Sorry to be naught but a linker this week, but things have been busy...
This New York Times Magazine article, interviewing three female researchers studying female desire, struck me as an interesting example of how scientific methodologies are of limited use in describing the human person. Many of their conclusions and ideas are interesting, and you can see how they reflect lived experience to a limited extent, but the fruits of all this research are also startlingly inadequate in describing something as universally experienced as human love and sexuality. And necessarily so, I would tend to think.
It takes someone with a Ph.D. to turn something like love into a lab rat. Maybe some of this research can be paid for with the *ahem* stimulus package? (Cue Beavis and Butthead snickering.)
ReplyDeleteSeriously, I applaud their efforts. Maybe their adventure into the "forest" of female desire will yield interesting insights and useful pharmaceutical applications. Still, it strikes me how much one has to forget or ignore about human sexuality and human nature to be so befuddled.
Using the empirical to try to completely explain the human person is what Walker Percy used to lament. It also reminds me how the author Philip Jenkins apparently tries to use empirical methods to explain why Christianity died in certain countries. Faith, like love, resists the purely scientific.
ReplyDeleteIt would be interesting to see how periodic abstinence in a permanent relationship such as with NFP or practices in Orthodox Judaism affects the dynamic of women's arousal in terms of wanting to be desired/chosen.
ReplyDeleteIt's also interesting that the majority of the methods discussed in the article were quantitative and not qualitative. Clearly it's difficult to investigate something that is both experiential and physiological and at the same time so very individual. The variation in response and desire must be mind-bogglingly enormous.
Thanks for posting about this, it was fascinating to get a glimpse into this sort of research.
I'm not a scientist or a sociologist or any other sort of "ist", but if I'm understanding this right, what science has finally proven is that most chicks dig other chicks, yet lie about it.
ReplyDeleteI knew it! No sense trying to deny it here either, ladies. Science says you're lying.
;)
More like guys go in for specific visual stimuli (explaining the popularity of girlie mags) whereas gals respond to the idea of sex, Rick.
ReplyDelete;-)
I was thinking along similar lines as Rebekka, actually, but wondered if the first researcher factored in fertility status of female subjects at the time the tests were run.
Considering how you describe it, that guys like looking at girl on girl action and women like thinking about it, it sounds like a win-win situation. If we could only get women to stop lying about it...
ReplyDelete:D