Mitä Nainen Haluaa?: Tutkimusmatka Naisen Seksuaalisuuteen (2014) - Plot & Excerpts
A weak 4 stars. Kindle quotes:the humping bonobos didn’t spur as much blood as the human porn, but with an odd exception. Among all women, straight as well as gay, the chiseled man ambling alone on the beach—an Adonis, nothing less—lost out to the fornicating apes. What to make of such strangeness? - location 165She put heterosexual and homosexual males through the same procedure. Strapped to their type of plethysmograph, their genitals spoke in ways not at all like the women’s—they responded in predictable patterns she labeled “category specific.” The straight men did swell slightly as they watched men masturbating and slightly more as they stared at men together, but this was dwarfed by their physiological arousal when the films featured women alone, women with men, and, above all, women with women. - location 175taped to their hands, forearms, and necks. The male replies were about the same under each of the three conditions, but for the females the circumstances were crucial. Many of the women in the first group—the ones who could well have worried that another student would see their answers—said they’d never masturbated, never checked out anything X-rated. The women who were told they would have strict confidentiality answered yes a lot more. And the women who thought they were wired to a lie detector replied almost identically to the men. - location 194When Fisher employed the same three conditions and asked women how many sexual partners they’d had, subjects in the first group gave answers 70 percent lower than women wearing the phony electrodes. - location 201Despite her high price, the woman was homely and built along the lines of a lumpy block. Rebecca whispered to her boyfriend that maybe the homeliness was due to the glare of his porch light, that all would be okay once they opened the door and began. She felt relieved, meanwhile, that she wouldn’t have to be concerned about her own looks. But when they opened the door and the escort stepped quietly, even timidly, into the vestibule, with the manner more of a housemaid than a call girl, the trouble did not improve. The woman appeared to be around ten years older than Rebecca. And now Rebecca was calculating at rapid speed whether she should and could go through with this to spare the prostitute’s feelings, so that the problem was no longer how to soften the exploitation of a body but how to avoid letting this woman know that her body was unexploitable. - location 252that excited her. Genital blood throbbed when the tapes described X-rated episodes with female friends—but the throbbing for female strangers was twice as powerful. The broad-chested male friends were deadening; with them, vaginal pulse almost flatlined. The male strangers stirred eight times more blood. Chivers’s subjects maintained that the strangers aroused them least of all the men they heard about. The plethysmograph said the opposite. Longtime lovers, male or female, were edged out by the unknown men or women—even - location 315casual sex while women, for the most part, don’t. In two of these experiments, males and females—“of average attractiveness,” as the researchers described them, and around twenty-two years old—were sent out onto a college campus to proposition two hundred members of the opposite sex. Either they asked for a date, or they asked, “Would you go to bed with me tonight?” About the same percentage of men and women—50 percent or so—answered yes to the date. But close to three-quarters of the male responders and none of the females said yes to bed. The data had been used often to argue not only a vast but an intrinsic difference in the desires of men and women. Conley created a questionnaire to look at the topic in another way. - location 330“Would you go to bed with me tonight?” Depp asked the female subjects. So did Brad Pitt and Donald Trump. The males were approached by Angelina Jolie, Christie Brinkley (chosen by Conley because she wondered whether at fifty-something a woman’s age would undercut her appeal despite her extreme beauty—it didn’t seem to), and Roseanne Barr. The experiment stripped away the social expectations, as well as the physical risks, that auger against a woman consenting to have sex with a stranger. Conley’s setup left only fantasy, frequently a clearer window into desire. The subjects scored how they felt about the propositions. The women were just as avid about saying yes to Depp and Pitt as the men were with Jolie and Brinkley; the women were just as hungry, impulsive, impelled. Trump was dismissed with as much distaste as Barr. - location 340In one study, they had taken three groups of straight females and showed them hundreds of similar pornographic pictures—all featuring women with men—in three rounds, at different points in the women’s cycles. Again, Wallen and Rupp used viewing time as a measure of the subjects’ interest in the porn. One result was predictable: in the first round, the women who were near ovulation stared longer than the other subjects. But something else caught them by surprise. These same women, whose first round of porn came at mid-cycle, when testosterone and estrogen peaked, stayed riveted when they returned to the lab for their second and third rounds, as the month wore on and these hormones faded. The women whose initial viewing came during lower hormonal stretches didn’t become transfixed when they ovulated. They continued to be less moved. Maybe, Wallen thought, some kind of conditioned arousal or indifference took hold. In later rounds, he guessed, the subjects still unconsciously linked the surroundings of the lab, the equipment, the porn to their reaction to their first viewing. “One lesson,” he said, “is that you don’t want a woman to form her first impression of you when she’s in the wrong menstrual phase. You’ll never recover.” He laughed. - location 609when he wanted to investigate, say, exactly which set of neurons were sparked by a type of stimulation, by copulation-like prodding of the cervix or by the excitement of glimpsing a desirable male, one method was to provide a female rat with the experience, kill it, extract and freeze her brain, place the organ on a device resembling a miniature cold-cut slicer at a delicatessen, and shave off a specific, infinitesimally thin cross section. - location 636played the video. The student picked up a female rat and, with a tiny brush, stroked the clitoris, which protruded from the genitalia like a little eraser head. She stroked a few times, then put the animal back down in her cage. Swiftly the creature poked her nose out of the open door. She clamped her teeth on the white sleeve of the student’s lab coat and tugged the woman’s hand inside the cage. The student brushed the rat’s clitoris again, set her down again. And again the rodent bit into the sleeve, pulling, communicating unmistakably what she craved. This went on and on and on. - location 684in three online porn users was female—four years earlier, the figure had been one in four. And - location 749“The shades in my bedroom let in a small amount of light, and he likes to sleep with something over his face. A T-shirt, a pillow, an arm, all three—I don’t know how he breathes. It’s kind of hilarious. In the mornings, I have to peel away layers to get to where his face is. I want eye contact.” She endured sex once a week but yearned for this every day. “I’ll find his eyes under everything and wait for his eyelids to open, and then I’ll find space for my body right against his.” - location 821Women who dressed with urgent, ungoverned need for the desire of men could set off, inside her, a flurry of disdain, like an instinctive aversion to a weakness or wound. - location 840I wouldn’t say it’s violent. Maybe vigorous—is that a dorky word to use?” - location 1053Occasionally I fantasize about being raped as punishment for having anti-feminist fantasies.” - location 1102sexual activity against her will.” Depending on the study, between around 30 and 60 percent of women acknowledged that they took pleasure in this kind of imagining. The true numbers, the authors argued, were probably higher. - location 1122An experiment carried out at an amusement park by Cindy Meston, a University of Texas at Austin psychology professor, contributed to yet another explanation. Hundreds of heterosexual roller-coaster riders were shown photos of the opposite sex; the subjects were asked to score, in Meston’s words, “dating desirability” before and after the ride. The thrill of fear spilled over into eros: following the ride, the scores rose. The phenomenon, which Meston labeled “excitation transfer,” hinted at interweaving circuits of terror and sexual arousal within the brain, - location 1128She dwelled on studies of victims that documented not only lubrication but sometimes orgasm during sexual assault. And she remembered—from her postdoctoral program in Toronto, when she had done work as a therapist—rape survivors who’d confided their own arousal, their own climaxes, to her. - location 1224Assigned to a ward of patients with spinal-cord injuries, a floor with a steady supply of men left paralyzed by motorcycle accidents, she found herself confronting, now and then, a man who had worked up the courage to ask how—or whether—he could ever have sex. She asked a supervisor for advice. “Change the subject,” he told her. - location 1317“I have male friends who tell me about new relationships. They say they’ve never been with a woman who’s so sexual. They’re thrilled. And I’m thinking, Just wait.” Not only did monogamy not enhance female sexuality, but it was likely worse for women than men. There wasn’t enough research on the topic, she said, but she talked about a German survey of committed relationships, showing that women felt desire wane more swiftly. - location 1440Her method sometimes came down to scheduling sex, whether or not it was wished for, if sex hadn’t been happening. She became a monitor, an enforcer. It was as though she were trying, almost brutally, to spade free something buried. “Fuck night,” one of her female patients named it caustically. One of the married women I interviewed saw this kind of scheduling in a happier way. It was like exercising, she said, if you were one of the majority of people who would rather be reading or watching TV. By the time you left the gym, “with the endorphins going,” you were glad to have been there, though you might not be anxious to turn around the next day and go back. - location 1450Female climax—in humans and, if it exists, in animals—has been viewed by many evolutionary psychologists as a biologically meaningless by-product, a hapless cousin to male orgasm, with no effect on reproduction. - location 1473But the clitoral expanse—touched through the vagina—rivals the penis in total nerve-suffused territory. And as for the slowness of ecstasy, Hrdy flipped predominant thinking upside down. Her vision was a vivid example of substituting a female lens for a male one. Female orgasm could well be thoroughly relevant among our ancestors. Its delay, its need of protracted sensation, wasn’t a contradiction but a confirmation of this; it was evolution’s method of making sure that females are libertines, that they move efficiently from one round of sex to the next and frequently from one partner to the next, that they transfer the turn-on of one encounter to the stimulation of the next, building toward climax. And the possibility of multiple orgasms compounded libertine motives. Another opioid rush—or a series of opioid infusions—might be in store with the next mounting. The advantages female animals get from their pleasure-driven behavior, Hrdy asserted, range from the safeguarding against infanticide in some primate species to, in all, gathering more varied sperm and so gaining better odds of genetic compatibility, of becoming pregnant, of bearing and raising healthy offspring. - location 1480take the female of an arachnid called the book scorpion. Let her have sex with one male and, afterward, offer her that same partner. Forty-eight hours will have to go by before she’s interested in mating again, though he is full of sperm and fully motivated. She seems wired to accrue an assortment of lovers and an array of sperm. Present her with a new male, and she is primed for sex within an hour and a half. - location 1494“In the lesbian community, the monogamy problem is being aired more and more. For years, gay men have been making open arrangements for sex outside the couple. Now, increasingly, gay women are doing it. It’s interesting that lesbians like to call it polyamory, as though to stress love or friendship, instead of just letting it be motivated primarily by sex.” - location 1521And the thing about being repulsed by him was, I felt like my body was a room that I didn’t want to mess up. Unlike that openness in the beginning when my body was a room and I didn’t mind if he came in with his shoes on—when I wanted him to come in that way. - location 1596“I have a friend who told me about an article she read about how to heat up your marriage. One of the things on the list was having your husband jump you in the laundry room. She just laughed. ‘My husband feels like my brother.’ “We never went to a psychologist until the end, when we were ready to divorce. I felt like seeing a therapist was only going to result in more tips like the ones I read in books—books written by therapists. We could try a hundred different emotional exercises. We could try new positions. “So I just lay on that bed, holding my daughter. She truly is a gifted snuggler. It was like taking a muscle relaxant. I clung on to her and thought my morbid thoughts, She is the last physical intimacy I’m going to have before I die, she is the last physical intimacy I’m going to have before I die. - location 1606Sophie and Paul’s romance had begun when they were in nursing school. One night, ten years ago, a group of students had gone out to a bar and decided to play telephone. Paul sat directly to Sophie’s right. “Sophie,” she whispered to the woman on her left, “will you go out with me?” The question made it all the way around the circle, word for word. They had been married now for eight years. - location 1614They raise evidence like a study done recently by British researchers who sent out a questionnaire to thousands of pairs of female twins, identical and fraternal. If the G-spot exists, the scientists proposed, if it is a zone of actual flesh rather than an article of trumped-up faith, then identical twins, whose anatomies are nearly perfect copies of each other, will be far more likely than fraternal pairs to agree that they have one. The twin experiment had a classic structure, one that’s been used repeatedly to separate the genetic from the learned, the objective from the subjective, in domains other than sex. And when the responses came back, the rate of positive answers was the same among the two groups. - location 1910race was for a drug to cure monogamy. - location 2032speed dating caught on in America and Europe after its invention in the late nineties by a Los Angeles rabbi desperate to make Jewish matches, - location 2327DANIEL BERGNER is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and the author of three previous books of nonfiction: The Other Side of Desire; In the Land of Magic Soldiers, a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year and winner of an Overseas Press Club Award and a Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage; and God of the Rodeo, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. - location 2525 Reassuring in some ways (I'm normal, desire is weird, monogamy is no bed—haha—of roses), depressing in others (paucity of scientific research on female desire, science is nowhere close to solving "problem" of female desire, monogamy most likely will always require unhappiness and/or secrets in my time to work). I was left wanting more (the jokes! they write themselves!), but as indicated above, there's really not that much more data available right now. The stories were interesting, and good for identifying, and the writing is good. I'm not sure what I expected, other than The Answer, and this definitely isn't that.
What do You think about Mitä Nainen Haluaa?: Tutkimusmatka Naisen Seksuaalisuuteen (2014)?
Somewhere between Orgasm Inc. and Sex at Dawn. An informative read that I took with a grain of salt.
—prateek
Sex is always a good subject, and he has a few interesting facts.
—rayanna5
