Ringing your chimes on a bell-shaped curve
Jessica Valenti of Feministing, while mildly dismantling problematic condom information in sex-ed curriculum from SIECUS calls attention to another cultural artifact-presented-as-fact.
"A young man's natural desire for sex is already strong due to testosterone, the powerful male growth hormone. Females are becoming culturally conditioned to fantasize about sex as well." (Cause lord knows we wouldn't think about sex naturally. Ick.)
Again, this goes against the only slightly older majority opinion (an opinion backed up with volumes of just-as-selectively-biased medical and scientific "facts") that *women* are the ones with "a natural desire for sex" that is "already strong due to..." estrogen, the powerful female sex hormone!
Gee! Do ya think that maybe... if there's scientific proof that women's hormones give them a strong natural desire for sex and men's hormones give them a strong natural desire for sex then...
Look, selective bias aside it's not an either/or game, where if men got 'em women don't or vice versa. *Everybody's* born with powerful sex hormones that give them a natural desire for sex.
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Now just to be clear, when I say everybody's born with powerful sex hormones I'm *not* trying to say that we're all born with equal amounts of them. *That* would be almost as stupid as saying men have more than women, or women more than men.
Instead there's a fairly wide, and random, distribution in both genders, with some men and women perfectly content never to have sex at all, others who can't get to sleep without, and everyone else distributed across a nice bell-shaped curve.
Update: Wait, wait, I was wrong! In a very cool riff on the same Madame X masturbation-during-sex post I blogged about the other day, Cherrie of The sensuous libertine drops the following bombshell
A more recent, but not attributed, study I found on the Internet pegged the percentage of adult female masturbators at 89%. (By contrast, well over 90 percent of men said they masturbated.)
Aha! So much for my thesis! Nevermind that it's within any conceivable statistical margin of error, and don't talk to me about rounding errors. 89% to 90%, people! What more proof do we need that one gender is totally oversexed and the other completely disinterested? Proof, I tell you, proof this day! :-)
Now just to be clear, when I say everybody's born with powerful sex hormones I'm *not* trying to say that we're all born with equal amounts of them. *That* would be almost as stupid as saying men have more than women, or women more than men.
Well, Figleaf, that may sound stupid, but if it was reiterated frequently by your parents and other authority figures when you were growing up, you *will* accept such fallacies as Gospel truth. Case in point: look at this excerpt from Lifestyles, Dating and Romance: A Study of Midlife Singles, published by AARP in September 2003:
The quote above is from a study that AARP commissioned on single Americans age 45+ which can be found here.Whether Jessica Valenti is lamenting the message hidden in sex-ed materials, or Twisty is lamenting the need for others to neatly categorize her, the fact remains that these mores are firmly entrenched and continue to influence our choices throughout our unexamined lives.
[Yeah, some dead white physicist (Einstein maybe?) said, approximately, that everything we learn before age five we believe to be "the natural order of things." And we end up struggling with it even if it later turns out to be untrue. But that just means unwinding gender stereotypes from reality is hard. Well, so's calculus but once you get it you (or at least I) understand, *and enjoy,* the world a whole lot more. The benefit totally outweighs the cost. Thanks, Kochanie. --fl]
I don't agree with the calculus analogy here, Figleaf. In fact, I think your lobster analogy (from the post on Twisty) is more apropos because it has the essential ingredient, i.e., a compelling emotional need to cling to beliefs, such as gender stereotypes, and not examine them closely. And, IMO, shame and fear are on the top of the list of compelling emotional needs. After all, what would the neighbors think if they knew I eat lobster on the sly or I masturbate frequently or fantasize about rough sex? [Hey, maybe all three simultaneously ;-) ] Jest aside, fl, I do think that there has to be a strong emotional payback for clinging to beliefs that really cause us so much discomfort and pain, and until we understand that that the payback--be it a need for security or fear of the outre -- does not compensate for the pain and discomfort, well, we will still have midden heaps of lobster shells in our psychological cellars.
[Lobster history makes me think about what we might be missing, but we all (progressives, and conservatives alike) spend already specialize in defining what isn't or shouldn't be. I also want to find an analogy that illuminates what *is or could be.* Calculus worked for me. (I'm not a math whiz and I barely passed one quarter of it but when I finally got the basic concept I started seeing the material world -- from rush-hour traffic to interest rates to tree tops bending in the wind -- that I'd always just taken for granted before.) But I agree I need to explore a catchier, more general analogies. :-) Thanks, Kochanie. --fl]