencies between what men say they do and their brain scan or technology-read behavior versus women, when the questions concern sexual behavior.

More reading:

Men More Likely Than Women To First Look at Face in Porn Films

RedTracker| Our radar couldn’t ignore this Wired.com commentary on a “Windup Girl” named Emiko, a “genetically modified sex slave programmed by Japanese gene rippers to serve and obey.”  Our direct experience in Japan and knowledge of Japan’s misogynistic attitudes about women, dolphins and sex robots posits the possibility that this novel by Paolo Bacigalupi is hardly far-fetched. Read on at Wired.com.

Anne of Carversville reading: Japanese sex robots and Japan’s dolphin slaughter