Thanks to Ellen Kushner for spotting this one yesterday while I was on the road. It is a long article, and one I’m not entirely sure what to make of, especially as one of the psychologists interviewed in a former associate of J. Michael Bailey. However, a number of things did leap out at me.
Firstly, if you want to understand female sexuality, you need to get women to study it. Men and women think about sex very differently and men, being men, will tend to impose male thought patterns on their female subjects, and therefore get things hopelessly wrong.
Secondly, this brief quote, which everyone who studies gender should take into account:
“The horrible reality of psychological research,†Chivers said, “is that you can’t pull apart the cultural from the biological.â€
And finally, the simple medical fact that female genitalia react to penetration, regardless of whether it is desired or not, as a simple act of self-preservation. The phrase “Arousal does not imply consent” should be burned into the retinas of every judge and jury that ever hears a rape case.
Amazing article. Thank you for posting it and commenting on it.
I find myself thinking of a fragment from that mammoth biography of Virginia Woolf that came out in the mid90s or so . . . one of the hints in her stories about the Duckworth brothers and what they did to her, something about how the association of fear and emotionally unpleasant sensations with a particular physical response just serves to make that response more repugnant and alien, to alienate oneself from one’s body.
I’m sure this isn’t the only corollary in literature but it is the first thing I think of.
One would think that the last point – arousal does not imply consent – would have received some credibility before this…otherwise what are we to make of the idea of the rape of a man by a woman? That it is an impossibility?