Huckleman2000
It was something I ate.
- Joined
- Aug 3, 2004
- Posts
- 4,400
What Do Women Want?
- Thread starter Huckleman2000
- Start date
Vermilion
Original Flavour
- Joined
- Jul 21, 2006
- Posts
- 7,379
Apparently that thing about women getting aroused at anything is a protective thing - they need to be lubricated in case a man forces himself on her... or something
Huckleman2000
It was something I ate.
- Joined
- Aug 3, 2004
- Posts
- 4,400
Yes, and the article hints that women become aroused by (at least the thought of) sex with strangers. From the evolutionary standpoint, I can sort of understand that, since it would encourage genetic diversity. When you're a little band of apes on the African plains who run into another little band of apes, it's sort of hard to fight when the women of the other band are trying to flirt with you and vice-versa.Apparently that thing about women getting aroused at anything is a protective thing - they need to be lubricated in case a man forces himself on her... or something
Like bonobos.The article does skirt some really uncomfortable ideas about forcible sex, though.
Stella_Omega
No Gentleman
- Joined
- Jul 14, 2005
- Posts
- 39,700
Women want everything. A simple answer, ain't it?
*blink*
Okay, but seriously, it seems that women *may* have a better-developed empathy function (I.E. mirror neurons.) Please be cautious about "evolutionary" claims about this. They tend to be tautologies, especially in popular articles.
*blink*
Okay, but seriously, it seems that women *may* have a better-developed empathy function (I.E. mirror neurons.) Please be cautious about "evolutionary" claims about this. They tend to be tautologies, especially in popular articles.
Last edited:
Stella_Omega
No Gentleman
- Joined
- Jul 14, 2005
- Posts
- 39,700
Yeah, because women have no choice but to worry about men who can't tell, or don't want to tell, the difference between a functional reflex and a conscious desire.Yes, and the article hints that women become aroused by (at least the thought of) sex with strangers. From the evolutionary standpoint, I can sort of understand that, since it would encourage genetic diversity. When you're a little band of apes on the African plains who run into another little band of apes, it's sort of hard to fight when the women of the other band are trying to flirt with you and vice-versa.
The article does skirt some really uncomfortable ideas about forcible sex, though.
It's sort of like; Hair keeps growing, whether you cut it, or not.
Or something.
Dragonlipz
Deep Fried and Sanctified
- Joined
- Sep 20, 2008
- Posts
- 2,096
Yo Stella......
Women have plenty of choices, you and I are proof of that.......no matter be they lover, sister, mother, wife, daughter or friend, they never fail to beguile and amaze me................
Women have plenty of choices, you and I are proof of that.......no matter be they lover, sister, mother, wife, daughter or friend, they never fail to beguile and amaze me................
Stella_Omega
No Gentleman
- Joined
- Jul 14, 2005
- Posts
- 39,700
Happy to hear that, lipz.
voluptuary_manque
Literotica Guru
- Joined
- Sep 5, 2007
- Posts
- 30,841
Women are my favorite kind of people. That doesn't keep me from periodically making an idiot of myself around them but it's still true.
TheeGoatPig
There is no R in my name
- Joined
- Dec 29, 2004
- Posts
- 13,163
True for me as well, if by "periodically" you meant "consistently and persistently."
DesertPirate
Sailing from the desert
- Joined
- Mar 20, 2006
- Posts
- 20,432
Been married to one for over 25 years and raised 3 daughters
Don't have a clue!
Don't have a clue!
SubmissivePet
Experienced
- Joined
- Feb 26, 2008
- Posts
- 70
HAHA! Some women may want chocolate but i would rather have sex. The problem is that all men are pretty much the same. Sex, food, booze for some, and sleep pretty much keeps a man happy.
Women on the other hand all want different things. One wants to be pampered and "made loved" to..one wants to be abused and thrown around like a fuck toy...some dont even know what they want. Women are one continous challenge. So good luck figuring out what one woman wants, let alone all.
Women on the other hand all want different things. One wants to be pampered and "made loved" to..one wants to be abused and thrown around like a fuck toy...some dont even know what they want. Women are one continous challenge. So good luck figuring out what one woman wants, let alone all.
dr_mabeuse
seduce the mind
- Joined
- Oct 10, 2002
- Posts
- 11,528
Yeah, I'd seen that article too. The paragraphs that jumped out at me:
=============
When she peers into the giant forest, Chivers told me, she considers the possibility that along with what she called a “rudderless” system of reflexive physiological arousal, women’s system of desire, the cognitive domain of lust, is more receptive than aggressive. “One of the things I think about,” she said, “is the dyad formed by men and women. Certainly women are very sexual and have the capacity to be even more sexual than men, but one possibility is that instead of it being a go-out-there-and-get-it kind of sexuality, it’s more of a reactive process. If you have this dyad, and one part is pumped full of testosterone, is more interested in risk taking, is probably more aggressive, you’ve got a very strong motivational force. It wouldn’t make sense to have another similar force. You need something complementary. And I’ve often thought that there is something really powerful for women’s sexuality about being desired. That receptivity element. At some point I’d love to do a study that would look at that.”
=============
- "Rape" fantasies: between one-third and more than one-half of women have entertained such fantasies, often during intercourse, with at least 1 in 10 women fantasizing about sexual assault at least once per month in a pleasurable way.The appeal is, above all, paradoxical, Meana pointed out: rape means having no control, while fantasy is a domain manipulated by the self. She stressed the vast difference between the pleasures of the imagined and the terrors of the real. “I hate the term ‘rape fantasies,’ ” she went on. “They’re really fantasies of submission.” She spoke about the thrill of being wanted so much that the aggressor is willing to overpower, to take. “But ‘aggression,’ ‘dominance,’ I have to find better words. ‘Submission’ isn’t even a good word” — it didn’t reflect the woman’s imagining of an ultimately willing surrender.
===========
For women, “being desired is the orgasm,” Meana said somewhat metaphorically — it is, in her vision, at once the thing craved and the spark of craving. About the dynamic at “Zumanity” between the audience and the acrobats, Meana said the women in the crowd gazed at the women onstage, excitedly imagining that their bodies were as desperately wanted as those of the performers.
Meana’s ideas have arisen from both laboratory and qualitative research. With her graduate student Amy Lykins, she published, in Archives of Sexual Behavior last year, a study of visual attention in heterosexual men and women. Wearing goggles that track eye movement, her subjects looked at pictures of heterosexual foreplay. The men stared far more at the females, their faces and bodies, than at the males. The women gazed equally at the two genders, their eyes drawn to the faces of the men and to the bodies of the women — to the facial expressions, perhaps, of men in states of wanting, and to the sexual allure embodied in the female figures.
Meana has learned too from her attempts as a clinician to help patients with dyspareunia. Though she explained that the condition, which can make intercourse excruciating, is not in itself a disorder of low desire, she said that her patients reported reduced genital pain as their desire increased. The problem was how to augment desire, and despite prevailing wisdom, the answer, she told me, had “little to do with building better relationships,” with fostering communication between patients and their partners. She rolled her eyes at such niceties.. She recalled a patient whose lover was thoroughly empathetic and asked frequently during lovemaking, “ ‘Is this O.K.?’ Which was very unarousing to her. It was loving, but there was no oomph” — no urgency emanating from the man, no sign that his craving of the patient was beyond control.
The generally accepted therapeutic notion that, for women, incubating intimacy leads to better sex is, Meana told me, often misguided. “Really,” she said, “women’s desire is not relational, it’s narcissistic” — it is dominated by the yearnings of “self-love,” by the wish to be the object of erotic admiration and sexual need. [my bolds--dr.M.] Still on the subject of narcissism, she talked about research indicating that, in comparison with men, women’s erotic fantasies center less on giving pleasure and more on getting it. “When it comes to desire,” she added, “women may be far less relational than men.”
=============
When she peers into the giant forest, Chivers told me, she considers the possibility that along with what she called a “rudderless” system of reflexive physiological arousal, women’s system of desire, the cognitive domain of lust, is more receptive than aggressive. “One of the things I think about,” she said, “is the dyad formed by men and women. Certainly women are very sexual and have the capacity to be even more sexual than men, but one possibility is that instead of it being a go-out-there-and-get-it kind of sexuality, it’s more of a reactive process. If you have this dyad, and one part is pumped full of testosterone, is more interested in risk taking, is probably more aggressive, you’ve got a very strong motivational force. It wouldn’t make sense to have another similar force. You need something complementary. And I’ve often thought that there is something really powerful for women’s sexuality about being desired. That receptivity element. At some point I’d love to do a study that would look at that.”
=============
- "Rape" fantasies: between one-third and more than one-half of women have entertained such fantasies, often during intercourse, with at least 1 in 10 women fantasizing about sexual assault at least once per month in a pleasurable way.The appeal is, above all, paradoxical, Meana pointed out: rape means having no control, while fantasy is a domain manipulated by the self. She stressed the vast difference between the pleasures of the imagined and the terrors of the real. “I hate the term ‘rape fantasies,’ ” she went on. “They’re really fantasies of submission.” She spoke about the thrill of being wanted so much that the aggressor is willing to overpower, to take. “But ‘aggression,’ ‘dominance,’ I have to find better words. ‘Submission’ isn’t even a good word” — it didn’t reflect the woman’s imagining of an ultimately willing surrender.
===========
For women, “being desired is the orgasm,” Meana said somewhat metaphorically — it is, in her vision, at once the thing craved and the spark of craving. About the dynamic at “Zumanity” between the audience and the acrobats, Meana said the women in the crowd gazed at the women onstage, excitedly imagining that their bodies were as desperately wanted as those of the performers.
Meana’s ideas have arisen from both laboratory and qualitative research. With her graduate student Amy Lykins, she published, in Archives of Sexual Behavior last year, a study of visual attention in heterosexual men and women. Wearing goggles that track eye movement, her subjects looked at pictures of heterosexual foreplay. The men stared far more at the females, their faces and bodies, than at the males. The women gazed equally at the two genders, their eyes drawn to the faces of the men and to the bodies of the women — to the facial expressions, perhaps, of men in states of wanting, and to the sexual allure embodied in the female figures.
Meana has learned too from her attempts as a clinician to help patients with dyspareunia. Though she explained that the condition, which can make intercourse excruciating, is not in itself a disorder of low desire, she said that her patients reported reduced genital pain as their desire increased. The problem was how to augment desire, and despite prevailing wisdom, the answer, she told me, had “little to do with building better relationships,” with fostering communication between patients and their partners. She rolled her eyes at such niceties.. She recalled a patient whose lover was thoroughly empathetic and asked frequently during lovemaking, “ ‘Is this O.K.?’ Which was very unarousing to her. It was loving, but there was no oomph” — no urgency emanating from the man, no sign that his craving of the patient was beyond control.
The generally accepted therapeutic notion that, for women, incubating intimacy leads to better sex is, Meana told me, often misguided. “Really,” she said, “women’s desire is not relational, it’s narcissistic” — it is dominated by the yearnings of “self-love,” by the wish to be the object of erotic admiration and sexual need. [my bolds--dr.M.] Still on the subject of narcissism, she talked about research indicating that, in comparison with men, women’s erotic fantasies center less on giving pleasure and more on getting it. “When it comes to desire,” she added, “women may be far less relational than men.”
Last edited:
Huckleman2000
It was something I ate.
- Joined
- Aug 3, 2004
- Posts
- 4,400
Thanks for the interest! I thought this would be a much more controversial thread, but the article is a bit of a slog, I guess.
The research is problematic - I would love to see some of the studies cited be replicated in other cultures, just to try and tease out what is culturization and what is biologically-based, but that might just throw more confusion into it.
What struck me is that the biological mechanics of female sexual desire seem to be so at odds with the functional necessities of child-rearing, at least as the process has evolved. What the article seems to imply is that choices women make in a mate (parenting/living partner) are different from choices they make for sexual partners. At least, insofar as sexual choices were made on the African plains.
Still, it explains somewhat the impetus behind so-called "third-wave" feminism and its embrace of casual sex over "friends with benefits" relationships.
lesbiaphrodite
Literotica Guru
- Joined
- May 29, 2007
- Posts
- 3,296
What women want cannot be synthesized into a neatly digestable NYT piece. The female soul is essentially unknowable.
Huckleman2000
It was something I ate.
- Joined
- Aug 3, 2004
- Posts
- 4,400
Tell that to the women doing the research.
It's nice to keep women in the ethereal, but not particularly useful if one wants to live among them.
What it means to me is that, as much as we can point at "male aggression" and violence as destructive forces in history as well as interpersonally, we should also examine the female reptilian brain. Instead of male hubris, there seems to be female narcissism with its accompanying behavioral traits of manipulation and deceit. It's a very Tennessee Williams sort of viewpoint.
Men are brutes, women are whores and sluts.
Selena_Kitt
Disappearing
- Joined
- Jan 25, 2004
- Posts
- 12,336
Tell that to the women doing the research.
It's nice to keep women in the ethereal, but not particularly useful if one wants to live among them.
They just haven't discovered the source of their own mystery yet...
As to your last... a thoroughly delightful masculine response.
Keep trying to figure us out. Go 'head. The wind, She will blow... change is always coming...
Stella_Omega
No Gentleman
- Joined
- Jul 14, 2005
- Posts
- 39,700
The title is thoroughly misleading, of course. There's an enourmous difference between basic biological functions and what we define as "want."
Mucous membranes are always lubricating. We salivate continuously, whether there's chocolate in sight, or a pencil. Anything actually edible causes more salivation-- but it doesn't mean we want that thing. You'll still salivate smelling liver cooking, for instance even if you gag at the thought of eating it.
Overall, what interested me most was the unwitting portrait the journalist painted of himself; after all, these women are professional rivals in a sense, since he's writing a book on the subject. And, while he can't tear into them the way he could in an academic setting, he does cast nasturtiums, where he thinks he can...
Mucous membranes are always lubricating. We salivate continuously, whether there's chocolate in sight, or a pencil. Anything actually edible causes more salivation-- but it doesn't mean we want that thing. You'll still salivate smelling liver cooking, for instance even if you gag at the thought of eating it.
I thought of you when I read them!dr_mabeuse said:
Overall, what interested me most was the unwitting portrait the journalist painted of himself; after all, these women are professional rivals in a sense, since he's writing a book on the subject. And, while he can't tear into them the way he could in an academic setting, he does cast nasturtiums, where he thinks he can...
Huckleman2000
It was something I ate.
- Joined
- Aug 3, 2004
- Posts
- 4,400
Watch yourself. I'm on to you now.They just haven't discovered the source of their own mystery yet...
As to your last... a thoroughly delightful masculine response.
Keep trying to figure us out. Go 'head. The wind, She will blow... change is always coming...
Selena_Kitt
Disappearing
- Joined
- Jan 25, 2004
- Posts
- 12,336
Huckleman2000
It was something I ate.
- Joined
- Aug 3, 2004
- Posts
- 4,400
of course you think you are!
Argue with me or abuse me, but please don't do both at the same time.
Selena_Kitt
Disappearing
- Joined
- Jan 25, 2004
- Posts
- 12,336
Argue with me or abuse me, but please don't do both at the same time.
don't make me get out my whip.
Huckleman2000
It was something I ate.
- Joined
- Aug 3, 2004
- Posts
- 4,400
dr_mabeuse
seduce the mind
- Joined
- Oct 10, 2002
- Posts
- 11,528
I thought of you when I read them!
And I thought of you when I read them too.In fact, the person who sent the article to me is an academic whose specialty is the way desire in portrayed in literature. She's in my camp, though, and we agree with just about everything that's in the article.
