Twn gay men having sex at the same time
And meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies search for a drug, a drug for women, that will serve as monogamy's cure.īergner thinks that monogamy is society's way of constraining female sexuality. We hold on with the help of evolutionary psychology, a discipline whose central sexual theory comparing women and men-a theory that is thinly supported-permeates our consciousness and calms our fears. Women are supposed to be the standard's more natural allies, caretakers, defenders, their sexual beings more suited, biologically, to faithfulness. Monogamy is-or we feel that it is-part of the crucial stitching that keeps our society together, that prevents all from unraveling. It defines who we aim to be romantically it dictates the shape of our families, or at least it dictates our domestic dreams it molds our beliefs about what it means to be a good parents. We may doubt the standard, wondering if it is misguided, and we may fail to uphold it, but still we look to it as to something reassuring and simply right. Monogamy is among our culture's most cherished and entrenched ideals. He says: "One of our most comforting assumptions, soothing perhaps above all to men but clung to by both sexes, that female eros is much better made for monogamy than the male libido, is scarcely more than a fairy tale." They responded objectively much more to the exercising woman than to the strolling man, and their blood flow rose quickly-and markedly, though to a lesser degree than during all the human scenes except the footage of the ambling, strapping man-as they watched the apes."įar from being more sexually modest and restrained than the male libido, the female sex drive is "omnivorous" and "at base, nothing if not animal" writes Bergner.
This apparently puts the lie to our socially manufactured assumption that women are inherently more sexually restrained than men-and therefore better suited to monogamy.ĭetailing the results of a study about sexual arousal, Bergner says: "No matter what their self-proclaimed sexual orientation, showed, on the whole, strong and swift genital arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women and women with men. That women can be turned on by such a variety of sexual scenes indicates, Bergner argues, how truly libidinous they are. The book, What Do Women Want, is based on a 2009 article, which received a lot of buzz for detailing, among other things, that women get turned on when they watch monkeys having sex and gay men having sex, a pattern of arousal not seen in otherwise lusty heterosexual men. His new book, which chronicles his "adventures in the science of female desire," has made quite a splash for apparently exploding the myth that female sexual desire is any less ravenous than male sexual desire. Daniel Bergner, a journalist and contributing editor to the New York Times Magazine, knows what women want-and it's not monogamy.