{"id":222581,"date":"2014-07-24T16:57:31","date_gmt":"2014-07-24T11:27:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tehelka.com\/?p=222581"},"modified":"2014-07-24T16:57:31","modified_gmt":"2014-07-24T11:27:31","slug":"book-review-what-do-women-want-daniel-bergner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/book-review-what-do-women-want-daniel-bergner\/","title":{"rendered":"Eroticism In The Raw"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"What
What do women want?<\/strong>
Daniel Bergner
Canongate
252 pp; Rs 399<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nSeeking treatment for her frigidity or what she described as sexual dysfunction, Marie Bonaparte, great-grandniece of Napoleon, consulted Sigmund Freud. It was to her that the father of psychoanalysis remarked, \u201cThe great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is \u2018What does a woman want?\u2019\u201d
\nFreud\u2019s question remained a mystery until award-winning and bestselling author of In the Land of Magic Soldiers<\/em> and God of the Rodeo<\/em>, Daniel Bergner sat down to paint an unprecedented picture of women and their sexuality, as we know today. Drawing on intricate research and interviews with renowned behavioural scientists, sexologists, psychologists and everyday women, his book, What do women want?<\/em> \u2014 Adventures in the Science of Female Desire<\/em>, challenges preconceived notions on matter of eros that we otherwise tend to accept as psychological axioms. For instance, men are animals and need to be tamed by society for most parts, but, this subjugation of their \u2018natural state\u2019 isn\u2019t complete without them asserting it in endless ways of pornography, promiscuity and infinite gazes directed at passing bodies of desire.
\nMeticulous experiments and extensive research have been recorded in the book to disrupt stereotypes and produce explosive evidence which pull women out of their lower strata of the sexually liberated.
\nAmong the most interesting experiments in the book to decode female sexuality and uncover what lies at the heart of it, are the works of Meredith Chivers, a professor of psychology at Queens University. Stripping away societal codes or creating primordial situations where she could, at a primitive level, find out what turns women on, was not possible physically for Chivers. Instead she created a plethysmograph, a male version of which was invented by Kurt Freund, an icon in sexology, way back in the 1950s. Chivers\u2019s instrument consisted of a miniature bulb and a light sensor that is placed inside the vagina to gauge its wetness and track vaginal pulse amplitude.
\nSitting on a brown leatherette La-Z-Boy in dimly lit lab in Toronto, women were shown a series of clips \u2013 men with women, men with men, women with women, lone men and women masturbating and two bonobos mating. Result? Chivers\u2019s subjects, straight or lesbian, were turned on right away by all of it, even copulating apes. \u201cTo stare at the data amassed by the plethysmograph was to confront a vision of anarchic arousal,\u201d says Bergner. Female libido to him looked omnivorous. The indiscriminate blood throbbing and catalysed lust busted first of the many myths.
\nThese women also held a keypad throughout the experiment to score their arousals subjectively. The results of the keypad were in stark contradiction to that of the plethysmograph. \u201cMinds denied bodies,\u201d Daniel writes \u201cthe self-reports announced indifference to bonobos, straight subjects admitted much less arousal to women touching themselves or enmeshed with each other and there was an objective-subjective divide in the data given by lesbians too.\u201d The discord between the self-scores and the instrument readings resonated the lies women tell world over, about their sexual desires.
\nNext in line was the big question, do women really crave intimacy and emotional connection? Once again scores of women were caught lying to themselves as they told Chivers, after another experiment, that strangers aroused them least. Meanwhile Chivers stared at massive data recorded by the plethysmograph stating the opposite \u2013 longtime lovers, male or female, were edged out by unknown men and women. And while lovers were seen as perfect dreams, sex with strangers delivered a blood storm. This most certainly doesn\u2019t fit well with our societal assumption that emotional intimacy is a pre-requisite for women to establish a sexual relationship with a man (or woman). As it turns out, eroticism thrives best on something raw. This idea, says Bergner, wasn\u2019t completely new, but it tended to be offered as an exception rather than the rule. \u201cThe raw was important to few women; it was the material of only intermittent fantasy for most. Here was systematic evidence to the contrary, the suggestion of a new, unvarnished norm.\u201d Come on ladies, let\u2019s admit it now!
\nFemales of the human species are not the only ones to have been mistakenly considered passive in their sexual encounters. Through the works of Kim Wallen, a psychologist and neuroendocrinologist, Bergner in his book extends the same idiom to the rhesus monkey, a species that went into space in \u201950s and \u201960s as stand-ins for humans to see if we could survive trips to the moon. As was the wisdom in the seventies, female pheromones were considered responsible for attracting the males who then initiated sex. But, what was evidently missed was that females of this species are bullies and murderers, the generals in brutal warfare, the governors. \u201cIt so flew in the face of prevailing ideas about the dominant roles of males,\u201d Wallen said, \u201cthat it was just ignored.\u201d Years spent on studying the behaviour of the rhesus introduced Wallen to their promiscuity. \u201cShe has sex,\u201d Wallen said, about rhesus females on the whole, \u201cand when he goes into his post-ejaculatory snooze, what does she do? She immediately gets up and goes off and finds another.\u201d
\n
\"Decoded
Decoded <\/strong>Bergner\u2019s adventures in science of female eros has resulted in a fascinating and controversial book<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nHowever, Wallen doesn\u2019t imply perfect correspondence between female rhesus and average human female due to subtlety in the impact of ovulation of the latter. During one such experiment he quips, \u201cOne lesson is that you don\u2019t want a woman to form her first impression of you when she\u2019s in the wrong menstrual phase. You\u2019ll never recover!\u201d
\nOf all that has been said and written about female sexuality, \u2018rape fantasies\u2019 continue to be an untouched topic in the mainstream. In the chapter \u2018The Alley,\u2019 Bergner recounts a number of such fantasies submitted by various women. A woman offered an explanation, \u201cI don\u2019t have to explain myself to Jesus.\u201d Rape fantasies remove guilt, says Bergner, and women embraced them to escape the shame and constraints imposed on their sexuality since an early age. The anatomical logic to the idea, he said, is that calling up thoughts of rape and feelings of fear could quickly provoke the spasms of climax.
\nA frequently offered argument here is that \u2018rape fantasy\u2019 is a paradoxical term. If you are fantasising about it, then it cannot be rape. Marta Meana, Professor of psychology at University of Nevada elaborates in agreement that the two ideas can\u2019t coexist, \u201cIn fantasy we control the stimuli. In rape we have no control. They\u2019re really fantasies of submission.\u201d Occupying the realm that is far from the actual and yet psychologically close, Bergner contests that we don\u2019t want to live all of it but our fantasies speak of our desires. Disagreement on this topic will follow at large by many, but what is not up for debate is the fact that rape fantasies are deeply rooted in the narcissism that is embedded in female sex drive.
\nFurther, among our culture\u2019s more treasured and entrenched ideals is monogamy, which dictates not only our domestic dreams but prevents society from unravelling. Bergner writes, \u201cOne of our most comforting assumptions, soothing perhaps above all to men but clung to by both sexes, that female eros is much better made for monogamy than the male libido, is scarcely more than a fairy tale.\u201d
\nWomen\u2019s desire, in its inherent range and innate power, Bergner says, is an underestimated and constrained force. Probably it\u2019s time for niceties to vanish and convention to crack. Female desire is, at base, nothing if not animal. Passing on the book, assuming it to be an amateur rant would be a big mistake, for it is nothing less than a revelation for men and women, across the globe. Brace yourselves because your most cherished myths about women\u2019s desires will soon be shattered.
\naishwarya@tehelka.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Daniel Bergner demystifies longheld notions on female sexuality, writes Aishwarya Gupta <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":222672,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[21],"tags":[7766,20,7056,7975,7976,7977,7978,7979,7980,7981,7982,7983,7984,759],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222581"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=222581"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222581\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=222581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=222581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}