99% of What We Believe About Female Sexuality is Nonsense | Daniel Bergner | Big Think

99% of What We Believe About Female Sexuality is Nonsense

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So much of what we assume is true about female sexuality stems from spurious research from the 1990s that's slowly and surely being tossed out in favor of new findings. Critically acclaimed journalist Daniel Bergner has spent a great part of the past decade researching this topic for articles and other publications, including his 2013 book What Do Women Want? In this video, he dives through the common misconceptions and explains how female sexuality is not naturally predisposed to be restrained, monogamous, inactive, and dependent.

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DANIEL BERGNER:

Daniel Bergner is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and the author of four books of nonfiction: What Do Women Want?, The Other Side of Desire, In the Land of Magic Soldiers, and God of the Rodeo. In the Land of Magic Soldiers received an Overseas Press Club Award for international reporting and a Lettre-Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage and was named a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. God of the Rodeo was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. In addition to the New York Times Magazine, Daniel’s writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Granta, Harper’s, Mother Jones, Talk, and the New York Times Book Review, and on the op-ed page of the New York Times. His writing is included in The Norton Reader: An Anthology of Nonfiction.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Daniel Bergner: To talk about female desire, we need to start by talking about one major misconception, a seemingly scientific theory that most of us have bought into and that is the idea that while men are genetically programmed to spread their limitless seed and be promiscuous that women, by contrast, are genetically programmed, evolutionary scripted to seek out one good man, seek out one good provider, seek out closeness and constancy and so that at least, relatively speaking, by this theory, women are somewhat better suited to monogamy, have a sex drive that’s a bit less raw, a bit less animalistic than male libido.

That dates back to the early '90s. I went back and looked at those original academic papers that sort of put that into our consciousness, via the media that sort of grasped onto this theory in the '90s. Those papers have very, very little substance to them. They have a lot of circular reasoning. They have very little substantive proof. And I think we as a culture latched onto them because we’re eager to have simple theories to explain who we are, especially when it comes to gender. But we need to move on now because all the research and all the researchers that I’ve spent time with now over the last decade are really taking us in another direction, showing us something very different about female desire, something that’s much more driven, much more like we used to consider male desire to be. A force that’s full of agency and that’s not that old, relatively passive conception that we for the most part have been clinging to.

So let’s go into some labs. So Meredith Chivers, a Canadian researcher, who I spent a lot of time with, tries to look past what culture teaches us and look at something more immediate. So she puts women in front of pornographic scenes or has them listen to erotic scenarios and measures their response in two ways. One, she gives them a keypad. They can rate their own subjective response. Am I turned on? Am I not...

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