Alternet has an extremely long piece exploring the mysteries of the female body. “Why do Women Orgasm?” by David Barash (mega-alpha-dog in evolutionary psychology) and Judith Eve Lipton asks a bunch of questions that are actually interesting, such as why evolution favored menstruation, menopause, and female sexual pleasure. Unfortunately, they don’t provide any answers that struck me as particularly new. Some of the sillier ideas come from Desmond Morris’ oeuvre, such as his theory that breasts served as ersatz buttocks, sending a sexual signal to newly bipedal males, and ultimately facilitating missionary-style intercourse and emotional attachment. The more interesting theories, such the grandmother hypothesis, are familiar to anyone who’s read Natalie Angier’s Woman: An Intimate Geography
So I scanned five pages of nothing new under the sun – only to arrive at this non sequitur of a conclusion:
We note that there are also “male mysteries.” But for some reason they aren’t as sexy or as prominent as their womanly counterparts. Some of these perplexities include: Why are men so much hairier than women? And, paradoxically, why are they also more prone to go bald? If penile size doesn’t matter, why is it so widely considered — at least by men — to be important? Why do men have shorter lifespans than women? And why are they so notoriously reluctant to ask directions? In view of the fact that in most species males are the fancy, colorful sex, why are male Homo sapiens so drably ornamented compared to women? And — most profound of all — why do men’s underpants have that little trapdoor when no one uses it?
(Read the whole thing here, if you’re looking to kill some time. My emphasis.)
Okay, so they’re trying to be cute, joking about trapdoors and using that trusty old cliche about men refusing to ask directions. But geez, can we retire the idea that only Woman is mysterious? Can’t we move beyond Freud’s famous – and pathetic – question, “what does woman want?” The “eternal feminine” died circa 1969 at the hands of early women’s liberationists. Women are uniquely “mysterious” only because they’re seen as objects, not subjects, and because they’ve been defined as bearers of The Sexay.
If the “male mysteries” aren’t “as sexy or as prominent” as women’s, then I guess Barash and Lipton are saying that the penis is neither sexy nor prominent. Sorry guys, I dunno what your experience has been, but I beg to differ. When you compare the human penis with other primates’, it’s pretty darn prominent by comparison, and that’s true whether it’s soft or erect. “Penile size” may not be as crucial as many men believe, but it’s still fascinating to many women. (Susan Bordo does a great job of exploring that fascination in The Male Body
And not sexy? Harrrrumph! That’s only the case if you believe that women aren’t interested in looking. This is bunk. According to Ms. Naughty (not the most academic source, but reliable on this score), it was Alfred Kinsey who found women to be unresponsive to visual stimuli. More recent research has laid this stereotype to rest:
Researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine in California found that women became fully aroused within two minutes of watching a sexually explicit film – faster than the average man. Twenty female volunteers aged between 20 and 30 were each shown a 22 minute erotic clip featuring two different hetero couples having sex, while their breathing and genitals were monitored. It didn’t matter whether the clips had sound or not, the women still became aroused. The results were published in 2003 in the journal “Fertility and Sterility.”
(This comes from Ms. Naughty’s “History of Porn for Women.”)
Mary Roach reports similar findings in her book, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
There’s nothing wrong with mystery. There’s nothing wrong with sex being a little mysterious. There’s nothing wrong with scientists trying to solve some of those mysteries. What’s not so great? Confining the mystery to only one sex.
Mystery is linked to being desired – not to being a subject who lusts and yearns. As long as only women can be mysterious, it reinforces the most hackneyed stereotypes of heterosexuality, where men do the looking and desiring, while women, as mere objects of desire, are expected only to react to men’s advance – and then only on the third Saturday of the month while hoping for expensive jewelry and/or a baby in return.
Patron cat of Kittywampus (1985-2001)
What’s hilarious to me is that while women are seen as “mysterious,” at the same time we’re all Chatty Cathy Oversharers who just WON’T STOP badgering our men to talk about feelings. How can we be sooooo mysterious to you menz if we’re simultaneously gabbing constantly about our feelings? Cue dueling banjos, it’s time for Dueling Stereotypes!
Well, it’s because men are emotionally and verbally stunted … that’s why they don’t get us! And they can’t be distracted from the football game on TV! But hey, it does maintain our aura of mystery.
There’s not enough sarcasm in the world to give these stereotypes the drubbing they deserve.
Wait…
Did someone say expensive jewelry???
Then why leave it to the 3rd Saturday of every month?
*headdesk*
Personally, I’ve got a weakness for fun earrings, as long as they’re *not* very expensive. Oops. I guess I’ve been doin it rong.
If penile size doesn’t matter, why is it so widely considered — at least by men — to be important?
That couldn’t possibly have anything to do with culture. The ancient Greeks considered large penises to be vulgar and celebrated small penises instead. You just have to look at their art to confirm it. Judging by the endowment of Michelangelo’s David, there was probably a similar standard during the Renaissance (not that I’ve actually done any research into the subject, so I could be totally wrong). My point is that different cultures value different physical aspects. If huge dicks were an immutable evolutionary advantage, and if you could judge this by current Western anxiety about penis size, then the ancient Greek preference for small dicks would be logically impossible.
Right. The ideal penis size is as subject to cultural and historical variation, just like the ideal breast size. The illustrations in George Mosse’s Nationalism and Sexuality include several male nudes from the Nazi period that show an ideal similar to the ancient Greeks’. What exactly this means is up for grabs – it can be read as suggesting that all libidinal impulses ought to be subordinated to some higher cause – but in any event there’s no historically or culturally constant ideal for men’s or women’s bodies. This fact alone casts grave doubt on any ev psych theory that purports to prove that there’s an evolutionary basis for a certain body shape.
Do you wiggle your fingers when you say mysterious?
http://www.sluggy.com/comics/archives/daily/020909
Mystery is linked to being desired though? I don’t follow that entirely. Mystery is the unexplained, either through lack of investigation or via unresolved questions.
A house can very well be mysterious without being at all desirable.
Frightening areas can be said to be mysterious.
I’ll agree that he shouldn’t say that there’s nothing sexy or prominent about the male mysteries, but since he admits there are also male mysteries, I can’t say that he’s using the term to suggest that women are somehow ‘not human’, just because there is something unknown about them.
Well, you’re talking about the spooky sense of mysterious. The authors of the Alternet article are using it to denote “things that are intriguing because they’re not fully understood.”
Mystery does have something to do with desire. Esther Perel’s work on sustaining eroticism in long-term relationships emphasizes that each partner needs to maintain some sort of autonomy or separate interests, because otherwise the erotic spark will die.
In one of my favorite poems, “Meditations at Lagunitas,” Robert Hass writes:
I think he’s right. Where there’s no distance at all, it’s hard to sustain desire.
I do not argue that mystery and desire always turn people into objects; but regarding one entire sex as uniquely mysterious has a reciprocal relationship with objectification. That’s a pretty different point.